Critical Mass

PW’s film writers discuss the funereal films of 2008.

by Sean Burns & Matt Prigge

Matt Prigge: I thought this year sucked, both with movies and just about everything else. Obama won, and that’s about it. But I have a feeling that, at least as far as movies go, you might think otherwise.

Sean Burns: Well, this certainly wasn’t one for the ages, I’ll give you that. I think between our toilet economy and the general pessimism in the air, there seems to be a free-floating dread seeping into movies. The year’s record-smashing blockbuster was a punishing, relentlessly downbeat tale about a depressed billionaire dressed up like a flying rodent beating the shit out of a psychotic clown. James Bond was so miserable that instead of bedding the babe he taught her how to kill.

MP: Don’t forget to include JCVD’s Jean-Claude Van Damme with the bummed-out action dudes.

SB: And then there’s Mickey Rourke playing this year’s saddest man in tights in Darren Aronofsky’s The Wrestler. With the bleak Jersey landscapes and air of quiet desolation, it feels like the big-screen version of an acoustic Springsteen tune … and that’s even before the Boss’ heartbreaking theme song kicks in.

MP: This was a great year for misery. Wendy and Lucy and Frozen River located stray, unlikely moments of altruism in bleak towns, but were still total downers.

SB: Even the finest family entertainment, my precious Wall-E, depicted a future in which we’d trashed the world to a point where the lazy human race wound up lounging around on our asses, eating junk food in space. I guess that’s why I’m so happy we agree on the Coens’ Burn After Reading, a flick unfairly dismissed as a lark. But if you look past the surface-level buffoonery, this might secretly be the brothers’ darkest, most pitiless movie yet, offering a Kubrickian vision of venal America that makes No Country for Old Men look sentimental. It’s also funny as hell.

MP: Agreed. Burn After Reading was my favorite of the “relevant” major releases and, not coincidentally, it was also the funniest. In fact, things have been so bad that even gloomy screenwriter Mike Leigh went the other way by calling his latest picture Happy-Go-Lucky and not meaning it ironically. On a more hesitantly positive note there was also Rachel Getting Married and A Christmas Tale, which plumbed the depths of despair while also conveying true, unadulterated joy.

SB: I think that’s why Rachel hit me so much harder than any other film this year. I was blindsided by director Jonathan Demme’s whiplashing between a blissful post-racial wedding ceremony and the bracingly stark family drama going on at the same time–those festive musical interludes felt to me like a pressure release valve for a film that might otherwise be too painful to bear.

MP: Along similar lines, the severely undervalued Be Kind Rewind depicted a community coming together in the face of a mini-tragedy, while Milk is stirring, invigorating propaganda that ends with the hero getting shot in the head.

SB: Yeah, and don’t forget In Bruges, Martin McDonagh’s delightfully profane comedy of manners that also ends with splattering viscera. With the exception of a few scenes in Gran Torino, I don’t think I laughed as hard at anything this year as I did at Ralph Fiennes’ blistering Bruges tirades. Forget about being boring and sad because a hot Nazi war criminal deflowered him in The Reader. Fiennes needs to play more villains.

MP: I think the most depressing experience of the year had nothing to do with our sociopolitical apocalypse. Synecdoche, New York was a claustrophobic trip inside Charlie Kaufman’s frazzled, depressive mind, which I know you found a slog but which I found an intentional, intensely self-critical slog. This is a film that should do for solipsistic brooding what Jaws did for the water.

SB: Synecdoche seems to be the most polarizing film of the year. I only wish that I had the sort of transporting experience watching it that you and the film’s fellow partisans did. Even though I understood exactly what Kaufman was trying to do, it still played like sheer torture to me. The only film that felt longer was Benjamin Button.

MP: Comparing my beloved Synecdoche to David Fincher Sells Out? Ouch.

SB: We were spoiled rotten in ’07, with movies like No Country and There Will Be Blood. But you knew that was a fluke. Things are pretty grim out there right now. I mean, Revolutionary Road? Jesus.

MP: There was virtually nothing to recommend this Christmas, unless people wanted to shlep to New York for Steven Soderbergh’s amazingly detached four-and-a-half-hour Che. (Incidentally, kudos to IFC Films, who distributed half my list. They’ve totally picked up the ball for international cinema after Wellspring’s death a couple years back.)

SB: Ah, Che, the movie so removed that half the time I felt like I was watching it from another room. It’s weirdly mesmerizing. But you’re right to salute IFC, as their On Demand program does a bang-up job making current specialty films available to towns without art-houses, even as the big-screen purist in me can’t help but wince a little bit. But I suppose the slow death of theatrical distribution should be a topic for another time. Meanwhile, happy New Year and pass the Prozac!