You've Got Unfinished Business, Sweetie

If I were a paid blogger, Smurf would have had to take a hit on me weeks ago. So much unfinished business. I know the Best of 2010 blog entries stalled out three weeks ago with Lourdes and Greenberg, and I don't see when I'll be able to write eight more, so with a profound sense of anticlimax, I'm posting my whole, unannotated Top Ten of 2010. What you'll see if you click the link is the Top Ten among U.S. commercial releases, but another link in the same frame will reveal a Top Ten among world premieres, with very little overlap given how many of my favorite releases last year were holdovers from festivals in 2008 and 2009.

Thanks to everyone who responded to the Annette Bening and Jennifer Lawrence pieces. I'm nearly done with a Natalie Portman retrospective, so I'm not nervous about encouraging you to keep your eyes open for that. I also got caught up on the back catalogs of Michelle Williams and of current Supporting nominees Helena Bonham Carter and Melissa Leo, who have been Actress nominees in the past. When I'll generate those write-ups I can't quite say. There's also, of course, Nicole Kidman, whose back catalog I basically already knew, though I did investigate her first Globe-nominated turn in Billy Bathgate. When I'll look into Practical Magic, The Peacemaker, and The Invasion ...it's even harder to say.

On the subject of Oscar commentary and predictions, I've been popping up at everyone's party except my own: this article I wrote with Nathaniel R. for Fandor's Keyframe Blog about the current Best Picture race, and Nathaniel's own Oscar-obsessed podcasts with Joe Reid of Low Resolution and Katey Rich of Cinema Blend. If you haven't read, please read! If you haven't listened, please listen!

As for proper predictions, I feel disinclined, but not for the reasons of profound annoyance I experienced last year. This time, I feel as though a lot of the winners seem pretty strongly fore-ordained: King's Speech, Firth, Portman, Deakins, Seidler, Sorkin, Wall & Baxter, Toy Story 3, and the Inception teams in Sound Mixing, Visual Effects, and despite a weaker case made by the actual film, Sound Editing. Other races feel nearly as sealed up for Fincher, Bale, and Atwood—although, just for shits and giggles, and because Winter's Bone (unlike, say, Animal Kingdom) is not a screener that I think AMPAS voters can feel okay about ignoring, and everyone seems to love John Hawkes, I'm going out on a limb to predict him over Bale, whose persona and performance are a bit more divisive, or Rush, who's already won. Please know that I'm as aware as you are that I'm probably wrong. But I like being wrong.

In the only categories left, I truly have no idea who will win, and for me personally, the least joyous aspect of current Oscar seasons is having so many Guild prizes, precursors, and voter interviews available, by which one could try to see the future. I miss the sense of joy I used to feel in predicting, but I miss the sense of surprise on Oscar night even more, and I'm not the sort of person who reads the end of novels before I finish the middle. So it's with a gleeful lack of credibility or information that I posit the following:

Supporting Actress: Leo, unless Weaver, unless Bonham Carter
Supporting Actor: Hawkes, unless Bale, unless Rush
Art Direction: King's Speech, unless Alice
Original Score: King's Speech, unless Social Network, unless Inception
Foreign Film: In a Better World, unless Biutiful, unless Outside the Law
Documentary Feature: Waste Land, unless Inside Job, unless Restrepo, unless Exit
Makeup: Way Back, unless Wolf Man, unless Barney's Version
Original Song: "I See the Light," unless "We Belong Together," unless "If I Rise"

I'll have one more bit of catch-up work to rush through this weekend, naming my favorites in the Oscar categories, but you'll need to give me a day on that. Otherwise, happy Oscaring, I hope you've had as much fun as I have cruising various cocktail recipes called "the Black Swan" online, and if you live in Chicago, go see Poetry at the Music Box this weekend! Based on Oasis and Secret Sunshine, and Cannes, and friend reports, it seems like it can't miss.

#9 of 2010: Lourdes

There are plenty of reasons why so many recent movies made about religion are studies in zealous extremism or, as we witnessed in the just-wrapped Sundance Film Festival, narratives about the ambivalent or downright scary pull of charismatic believers, marginal practices, creepy cults. Lourdes, despite resolutely avoiding the track of vilifying faith, may seem in its opening shot or in a roughly synopsized premise to be headed along the equally easy road of facetious send-up. Our first impression, from a camera somewhere in the high rafters of a dubious, marble-floored hotel restaurant, is of timid, hunched, variously incapacitated pilgrims gradually entering and taking their seats, before the head nun/chaperone runs dispassionately through the group itinerary for their visit to Lourdes, the legendary healing site. As the shot fills with people and the camera zooms closer, the kitschiest accoutrements of this trip (an end-of-week prize for Best Pilgrim!) stand in uncertain relation to the soft, sympathetic sincerity with which this nun, uncannily played by Elina Löwensohn, promises to her temporary wards a respite from their acute loneliness. The mutedness of the sound design, plus writer-director Jessica Hausner's gift for capturing the hush and austerity even in commercialized spaces, lend the scene an unexpected dignity; the Crayola shades of the costumes and the architectural pastiche of banquet hall and ski chalet encourage winking skepticism. The camera's refusal to cut, like the unfussy inscrutability of the performers, refuses to break this inchoate first impression into more revealing tonal clues. Nothing contextualizes the overlaid rendition of "Ave Maria," which will reprise later in the film, as a devout musical invocation or as a smirk at the commodified canning of spiritual expression. Is this pilgrimage for real or not, on the whole or in parts? And if so, which parts?

The withholding of judgment persists across Lourdes, which is comic, haunting, sweet, pious, unsettling, agnostic, and wholly deadpan at various moments. The scene structures, story arc, and style are so unusual that they ironically emit a strong sense of directorial point of view even as they inventively resist any sense of pinpointable editorial intervention. Our focal character, played by the charming, heroically opaque Sylvie Testud, is a young, wheelchair-bound woman who, early on, comments on the plastic, "touristy" aspects of this trip to Lourdes, where the minuscule possibility of a miracle is sold like a visit to Epcot Center, a Carnival Cruise, a steady engine for gift-shop apparel: I Prayed To Be Able To Walk, and All I Got Was This Lousy T-Shirt. But Testud's Christine makes this comment gently, in docile appreciation of the chance to get out, and the framing of spaces as well as ensuing events conspire to imply that something miraculous is happening, almost happens, or at least potentially could happen to Christine while at Lourdes. And why Christine? Löwensohn's chaperone, whether outraged at her unrewarded devotion or guilty about a private waver in her faith, seems incensed that Christine, not she, is the object of divine contact. The indolent, boy-crazy escort played by Léa Seydoux and the more intensely afflicted visitor played by Orsolya Tóth alternately stress the wry vulgarity and the humbling stakes of this place, this spell, whether of time or of magic.

Hausner, working in brilliantly cool cahoots with up-and-coming cinematographer Martin Gschlacht, keeps finding new locations, angles, and movements for her camera that simultaneously imply the very apex of capitalist banalization and the lurking potential of Spirit, of something ineffable. Embracing neither belief nor renunciation, Lourdes produces astonishing, dispassionate fusions of the two and an incredible range of gradations between them. What does it mean, either as the disabled pilgrim or the chaperoning nun, to visit Lourdes and imagine, much less expect, a touch from God's finger? What does it mean to come to Lourdes and not entertain that possibility? Is it holy or ridiculous, a joke or Very Much The Point, that the Spirit insinuates itself not in objects or intervals of sublime ecstasy but on drab day-trips, in restless queues, between the trapezoidal cafeteria trays? What finally happens in Lourdes and the questions or answers that the movie thereby prompts are generously, uncynically open to interpretation. But this is not a foggy, uncommitted exercise in run-of-the-mill ambiguity, nor does it turn on a brazen sensationalizing of body, society, and spirituality in the manner of Breaking the Waves. The exquisite, oblique manipulation of images, sounds, rhythms, and performance by which Lourdes evolves from scene to scene and by which it arrives at its finale offer its own grounds for an ardent belief in cinema—if not as a higher power then at least as a profound one.

#10 of 2010: Greenberg

Like The Fighter, another regionally specific, humor-spiked American character study that I wouldn't trade for anything, Greenberg shows a marvelous knack for shifting a plausibly bonded calico of characters onto and off the screen, gathering them together and separating them out. Rich, consistent rewards are generated from scenes where we observe group interaction from a sufficient distance to make our own choices of whom to watch and our own surmises about the relative distance between characters. These make for subtle, savory feasts of personality revealed through behavior, but the movie is equally adept at zeroing in on single characters or pairs and digging incisively into the particulars of what makes them tick or, more often, not tick. Even more than The Fighter, Greenberg stays fresh and surprising with its dramatic choreography: it's never clear who will linger within or disappear from Roger Greenberg's ornery orbit. Characters who seem like one-offs return for tangy comedy or tough confrontation; others thread themselves in and out as semi-regular mainstays; the female lead, around whom the film opens and with whom a central relationship begins to coalesce, goes missing for a significant passage, within an astutely engineered narrative context.

The ensemble plays as richly as in a Leigh or Demme film, without abandoning that prickliness and starch that Baumbach has been perfecting. Laugh lines ("You let a mental patient go down on you?") and quiet heartbreakers (Rhys Ifans, supplying the correct name of his son) are equally within the purview of Baumbach's deepest, nimblest, most surprising ensemble so far. Roger's aggressive unapproachability is funny, poignant, and intimidating, not unlike Mark Zuckerberg's in The Social Network, but more discomfiting and even infuriating, often to himself, without topical rhetoric or simplified arcs of romantic yearning to cushion the blow of such exacting portraiture. Compare Greenberg to Coppola's Somewhere, and you see how a story of L.A.-specific drift and disappointment doesn't need to hit the same nail quite so frequently, or so fully on the head; Savides's light proves evocative and elevating of the film without feeling so obviously recruited into blunt directorial framings and conceits. Compare Greenberg to Black Swan and note that a seemingly objective camera can perform a dissection of a highly aggravated mind without resorting to hysteria, or equating fearlessness with hyperbole. Am I making Greenberg seem special only by running down its peers, framing them as reflections of this film rather than autonomous entities? Apologies; Roger makes that reflex contagious. I skipped Greenberg in theaters because the ads didn't convince me I needed to attend; since debuting on DVD, it's remained a pebble I can't get out of my mental shoe, and don't want to. (capsule review)

Top Ten of 2010: A Cheerful Prologue

My Top Ten list of U.S. releases for 2010 encompasses five film-festival hits from 2009 that took the customary year to arrive on a rarefied number of American commercial screens; one documentary that premiered at festivals in 2008 before finally landing a micro-budgeted distribution deal last winter; a feature that bowed at Cannes in 2008 and, despite finally debuting to Chicago audiences for a week-long public run at Facets, shows no clear signs of having played New York or Los Angeles at all; and three U.S.-made releases about which no "release date" enigma exists. Even at that, though, one of those last three films, a Sundance discovery last January, and another, released in March, feel like they, too, have been out forever.

The main lesson to be drawn, however, is not that 2010 had a hard time generating its own, ready-made Top Ten material. Granted, I wouldn't be entirely strenuous in disputing that sentiment, especially given the memory of a summer that had little to furnish into anyone's time capsule beyond Toy Story 3 (which I loved), Inception (which I didn't), and the indelibly vicious take-downs of Sex and the City 2 (which I avoided). The year wasn't great, and minus the triage performed by all those slow-trickle international gems, it would clearly look much worse. But, as few "A"-level movies as I found, I gave more "B+"s to more movies I more or less cherished and would avidly watch again—and, in many cases, already have watched again—than I can remember doing in any recent year. And as I was finally moved to explain this summer, a B+ or even a B– on this site generally implies a film that I'd urge you to have a crack at. The number of movies that made a strong, wholly defensible run for the #9 or #10 spot on this list is greater than the list itself. Even though this runner-up echelon includes more Cannes-vetted entrees (Mother, Carlos, The Father of My Children, A Prophet, Secret Sunshine), pulpy humdingers imported from abroad (Animal Kingdom), and micro-mini releases (My Neighbor, My Killer), it is also impressively fat with homegrown, medium-rare, commercial entertainments that invigorated at least as much as they impressed. Inside Job, The Fighter, Let Me In, The Town, The Social Network, Green Zone, and How to Train Your Dragon, basically in that order, would be proud entrants in a year-end Best list, with October Country, The Ghost Writer, Winter's Bone, The American, and Catfish not too far behind.

Solid if highly qualified successes like Mike Leigh's Another Year, Sylvain Chomet's The Illusionist, Luca Guadagnino's I Am Love, and the deceptively tough-minded sheep-herding documentary Sweetgrass all demand a second look and imply possible gains in my estimation as I keep mulling. The best stuff in inconsistent dramas like Fair Game (great start and middle, vaporous ending), Conviction (grippingly acted, mystifyingly scripted), The Last Exorcism (blazing middle trumps the intro and the finale), and For Colored Girls (an entire gamut of the dazzling and the risible, often within the same scenes) is as good as the best stuff in a lot of better movies. Meanwhile, amongst Emma Stone and her abler abettors in Easy A, Drew Barrymore and her comic accomplices in Going the Distance, prankish documentaries Exit Through the Gift Shop and Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work, and the Hope Diamond of unabashed costume jewelry that is Burlesque, I had some hearty laughs and joys at the movies this year, which mean more to me as time goes by.

Very little in the way of unpolluted greatness, then, but an exhilarating lot in the way of rich, savory outings, of which my at-last stabilized Top Ten had the most fiber and flavor. Look for those in the next blog entry, over the next few days. I'll follow that post, once it's done, with a Top Ten list by world premiere, since the abundance of top-flight holdovers on the one you're about to read means the lists have very little intersection... and to assure you, as well, that 2011 is likely to hit several high-points that festival mavens have already spotted over the last 12 months. Hooray, and stay tuned!