Forget the Oscars! These Are the Best Films of 2012
Many top filmmakers in 2012
gravitated toward darker themes reflecting the anxieties and uncertainties of
our modern age, even if those themes were sometimes embedded in a highly
entertaining gloss. Zero Dark Thirty and
Argo thus took on real-world
terrorism, the former with grim docudrama-like precision, the latter with a
literal (albeit ostensibly true) happy Hollywood ending. Lincoln and Django Unchained looked at the thorny issue of race, while Hyde
Park on Hudson, like Lincoln, looked to the politics of the past as inspiration for
healing our current body politic. Interestingly,
four separate films explored the indignities and uncertainties of aging. These
ranged from sentimental (The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel) to caustic (Late Quartet), from
warm-hearted and poignant (Dustin Hoffman’s Quartet) to unsparing (Amour).
Even the few romantic
stories worth seeing in 2012, which excludes most of the studio-released
schlock, involved couples as seemingly ill-suited to the general principle of
love as they are to each other (Rust and Bone, Silver Linings
Playbook, Safety Not Guaranteed, Seeking a Friend for the End of the World). The two films that stood head and shoulders over all
others in 2012—Beasts of the Southern Wild and Moonrise Kingdom—had
children as their protagonists, kids who refuse to accept a forbidding or
inauthentic world as it is and take control of their own destiny.
With only a handful of truly great
films in 2012 it is perhaps more instructive to analyze the ambitious failures,
to try to determine why works by serious artists either failed colossally or at
least underwhelmed. When I heard Paul Thomas Anderson was making a thinly
veiled account of the life of Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard, I expected
great things. (Remember his brief but sharp characterization of a misogynistic
motivational guru, played brilliantly by Tom Cruise, in Magnolia?) So
how could a movie so beautiful to look at, with three near-great performances
at its core and some of the best scenes on film in 2012, still devolve into a
muddled mess? The failure rests solely in the hands of Anderson, who should
have sought imput from other writers to rein in the weaknesses and vagaries of
his self-penned script (such as its insistent focus on its least interesting
character), and exerted more directorial discipline over some of his actors’
distracting indulgences (we’re talking about you, Joaquin, no matter how much
we love you).
The failed promise of The Master
evidences a weak-mindedness ever more
pervasive in movies in recent years. The majority of filmmakers today lack
either the intellectual heft or passionate ideological vision to shape films
with a clear point of view. What is the point of making a movie about a subject
as controversial as a cult like Scientology if the filmmaker doesn’t seem to
have a clue as to what he wants to say? One may love or hate the work of Danish
director Lars Von Trier (and I have done both), but at least the viewer knows
what the director feels about his subject. Von Trier forces you to see the
world through his eyes, however painful or dehumanizing that may be at times.
Thank God for the mad genius that is Quentin Tarantino, who makes films that
are completely unapologetic, that are not afraid to provoke or offend, that
have heart and spirit and real intelligence beneath their rollicking surfaces.
The same problem mars the, in my
view, greatly overpraised Zero Dark Thirty.
I'm willing to cut director Kathryn Bigelow some slack because she set out to
make a very different movie: one about the failure to capture Osama bin Laden.
When world events threw a monkey wrench into her plans, she had to scrap the
whole thing and bust out a completely different story under a tight release
schedule, presumably worried that someone else would beat her to the punch. Maybe
the film she had originally conceived had a strong and compelling point of
view. I have my doubts, because her previous Iraq war film, The Hurt
Locker, somehow managed to score the 2009
Best Picture despite having nothing more profound to say than that war is a
dirty job and those tasked with carrying it out have to compartmentalize their
feelings in order to survive. (Sadly, a far more intuitive film on the
psychological fallout of war, The Messenger, went largely unseen and unheralded the year The
Hurt Locker stormed to a surprise Best
Picture win over Bigelow's ex-husband's Avatar.)
Zero Dark Thirty carries the same basic message as The Hurt
Locker, ending with Jessica Chastain not in
triumph but alone and seeming emotionally adrift now that her obsessive mission
has been accomplished. A puzzling controversy has arisen over whether the film
endorses or condemns torture, but the film takes no position on that or
anything else that might give the viewer something to chew on. Torture is just
presented as a fact of spycraft and not as a subject of any real interest
either to the protagonist or to the filmmaker. Bigelow's real interest is the
bang-bang, the documentary-like recreation of the daring assault on Bin Laden's
compound. The rest of the story seems rather perfunctory, despite Chastain's
game efforts, tacked on just to hold the frame up until the picture comes to
life during the Abbottabad raid. When the raid is over we as viewers are left
with the same empty feeling captured on Chastain's face in the final shot, more
entertained than enlightened.
Still the most inexplicable failure
of 2012 was Hitchcock. Who could serve
as greater cinematic fodder than Alfred Hitchcock, the master of movie
suspense, whose work reflects one of the most fascinatingly complex psyches in
human history? But Hitchcock the
movie was pure camp, without a
single authentic idea or genuine emotion. Anthony Hopkins has been able to
convincingly portray Pablo Picasso and Richard Nixon by the sheer skill of his
acting, without any attempt to look or sound like those historical figures. But
his ridiculously mannered “performance” here is more stunt than acting. My ears
still sting from the over-enunciation of his character’s name, which sadly
lives on to irritate in the turn-off-your-cell-phone ads which theaters
continued to play long after the movie’s run mercifully ended, a marketing
angle as cynical and predictable as this movie.
On the acting front, Daniel Day
Lewis’ performance in Lincoln is a
master class in the craft of acting, but its cool calculation left me emotional
wanting. The performance that moved me most in 2012 was that of 6-year-old
Quvenzhané Wallis in Beasts of the Southern Wild. Some critics have argued, unfairly in my view, that
Wallis could not possibly have been “acting” in this movie, simply being
herself, because 6 year olds are incapable of that level of abstract thought
(so much for Mozart!). The argument is patently ridiculous, as Wallis has never
lived in a makeshift junkyard, or stared down mythical beasts, or lost a parent,
or survived the melting of the polar icepacks, or experienced any of the other
fantastical elements depicted in Beasts. In what she accomplishes in Beasts isn’t acting, I don’t know what is.
Movies in 2012 featured a number of
other accomplished performances by children and teens—Tom Holland, the son who
comes of age trying to survive a tsunami and reunite his family in The
Impossible; Isabelle Allen, the young
Cosette in Les Miserable; Jared
Gilman and Kara Hayward, the runaway lovebirds in Moonrise Kingdom; Suraj Sharma, the intrepid shipwreck survivor
struggling to share a lifeboat with a hungry tiger in The Life of Pi.
I am excited to see what the future holds
for these bright young talents.
On the other end of the age
spectrum, Emmanuelle Riva, at 85 the oldest woman ever to receive a Oscar
nomination for Best Actress, was superb as an elderly woman trapped in an
increasingly debilitated body, matched note for note by her onscreen husband,
played with a haunting sense of dislocation and despair by 83-year-old
Jean-Louis Trintignant. Other
indelible performances were delivered by Marion Cotillard, an unsentimental
accident victim in the lovely Rust and Bone, Denzel Washington, playing against type as a self-destructive
alcoholic in the underappreciated Flight, Ann Dowd (in the year’s second most unforgettable performance) as a
by-the-book fast food restaurant manager unwittingly enticed into enabling a
horrible crime in the squirm-inducing Compliance, an uncharacteristically tender turn by Bruce Willis
in Moonrise Kingdom, and nearly
the entire cast of Django Unchained, most notably Christoph Waltz, Leonardo
DiCaprio, and a completely against type Samuel L. Jackson.
As always, this list is my humble,
idiosyncratic corrective to the inevitable miscarriage of justice that is the
Academy Awards. Without further ado, here are my nominations for best and worst
in cinema in 2012. [Please note as always films and performances are listed in
the order in which I saw them during the calendar year, not ranked within each
category.]
The Best of the Best
Beasts of the Southern Wild: The most magical, transportive film of 2012. First
time feature director Behn Zeitlin, in an extraordinarily auspicious debut,
creates an beautifully realized world known as The Bathtub, simultaneously
magical and grittily earthbound, in this Katrina-like parable of a down-and-out
Bayou community threatened by an apocalyptic storm. Zeitlin and co-writer Lucy
Albar, whose play was the source of the story, made the decision to change the
protagonist from a little boy to a little girl, creating one of the best young
female role models in film history. No fairy tale princess waiting to be
rescued, “Hushpuppy” is tough and resilient, willing to face life on its own
terms, come what may. The relationship between Hushpuppy and her sometimes-available
father, Wink, is surprisingly nuanced. The superbly moving performances of Quvenzhané
Wallis and Dwight Henry are all the more remarkable considering that both
father and daughter are played by completely untrained actors. The denizens of
The Bathtub may be poor but they live and love and hope and experience joy and
fight to stay in the only place they know as home and the movie never
condescends towards them. Wondrously imaginative, Beasts is visual poetry.
Moonrise Kingdom: While
I’ve enjoyed the work of Wes Anderson in the past, his films
are often too-precious-by-half to
provide any kind of true emotional experience. Kingdom marks a huge step
forward in Anderson’s maturation as a filmmaker. This charming tale of would-be young lovers on the run set
among two precocious 12-year-olds—he an orphan fleeing “Khaki Scout” camp, she a
dreamy girl with a penchant for stealing library books and listening to French
chanteuses—manages to mix deft satire with ineffable sweetness and a European
cinematic vibe. The fable-like quality of the movie is enhanced by the stunning
composition of its design, which looks like a hand-painted storybook come to
life. The visuals are complemented by a beautiful score composed by Alexandre
Desplat, with additional music ranging from Benjamin Britten to Hank Williams
to Françoise Hardy. The director also elicited great performances from his
entire cast, including previously unplumbed depths from Bruce Willis.
The Imposter: This
astonishingly documentary – the improbable but true story of a European scam
artist who managed to convince a Texas family that he was their missing son—is
more suspenseful than any thriller released last year and more entertaining
than nearly all feature films in cinemas in 2012. Director Bart Layton does a
superb job getting his real life characters to tell the story in a way that it
feels as if we are seeing the stories events unfold before our eyes. The movie
leaves us with a lot to ponder about truth and fiction and the nature of human
psychology, especially as even greater questions are raised toward the film’s
end.
Django Unchained: Quentin
Tarantino matches and perhaps even tops his last brilliant effort, Inglorious
Basterds, once again focusing his eye on
one of history’s darkest periods and recasting victim as hero in charge of his
own fate. This time, rather than the Holocaust, the director takes on the ugly
legacy of slavery, in a way I found much more compelling and insightful than
the much lauded Lincoln. No
synopsis or trailer can ever do justice to the work of Quentin Tarantino. You
have to let his films unfold in all their delirious glory, and look beyond the
violence and clever dialogue and audacious setups at what the film is really
trying to say. And Django has a
lot to say about the corrosive institution of slavery. No other filmmaker
working today has the stones to risk offending and upsetting people in the way
Tarantino does to express his unique vision, and we are the luckier for it.
Amour: This
movie may be hard to watch for many, but that makes it no less important. The
ravages of aging, a topic on the minds of many a baby boomer, has never been
examined in such unstinting fashion, without an ounce of sentiment. Director
Michael Haneke’s greatest work, with career-capping performances by legendary French
actors Emmanuelle Riva and Jean-Louis Trintignant.
Searching for Sugar Man: The
second documentary, after The Imposter, so accomplished it deserves to be on the best film list. The
vicissitudes of fame are explored through the story of an obscure American
musician who became an unlikely hero during the struggle against apartheid in
South African. Swedish director Malik Bendjelloul employs an extensive array of
skills to tell this transformative story, from intrepid reporting to beautiful
cinematographic flourishes to simple yet riveting use of animation.
The Best of the Rest
Lincoln: I
was not as enamored as most by Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln biopic. A movie that
champions craven compromise in the body politic, even in the interest of an
exceedingly greater good, is something that I find a hard time cheering
(especially the abnegation by Thaddeus Steven of his view that blacks and
whites deserved equal treatment in order to win Southern votes for the
Thirteenth Amendment). Not to mention the fact that the movie overlooks
Lincoln’s slow evolution against slavery, and disproportionately credits a
handful of white men with the demise of the institution. I credit Spielberg for
almost completely reigning in the sentimental excesses that mar most of his work.
But I suspect the success of this movie lies first and foremost at the hands of
screenwriter and playwright extraordinaire Tony Kushner, whose love or words
and the rough and tumble of argument is rivaled only by Aaron Sorkin, and who
kept the movie tightly focused on the effort to constitutionalize the end of
the “monstrous injustice" rather than take a sprawling biopic approach to
the entire Lincoln presidency, which would have surely diluted the film’s
impact.
Flight: This
movie seems to have been virtually forgotten at awards time. But Flight
marked an incredible step up in class for
director Robert Zemeckis and provided Denzel Washington with another tour de
force opportunity to show off his incredible range depicting a deeply flawed
airline pilot in denial over his alcoholism.
Life of Pi: An
incredible technical achievement by the anti-auteur director Ang Lee, who seems
to approach every film as an opportunity to master a completely new genre. Here
he uses special effects with virtuosic ease to turn a seemingly unfilmmable
novel not into a soulless cartoon but a poetically realized tale of faith and
fate, man and nature.
Rust and Bone: An
unlikely romance between a physically handicapped woman and an emotionally
stunted man by Jacques Audiard, the French director of the 2010 Oscar nominee Un
Prophet. Marion Cotillard and Matthias
Schoenaerts are both terrific, and one shot in particular, of Cotillard
visiting the underwater whale tank in the sea park where she used to work, is
unforgettable.
The Impossible: Extraordinary
special effects and affecting performances by Naomi Watts, Ewan McGregor, and
Tom Holland highlight this true story of a family's struggle to survive the
2004 Indian Ocean tsunami.
Most Underrated Film of the Year
Anna Karenina: I
fully expected to be put off by director Joe Wright’s decision to set this
remake of literature’s greatest love stories in an artificial theatrical
setting, replete with stylized gestures and choreographed camera movement,
which many viewers and critics felt robbed the romance of some of its heat. But
the movie’s sumptuous color scheme and inventive production design created a
feast for the eyes, the sinuous camera work a mesmerizing visual ballet. Keira
Knightly redeemed herself after earning my worst performance palm twice in
recent years for her overwrought turns in 2010’s Black Swan and 2011’s A Dangerous Method. And Jude Law was so transfixing you wondered why Anna
could not see that still waters run deep. Only Aaron Taylor-Johnson’s stolid, wimpy
Vronsky failed to convincingly hold up his end of the love triangle.
Most Overrated Film of the Year
Silver Linings Playbook: Sure,
the performances were solid across the board, but there was nothing else that
set this movie above a garden variety romcom—especially when a seemingly
thoughtful story about loss and mental illness took a turn into a bad homage to
Dirty Dancing. Another triumph
for the Weinsteins’ publicity and marketing machine.
Best Actor
Joaquin Phoenix, The Master
Denzel Washington, Flight
Daniel Day-Lewis, Lincoln
Jean-Louis Trintignant, Amour
Tom Courtenay, Quartet
Best Actress
Quvenzhané Wallis, Beasts of the
Southern Wild
Paprika Steen, Applause
Ann Dowd, Compliance
Marion Cotillard, Rust and Bone
Emmanuelle Riva, Amour
Best Supporting Actor
Dwight Henry, Beasts of the
Southern Wild
Bruce Willis, Moonrise Kingdom
Philip Seymour Hoffman, The
Master
Tommy Lee Jones, Lincoln
Jude Law, Anna Karenina
Robert De Niro, Silver Linings
Playbook
Christoph Waltz, Django
Unchained
Leonardo DiCaprio, Django
Unchained
Samuel L. Jackson, Django
Unchained
Best Supporting Actress
Amy Adams, The Master
Helen Hunt, The Sessions
Sally Field, Lincoln
Corinne Masiero, The Impossible
Maggie Smith, Quartet
Best Ensemble Acting
Moonrise Kingdom: Jared Gilman, Kara Hayward, Bruce Willis, Edward
Norton, Jason Schwartzman, Bill Murray, Frances McDormand, Tilda Swinton, Bob
Balaban
Worst Performance
Anthony Hopkins, Hitchcock
Best Director
Behn Zeitlin, Beasts of the
Southern Wild
Wes Anderson, Moonrise Kingdom
Bart Layton, The Imposter
Quentin Tarantino, Django
Unchained
Michael Haneke, Amour
Special Award for Achievement in
Direction
Ang Lee, Life of Pi
Juan Antonio Bayona, The
Impossible
Worst Director
Paul Thomas Anderson, The Master
Best Original Screenplay
Moonrise Kingdom
Django Unchained
Amour
Best Adapted Screenplay
Beasts of the Southern Wild
Lincoln
Life of Pi
Worst Screenplay
The Master
Best Cinematography
Beasts of the Southern Wild
Moonrise Kingdom
Anna Karenina
Life of Pi
The Impossible
Best Production Design
Beasts of the Southern Wild
Moonrise Kingdom
Anna Karenina
Life of Pi
Les Miserables
Best Visual Effects
Life of Pi
Best Documentary
The Imposter
Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry
Bully
The Flat
Searching for Sugarman
Best Animated Short
Head Over Hills
Best Live Action Short
Death of a Shadow
Most Disappointing Movie
The Master
Hitchcock
Best Score
Moonrise Kingdom
Worst Soundtrack
Hugh Jackson's painfully off-pitch
warbling in Les Miserables
Best Scene
Two scenes from The Master: the
“free association” exercise between cult leader Philip Seymour Hoffman and
acolyte Joaquin Phoenix; and the scene in which Hoffman looses his cool when
confronted by a skeptic
The stairwell smoking encounter in Flight.
The "whale ballet" scene
in Rust and Bone
Worst Scene
The “wall touching” exercise in The
Master
Best Shot
The gasp-inducing minibar shot in Flight
Best Movie Line
Almost any line in Moonrise
Kingdom but these bits of dialogue between
the runaways lovebirds, Sam and Suzy, were gems:
Sam: “What happened to your
hand?”
Suzy: “I got hit in the mirror. “
Sam: “Really? How did that happen? “
Suzy: “I lost my temper at myself. “
Suzy: “I got hit in the mirror. “
Sam: “Really? How did that happen? “
Suzy: “I lost my temper at myself. “
In another scene from Moonrise
Kingdom:
Sam: “I feel I'm
in a real family now. Not like yours, but similar to one.”
Suzy: “I always wished I was an orphan. Most of my favorite characters are. I think your lives are more special.”
Sam: “I love you, but you don't know what you're talking about.”
Suzy: “I always wished I was an orphan. Most of my favorite characters are. I think your lives are more special.”
Sam: “I love you, but you don't know what you're talking about.”
This interchange from Beasts of
the Southern Wild between Hushpuppy and her
father, Wink, a flawed but loving man who has been Hushpuppy’s only parent
since her mother reportedly “swam away” form the squalor of the flooded bayou
where they live, may seem like simple cliché when read out of context. But delivered
with such conviction by Quvenzhané Wallis, it played like a feminist battle cry:
Wink, who has been
tutoring his daughter to be more self-reliant, believing his death is near:
“Who the man? “
Hushpuppy: “I’m
the man!”
Worst Movie Line
Laura Linney’s Daisy Stuckley,
“cousin-with-benefits” to FDR, after her first sexual encounter with the 32nd
President in Hyde Park on Hudson: “I
knew then we were not just fifth cousins but very good friends.”
How to Make a Movie
First-time feature director Benh
Zeitlin on what inspired his magical, moving bayou saga Beasts of the
Southern Wild: "When you look at the map you can see America
kind of crumble off into the sinews down in the gulf where the land is getting
eaten up. I was really interested in these roads that go all the way down to
the bottom of America and what was at the end of them."
How Not to Make a Movie
Writer and director Martin McDonagh
on his self-named protagonist “Marty” in Seven Psychopaths, a stymied screenwriter: “He has ideas and has
characters and stuff, he’s just not quite sure how to put them down. It’s not a
writer’s block so much as a writer’s self-appraisal of his own past work and
where he finds himself in the present.”