| The Best Film of the Past Two Years | ||
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| By Jonathan Rosenbaum | ||
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And 24 more picks from what the industry thought us yokels could handle in 2005 To choose the best movies of 2005 is to compromise. I limit my list of candidates to films that have screened in Chicago, but I could easily fill it with movies that haven't screened in the U.S. at all, and God knows what I've missed altogether. I'm at the mercy of studio heads, distributors, and publicists, whose decisions about what to release and when defy comprehension. I saw Woody Allen's Match Point in Madrid in mid-November, believing the distributor's announcement that it would open in Chicago in December. Surprised at how much I liked it, I decided it probably belonged on my list, but then some industry executives decided that only the people in New York and Los Angeles should get to see it this year (in time for Oscar nominations), not the less discriminating moviegoers in the Chicago boondocks. I also couldn't consider other films that won't open here until 2006, such as Tommy Lee Jones's The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada. The people who run Disney spent a fortune sending critics and Academy members security-encoded DVDs with special "high end" players to view them on. Once we register the players we can watch the five films we've received so far as often as we like, though each time we do, according to the instructions, "the SV300 inserts a powerful, completely invisible watermark. It stamps the content with your player's ID number, and the time and date of the recording. If the playback is copied illegally to videotape, recordable DVD, or onto the Internet, Cinea will be able to analyze the copy and identify the player, the time, and the date on which the copy was made." Unfortunately, these players aren't high-end enough to be region free, and the version of Howl's Moving Castle they sent me is the same old dubbed one I'd already reviewed. The Japanese original with English subtitles won't be out commercially on DVD until March. I can't consider that version here because I haven't seen it, so I've grudgingly put the dubbed version on my list. These complaints aside, 2005 was a good enough year that my top ten list expanded to 15 including ties.
Jia's greatest film, Platform (2002), is about the Cultural Revolution and its aftermath; The World is a superb companion piece about China's recent capitalist revolution, set in a theme park outside Beijing with scaled-down models of the world's most famous tourist attractions and populated by visitors and workers. It's a kitsch monstrosity that Jia makes endlessly fascinating and suggestive -- in contrast to the cramped and unattractive "backstage" living spaces where the main characters spend most of their time when they're not working. The animated fantasies sparked by characters' text messages are often even more spacious and ethereal than the shots of the theme park. The play among all these spaces marks Jia as the most talented Asian director currently at work -- with the possible exception of Hou Hsiao-hsien, whose hauntingly minimalist Cafe Lumiere will be playing at the Music Box in January.
The year's biggest disappointment was a marked decline in the quality and vitality of the documentaries released. In 2004 we were given Fahrenheit 9/11, The Corporation, Los Angeles Plays Itself, and Route 181: Fragments of a Journey in Palestine-Israel. This year we got solid stuff -- Cinevardaphoto (a Block Films screening), Go Further, Grizzly Man, Magnificent Obsession: Frank Lloyd Wright's Buildings and Legacy in Japan, The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill, and William Eggleston in the Real World -- but fewer revelations. Even the most documentarylike items in my top 15, Ten Skies and Michelangelo Eye to Eye, are subversions of the form, as is Jem Cohen's memorable Chain. Sad to say, none of the documentaries I saw about the war in Iraq seemed adequate to the subject. They all seemed too "embedded," too timid, too dependent on cross-referencing Hollywood fantasies like Apocalypse Now. It's obviously important for Gunner Palace to show that some innocent families in Baghdad whose houses were ransacked for weapons got sent to Abu Ghraib even though no weapons were found, but it's offensive to treat such information as incidental and secondary. Ironically, Joe Dante's crude, fictional Homecoming -- an angry satire about slain soldiers returning from their graves to vote the president out of office, which turned up on Showtime's "Masters of Horror" -- came closer to bearing witness to the war's true meaning. Far too much fuss has been made lately about liberal-minded fiction films that make liberal-minded viewers feel sensitive and virtuous. As a first feature, Paul Haggis's Crash certainly has its high points, but fresh insights into the nature and ramifications of racism aren't among them, and the complacent Altman-esque ironies don't help. (Curiously, Jan Hrebejk's uncannily similar and equally accomplished Czech film Up and Down was ignored by critics.) I was moved by both Brokeback Mountain and Rent, but they still seemed overly contained. Steven Spielberg may have learned to think beyond Zionist reflexes, but Munich, like Raiders of the Lost Ark, is still supposed to make us feel good about the slaughter of Arabs, though we're now also supposed to feel bad about feeling good. Ten other movies I liked, in alphabetical order: The Beat That My Heart Skipped; The Brothers Grimm; Fear and Trembling; Goodbye, Dragon Inn; Lord of War; Notre Musique; Or (My Treasure); Play; The Producers; and Safe Conduct. My annual F.W. Murnau award, given to the film that did the most to alter my sense of film history, goes to the wonderful, radical 1966 Jacques Rivette documentary Jean Renoir, the Boss: A Portrait of Michel Simon by Jean Renoir, or A Portrait of Jean Renoir by Michel Simon, or The Direction of Actors: Dialogue. Unlike most of what I saw in 2005, it was blissfully free of compromise.
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The World. Not just the best film of 2005, Jia Zhang-ke's
feature was better, or at least more important, than my first choices for
2004 (The Big Red One) and 2003 (25th Hour and Crimson Gold).
Those earlier masterpieces lack its vital and complex vision of what the
whole planet is like at the moment.
Not on the Lips. At 35, Jia may be the youngest supreme film master
working today. At 83, Alain Resnais is the second oldest working regularly,
after 97-year-old Manoel de Oliveira, who visited Chicago for the first time
during this year's film fest. This exquisite film version of a 1925 operetta
is Resnais' fifth cinematic effort to convey his love of musicals, and in
some ways it's his most successful. A weird, ghostly farce about loneliness
and emotional fragility, it's also an anachronistic history lesson, with
its 1920s manners, 1950s MGM colors and lighting, and early-21st-century
French racism and anti-Americanism. It also displays much of the formal
mastery of previous Resnais masterworks, including Last Year at
Marienbad (1961), Providence (1977), and Melo (1986). Fox Lorber
never bothered to advertise this film, but it's been available on DVD since
March, when it also screened at the Gene Siskel Film Center. 
A History of Violence. I've yet to encounter a single attack on
David Cronenberg's multilayered yet fluid meditation on violence in George
Bush's America -- filmed entirely in Canada. The writer-director clearly
knows what he's doing -- note the brilliantly worked-out sex scenes -- and
though the film peaks well before its end, making the climax almost an
afterthought, it's less a serious flaw than an indication of how lean and
mean the earlier segments are.
Ten Skies. Here's an experimental film seen by many fewer
people than the titles above, having screened only once at Chicago
Filmmakers. This masterpiece by James Benning is an elaborately constructed
montage of ten ten-minute takes, a mesmerizing study of time, light,
movement, and moisture that traces the shifting relations between clouds
and earth, nature and people. It had much more to say to me than most
narrative films, though the subtly shifting patterns and textures of each
shot provide plenty of narrative as they tell the story of our own
perceptions.
Tropical Malady. All three features to date by Thai
writer-director (and School of the Art Institute of Chicago graduate)
Apichatpong Weerasethakul confirm that he's one of the most creative and
unpredictable film artists now working anywhere. Each time out he becomes
more ambitious, though Mysterious Object at Noon and Blissfully
Yours were hardly modest efforts. Part one of Tropical Malady shows the
budding romance between a soldier on leave and a shy country boy with a
mixture of irony and tenderness. Part two turns folkloric and allegorical
as the soldier travels through a dark forest, alternately stalking and
being stalked by his lover in the form of a tiger spirit, with a talking
baboon offering sage advice. 
A tie between two kids' movies, Howl's Moving Castle and
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, both based on well-known English
novels. I especially value the first, Hayao Miyazaki's animated feature --
based on Diana Wynne Jones's book and the most commercially successful
domestic release in the history of Japanese cinema -- for the radical
fluidity with which people and objects undergo constant transformationand
for the implied philosophical position: that wisdom doesn't so much succeed
callowness as peacefully coexist with it. The same can be said for dreams
and waking reality. The triumph of Tim Burton's delirious riff on Roald
Dahl's Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is more in the surrealist
design and nightmarish dislocation than in some metaphysics. The
off-putting aggressive mannerisms of Johnny Depp as chocolate tycoon Willy
Wonka are a reminder that Burton has better instincts for the visual than
for human behavior.
A tie between two literary movies, Yes and Capote, both
highly unexpected successes. Yes, a post-9/11 love story about an
Irish-American scientist (Joan Allen) and a Lebanese surgeon working as a
cook (Simon Abkarian), proved that contemporary world politics could be
gracefully confronted in iambic pentameter. It's the best film Sally
Potter's made since The Gold Diggers (1983), in part because she found
something affirmative to say. Capote showed that Truman Capote's downfall
could be partly explained by the ethical and emotional conflicts he went
through while writing In Cold Blood. It had the advantages of a
first-rate actor (Philip Seymour Hoffman), a highly focused script by Dan
Futterman, and the economical direction of Bennett Miller.
A tie between two up-to-date works about art by old masters,
Michelangelo Antonioni's 17-minute Michelangelo Eye to Eye (2004) and
Ingmar Bergman's feature-length Saraband (2003). Michelangelo Eye to
Eye, shown in 35-millimeter as part of the Onion City Film Festival at
Chicago Filmmakers, used digital technology to show Antonioni, now in his
90s and confined to a wheelchair since 1975, walking through Saint Peter's
in Rome, looking at and caressing Michelangelo's restored Moses -- one
restored Michelangelo considering another. Saraband, a sequel to
Bergman's 1973 Scenes From a Marriage, was shot in DV and shown that
way at Bergman's insistence during its commercial release. It's a kind of
postcinematic effort by Bergman, now in his 80s, made with a new technology
after a 60-odd-year career using film. The content is typically
self-punishing, but I could only admire his willingness to record such
barrenness using a technology that wouldn't grant it even a modicum of
glamour. 
A tie between two plaintive comedies about lonely fuckups, Jim
Jarmusch's Broken Flowers and Miranda July's Me and You and Everyone
We Know. I could have made this a three-way tie and included Noah
Baumbach's The Squid and the Whale, but once the shock of it wore off I
didn't find its negativity as clarifying as I would have liked. Jarmusch's
feature lacks the formal and moral complexity of his underrated Coffee
and Cigarettes, and the fact that he edited it backward is apparent, because
it starts out rich and ends up depleted. Bill Murray's narcissism bores me
almost as much here as it did in Lost in Translation, but the other
actors are delightful. July's compulsion to tweak Americans for their
puritanism is also somewhat off-putting, but the characters are sweet, her
direction deft.
A tie between two examples of not-quite science fiction, Hal
Hartley's modest The Girl From Monday and Wong Kar-wai's almost
Wagnerian 2046. Hartley's hilarious futuristic satire imagines a
"dictatorship of the consumer," with citizens wearing bar codes on their
wrists and regarded as "investments with growth potential," especially when
they have sex. Wong's first film in 'Scope, a labyrinth of longing, begins in
the last year of Hong Kong's economic and political independence but is set
mainly in the 60s and concerns his parents' generation.