It is never easy to predict what a year in film might hold. We might trawl the Internet for trailers and awards-season buzz or flip through festival programs searching for the names of directors with pedigree and style. We might conjure up images of perfect onscreen pairs, their chemistry poised to melt the celluloid itself, or repeat as catechism Hollywood’s mantra that any film about the Holocaust will bring in money and Oscar gold.
But what makes film so endlessly entertaining is not just the infinite variety of films themselves but the gap between what we expect and what we receive. The pictures to which I most looked forward in 2008 — Fernando Meirelles’ “Blindness,” Clint Eastwood’s “Changeling,” Sam Mendes’ “Revolutionary Road” — all fell short, somehow becoming too tendentious, too weighty, to move with the fleetness cinema requires.
It’s not that these were bad films, necessarily, just that their topicality, their placid heaviness of allegory or message, felt about as daring or lively as an episode of “Wheel of Fortune.”
Even those qualified successes, like Eastwood’s tale about a single mother whose child is kidnapped in 1920s Los Angeles, seemed bloated, behind the times — misusing a kind of primal, collectivist fire for the sodden “drama” of gray-blue hues and saccharine endings.
Yet there were three films that stood out far from the madding crowd, each undeniably timely in its own right but constructed with a humane joy other films sadly lacked. Gus Van Sant’s “Milk,” Danny Boyle’s “Slumdog Millionaire” and Disney’s “WALL-E” are about as different, narratively and aesthetically speaking, as any three mainstream pictures could be.
The stories — of an openly gay man on San Francisco’s Board of Supervisors in the 1970s; of a Mumbai slum-dweller one question away from the top jackpot on India’s version of “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?”; and of an animated trash compactor who falls in love with a floating iMac 700 years into a garbage-strewn future and eventually helps save humanity — would seem permanently unmoored from each other. But they are tied by the moving pictures’ defining liveliness, a testament to cinema’s enduring power not only to seek out life but also to create it anew.
The year’s three best films brought some rambunctiousness, some romance, to tales which reflected and refracted an intensely political year. They took on topics which at times felt uncomfortably close — from the peripheral Anita Bryant in “Milk,” whose inane, smiling hatred calls to mind the sorry prejudices of Rick Warren, to director Danny Boyle’s lively, unsettled Mumbai, brought low by terrorists this autumn. But the politics were leavened by a quiet, simple beauty, the beauty of movie love affairs, of suspense thrillers, of flawed heroes who did right and paid the price.
2008’s best films were an homage to the possibilities of cinema itself, culminating in the note-perfect opening sequence of “WALL-E”: worthy of Charlie Chaplin, scored only by the precocious bleating of its eponymous robot and the deafening quiet of an Earth abandoned for parts unknown. It is a tender elegy at once eerie and gorgeous, carrying its political and aesthetic risks so lightly as to seem effortless — an elegy tinted with an innocent Astaire-and-Rogers glee, an elegy for us, the humans who left behind skyscrapers of waste because we mistook contentment for consumption.
2008 was also about the power of language, like the thick chatter of “Slumdog Millionaire,” echoing amid the azures and fuchsias of textiles hung in narrow tenement gaps: the language of interrogation, of humiliation, of song; of comedy and cruelty, of eroticism, exoticism and exaltation. From the opening frames, this sprawling epic seemed less a film than a total immersion in a realistic “One Thousand and One Nights.” Hindustani and English, rickshaw clatter and prostitutes cooing tell the stories that form our world. In the process it revealed the power of (and the flaws in) India’s democratic experiment, suggesting that the achievement not just of wealth but also of freedom is a matter of retelling one’s story, meeting an interrogation with the only answers we know.
But if I had to choose a word to describe 2008 in cinema, it would be “performance.” The crux of the films that defined our tumultuous year — a moonlit dance in “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button,” standing in for all the things we wish to say but for which we have no words; the brave flight of a skateboarder in “Paranoid Park”; a miniature Manhattan made larger than life by a stage director in Charlie Kaufman’s “Synecdoche, New York”; the major and minor performances we make each day to state our case (“Hunger”), to hide the truth (“Let the Right One In”), or to make the right impression (“Smart People”).
And of course there was “Milk,” with Sean Penn in a career-defining performance as the title character, a politician and performer himself: a man who seemed and was in fact a hero — not in spite of being human and flawed and sometimes selfish in his selflessness, but because he was all that and more.
Performance runs in the veins of each film on this list, but that’s not to say that they are in any way inauthentic. Instead, each film suggests the importance of art, of performing or telling a story, for survival in a world of zealots and terrorists, which seems with each passing day to become more dangerous.
Maybe that’s why my favorite movie moment of the year was not in any of the three films I single out here, though they were the fullest expressions of that art. Instead it is a tiny moment, one of those small miracles the cinema sometimes gives us when we least expect it.
Stephen Walker’s documentary “Young @ Heart,” about a choir of elderly singers in Western Massachusetts that sings covers of contemporary pop songs, is not as sappy as it sounds on paper — indeed, as the deaths of two choir members during the film’s production shows, age is not just affirmation but infirmity, not just wisdom but frailty.
One of those deaths sadly makes a duet of Coldplay’s “Fix You” a solo, sung by an aging cowboy with a bawdy sense of humor and an oxygen tank. Yet to see his performance — sitting on a stark stage, his flat, plaintive voice suggesting an emptiness that threatens ever to engulf us — is to see once more our ability to bind up and salve our wounds, to fix ourselves again.
To see the films I’ve listed here is to remember that the best cinema does not just bring life to us; in its soaring vivacity, it brings us back to life.
2008: A year in film
Published: Tuesday, January 13, 2009
Updated: Tuesday, January 13, 2009
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