POP AND POP ART: THE FILMS OF 2002
By Zach Campbell
The past year saw, once again, strong work by the popular Movie Brat directors: Scorsese, Spielberg, Hill, De Palma, even Bogdanovich (whose film was plagued by an unfortunate release strategy). And yet mainstream journalism and criticism dissected these films in a disparagingly ungentle way. Instead of peering into the complex, often "unsuccessful" ways in which these pop maestros were indeed working, critics generally judged the work on its adherence to the very rules that this peer group seems to want to leave behind. Who knows if they'll continue in this direction, but:
(a) Spielberg seems more obsessed than ever with the confusing dissonance between youth and maturity and issues of parenthood, so much so that I started reading Catch Me If You Can as a horror film while I was watching it, and the real story of Minority Report is clearly that of a broken family's pain and lost illusions, to the point that it intrudes on the slickly realized sci-fi story and in any conventional sense "hurts" it—the satisfying entertainment of the narrative often contradicts the meandering line of family affairs that Spielberg so clearly wants to stress.
(b) Scorsese's technical and storytelling competence is beyond question, so clearly the narrative clutter, the anti-climactic showdowns, the anachronisms and tonal inconsistencies in Gangs of New York are not the result of idiocy or ignorance. One may or may not view them as artistic advances on Scorsese's part, but it seems only accurate to suggest that his own interests are becoming convoluted as a result of his instincts to shake the very conventions he uses as his foundations.
(c) Bogdanovich's The Cat's Meow has a distinct willingness to dive into the past in order to recreate and revive tropes that the public seems no longer to care about; Hill does something similar in Undisputed, which has jumpy editing and an energetic soundtrack but evokes a lost past more than an exciting present. (Plus, Undisputed makes the risky political move of refusing to judge, and in fact sympathizing with, the criminal black male—without either dehumanizing or tidying him up for white audiences.)
Indeed, pop culture and the Movie Brats seem to be moving away from each other, and using the critical mantra of "great popular art" to unlock the recent movies of this group of filmmakers seems a subtle injustice to the expressive personalities that continue to emerge and evolve. I liked the work of all the directors in this group this year, though the only resounding success for me was De Palma's Femme Fatale, which might be the only one still quite comfortable in dealing with the tropes and myths of this great popular art—but only because De Palma, more than Hill, Spielberg, Scorsese, or Bogdanovich (or Coppola and Lucas, for that matter), consciously distanced himself from these movie conventions to begin with, and has experimented with them for over thirty years.
This was the dominant trend of the new cinema I saw from 2002. But hopeful films emerged elsewhere. A lot of the films I really valued from the past year had a vaguely spiritual (or at least immaterial) cast to them, suggesting an unknowable complexity to concepts like kindness, redemption, love, or even political identity (films like Blood Work and Blissfully Yours did much to engage sociopolitical issues without seeming to). I only wish I could have sampled from the films of the festival circuit more. Even so, here are some films I'd put forth as exemplary of the qualities I look for in art.
1.
FEMME FATALE (Brian De Palma, USA/France)
De Palma's modernist assault on narrative convention attains great depth
when, at the key plot twist, he proves his stunning insight by instantly
applying all of the baggage of film noir and the femme fatale to
the subjectivity of his female protagonist. Gender becomes, for De Palma,
a network of myriad influences and constructions that transgress reductive
elements of an overriding patriarchy. Rebecca Romijn-Stamos' Laure Ash
provides a perfect encapsulation of De Palma's ideas about the aggressive nature
of voyeurism—as well as the shocking and moving capacity for kindness that
exists in symbiosis with this aggression. A few competing titles spring to
mind, but this could be the greatest American film since, actually, Carlito's
Way.
2.
TURNING GATE (Hong Sang-soo, South Korea)
Imperfect, but who could possibly care? This quiet behavioral
observation ends up providing a good deal of psychological information without
trying to explain the ethical and romantic dilemmas that plague the characters.
Neither prude nor prurient, neither cynical nor saccharine, and yet certainly
not impassively cold, Hong's great feat is to inject his clear-headed
sensibility (without notions of superiority or judgment) into the foggy world of
his characters. The result is that an old myth can come to life and we can
understand another true meaning.
3.
THE SON (Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne, Belgium)
Adding a vaguely spiritual dimension to Rosetta-like methods, the
Dardenne brothers hit a perfectly ambiguous tone in this story of forgiveness.
The final shot was the one I was most thankful for this year—I constantly want
movies I love to end like this, and just at the moment I was suspecting The
Son was not going to, it did. Olivier Gourmet also gave my favorite
performance of the year. This might be the most acclaimed film on my list
(Far from Heaven aside), so I feel less of a need to argue for its good
qualities.
4.
TEN (Abbas Kiarostami, Iran/France)
More minimalist in conception than his previous work, but this still feels
like Kiarostami for a few key reasons: there's something about Kiarostami's
social activism which is assumed rather than pleaded (he strikes me as a bit
aristocratic in this regard); there's the way a fixed camera shot of his (pushed
to the brim in Ten of course) that always seems resolutely, revealingly
distant from the action captured on the screen; the actors seem to act with a
purpose the audience doesn't know. Digital video "downgrade"
aside, this is Kiarostami through and through, and may be a masterpiece.
5.
BLOOD WORK (Clint Eastwood, USA)
I've written before in 24fps why this film is an unfairly neglected
effort by the uncannily consistent Eastwood (one of America's great
post-classical Hollywood filmmakers). I won't bother to defend the film as
an adaptation here: if it doesn't set out to do what the source novel was
popular for doing, I don't see why we should fixate on it. This is
Eastwood as comfortable as ever expressing his own doubts about his body and his
image by having his director persona examine his star persona at every possible
turn.
6.
TALK TO HER (Pedro Almodóvar,
Spain)
In
total control of his camera, Almodóvar implies the subtle progression of the
relationship between his two male leads, and generally saves his flashier
elements for the set pieces. Thus, an upfront flamboyance works
hand-in-hand with an understated study of two (four?) characters, and the result
veers between pure cinema set pieces (the bullfight scene is close to
perfection) and a dramatic gaze into the quiet places of his characters' inner
selves.
7.
BLISSFULLY YOURS (Apichatpong "Joe" Weerasethakul, Thailand)
A few things mark Weerasethakul's directorial sensibility: a distance from
the material in conjunction with a closeness to its lived experience; formal
humor (e.g., starting the credits over forty minutes into the film); a desire to
shoot long takes but to insist on a narrative fragmentation that continually
gives us mere glimpses into the story structure, always teasing us with the
beginnings and ends of other stories. The political undertones have a
beautiful subtlety to them, because the viewer ignorant of the sociopolitical
affairs of Southeast Asia at this time (myself) will only come to learn about
this film's comments on such things after we see them deliberately treated.
Blissfully Yours starts off with its longeurs (though it is not
uninteresting); once the credits came on I was hooked. I'm glad that Mysterious
Object at Noon intrigued me enough to stay interested in Weerasethakul—if
he keeps improving at this rate, he'll make the best film of 2004.
8.
HAPPY HERE AND NOW (Michael Almereyda, USA)
Very much a rootless work: the viewer is tempted to find a core narrative or
thematic strand, but to my mind there simply isn't one, and grasping for straws
isn't what one resorts to—it
is precisely what one is invited to do. The direct pleasures Almereyda
offers the viewer (including a funny, charismatic performance by one Ernie
K-Doe) instead form a network of ideas about loneliness and isolation, but the
end result doesn't feel like a disinterested view of such subjects.
9.
CATCH ME IF YOU CAN (Steven Spielberg, USA)
I swear it is a horror story! It's about the inevitable onslaught
of adulthood (Tom Hanks) as it creeps up, overtaking childhood (Leonardo
DiCaprio running from maturity like so many of Spielberg's heroes).
Youthfulness cannot run and cannot hide, but Spielberg—gives us a bitter pill
to swallow—soothes us by turning the horror of the narrative into a fun comedy
that feels lighter than it should be.
10.
FAR FROM HEAVEN (Todd Haynes, USA)
A recreation of certain ideas about the Fifties (consciously) filtered
through a modern sensibility, Far from Heaven's supreme compassion is
that it realizes that modern viewers will react with more emotion to our
cultural ideas of the past than an "accurate" presentation of a
past we can no longer know. I think the point is that these characters
represent our desires more than they do their own, and Haynes' motivation is to
expose how society exerts pressure upon us always, so much so that we need the
artifice of our past to remind us of the arbitrary nature of today's images.
11. RESIDENT EVIL (Paul Anderson, USA)
This may or may not be my eleventh favorite film of 2002, but I'd like to
extend some support for it nonetheless. It is a fascinating (and
organically videogame-inspired) movie that does a lot of interesting things that
point to the future of the medium. It won't win any awards, but ten years
from now, this movie will probably matter more than a lot of the Oscar nominees.