My 2010 Movies

Well, looks like another year has passed us by. It was a good one for me in virtually every way imaginable, and that extends to the movie theater (or DVD player, as was the case more often than not) as well. It was a terrific year for movies, and anyone who tells you otherwise just isn't looking hard enough.

Anyway, here are my favorite movies of 2010, presented chronologically as always.

Shutter Island

Part mystery, part psychological portrait, part human tragedy, Martin Scorsese's best film in many years was the year's first great film, and an unexpected treasure. Review here.

The Ghost Writer

Sad that when a movie comes along that does the sort of thing Hollywood used to do well - that is, tell a cohesive story with style and craft - it is something we have to savor, as it's the exception as opposed to the rule. This is not to take anything away from The Ghost Writer, which is as good as genre film making gets - and there are some very pointed, non-preachy insights into the political process to boot. Review here.

Mother

Hye-ja Kim gives one of the year's great performances in Bong Joon-ho's unusual film, which was a real treat after his interesting though highly problematic previous effort The Host. Whereas the manner in which that film tried to balance the serious and the silly was borderline offensive, Bong has found a way to streamline his sensibility much more effectively in the years since The Host. A disturbing tale of the extents a mother will go to protect her child - right or wrong - Mother is a simultaneously twisted and hilarious document of parenthood, permeated by a cruel irony.

Vincere

Marco Bellocchio's Vincere is a deeply affecting film about a fascinating historical footnote - the plight of Benito Mussolini's first wife (portrayed by Giovanna Mezzogiorno, in a performance that is nothing short of stunning), the hell he put she and his first born child through after he went away to fight in the first World War and met another woman. As he ascended to power, he had their marital documents destroyed and had both her and his son committed to insane asylums, where they both died tragically young - she at the age of 56, their son at the age of 26. The remarkable thing about Vincere is that it puts you through this anguish without being exploitative in the slightest.

The Eclipse

Easily one of last year's most unique films, Connor McPherson's The Eclipse is at once a frightening horror film and intimate human drama; a fascinating exploration of both the horror genre and human loneliness. A lovely, scary, and deeply affecting film that showcases one of Ciaran Hinds' two great performances from the last year.

Wild Grass

Alain Resnais' latest film is a quixotic recapitulation of the French New Wave; an elegy about aging, a simultaneously comic and tragic examination of love and lust, and quite frankly the most inventive aesthetic work I've seen in a long time. In short, it is nothing short of a total fucking masterpiece, and hands down my favorite film of last year.

Life During Wartime

Todd Solondz is now so much more than a bitchy, though perceptive, observer of the faults of our culture, he is one of our great humanitarians - a director who challenges you to empathize with those society teaches us to hate. Considering the extent of the cruelty in our world, this is revolutionary. Review here.

Eccentricities of a Blond-haired Girl

Perhaps the only film you could ever call "delightfully antiquated", Manoel de Oliveira's Eccentricities of a Blond-haired Girl is just about the most sublime 60 minutes imaginable - a recontextualizing of an Eça de Queiros short story written in the 19th century to the modern world, a dramatic conceit that at once makes the past feel immediate and the present feel timeless.

You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger

One of last year's most pleasant surprises, Woody Allen's You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger isn't any less cynical than Allen has been for the last, oh, 30 years, but here he plays it in almost a gentle way, which is not to say he softens the punch of the material in any way. You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger is yet another of Allen's odysseys of infidelity, but what separates You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger is he deals with the misery people inflict on one another in an emotionally honest way, acknowledging that your actions have consequences both on your own life and on the lives of those around you. Review here.

Secret Sunshine

Chang-dong Lee's Secret Sunshine is a radically structured melodrama, one that takes such unusual turns throughout its 2 and a half hour run time that you feel emotionally drained as you watch the tale of Shin-ae, a widow who moves to her husband's hometown Milyang in South Korea after his death. For the first 45 minutes, the film plays as a borderline quirky drama/comedy hybrid that you could almost see Indiewood doing (poorly). Then the film takes a sharp, sudden shift, one that would be literally criminal to discuss here as it's so dramatically potent. But suffice to say, it changes the film completely, and it transforms into something deeply tragic and, I think, pretty great. Jeon Do-yeon anchors the film with a sensational performance that is nothing short of haunting.

True Grit

What I would consider the Coen brothers greatest virtues as film makers - their idiosyncratic humor, their insights into the American south, their elevation of American folklore to almost mythic stature, their sense of morality, their reverence of film genre, their genuine considerations of spirituality and faith - are all on display in the brothers' adaptation (not remake) of True Grit. While the film is on one hand a scathing satire of Old West racism and sadism, both as it existed in history and on film - some of the Coens' sharpest gags in years highlight the casually cruel treatment of Native Americans - True Grit is, ultimately, a moving portrait of family, and the manner in which the film's three characters (Hailee Steinfeld's Mattie, Jeff Bridges' Rooster Cogburn, Matt Damon's Labeouf) transform into that family over the course of the film is incredibly powerful. By the end, True Grit becomes a meaningful testament to history and our place in it; the final line, which I dare not reveal here, is at once a simple profound truism. All the performances are great, but it is Hailee Steinfeld who is the true revelation here.

Another Year

You could label Mike Leigh's latest film as "The Abyss", as his latest is quite dark and extremely troubling, yet there is a palpable optimism as well. Of course, this is a Mike Leigh film, so the drama springs out of the narrative in the most unusual ways - as opposed to the central characters providing us with the drama and the supporting characters existing solely to be thoughtful listeners and advice-reciters, the central characters - a married couple played by Jim Broadbent and Ruth Sheen - are as stable as a rock; as in love with one another as the day they were married, happy as can be, and just all around good people. It's everyone around them who is fucked up. What is remarkable about Another Year is that it pays homage to the depth of suffering and unhappiness in the world, yet is in no way oppressively glum or downtrodden; like life itself, there is joy and misery and everything in between.

Favorite Male Performances:
Jeff Bridges - True Grit
Jim Broadbent - Another Year
George Clooney - The American
Leonardo DiCaprio - Shutter Island
André Dussollier - Wild Grass
Lars Eidinger - Everyone Else
Jesse Eisenberg - The Social Network
Ciaran Hinds - The Eclipse & Life During Wartime
Anthony Hopkins - You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger
Ben Kingsley - Shutter Island
Mark Ruffalo - Shutter Island
Jason Schwartzman - Scott Pilgrim vs. the World
Ben Stiller - Greenberg
Justin Timberlake - The Social Network

Favorite Female Performances
Sabine Azéma - Wild Grass
Jeon Do-yeon - Secret Sunshine
Greta Gerwig - Greenberg
Shirley Henderson - Life During Wartime
Iben Hjejle - The Eclipse
Hye-ja Kim - Mother
Jennifer Lawrence - Winter's Bone
Lesley Manville - Another Year
Giovanna Mezzogiorno - Vincere
Birgit Minichmayr - Everyone Else
Natalie Portman - Black Swan
Ruth Sheen - Another Year
Hailee Steinfeld - True Grit
Olivia Williams - The Ghost Writer

Now, bring on 2011! I promise I'm going to be on top of my shit this year, as the paltry amount of output from me this year is literally depressing.

2010 Capsules: Somewhere, Winter's Bone, You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger

First things first: My apologies for the dearth of posting for the entirety of this blog's existence in the last month. But, you know, lack of will, appropriate subjects, and time has prevented me from partaking in the noble vocation of cinema blogging. My many thanks and most sincere apologies to my readers for putting up with my laziness for the entirety of this blog's existence the last month.

But I have a reward for all of you who have been anxiously awaiting my triumphant return to writing about the cinema of Two Thousand and Ten in the Year of our Lord: capsule reviews! Delicious, delicious capsules.

Sofia Coppola - for whom I've been a bit of a defender/apologist - attempts a minimalist (or more minimalist) aesthetic in Somewhere, and it's an experiment that, save for some truly touching moments, largely falls flat. Coppola, so often written off as a Princess who has been handed the keys to her indie kingdom, is undoubtedly a major talent, and I think her namesake prevents a more objective analysis of her work - yes, she is a rich girl, and she makes movies about rich people, but the honesty of her perspective is often overshadowed simply by her being who she is. For whatever reason, her particular method of depicting rich people seems to rub a great many people the wrong way.

Somewhere represents the first time I've understood where her detractors are coming from - while in the past I feel Coppola has humanized the rich in a meaningful way, offering us insights into a social world that many of us never have and never will know anything about, the manner in which she tries to extract sympathy for her disaffected wealthy protagonist in Somewhere is insensitive and borderline obnoxious. The film opens with a static shot of hot shot actor Johnny Marco (Stephen Dorff) driving his expensive muscle car very fast on a desolate road, and this opening image, which drags on for what feels like an eternity, pretty much sums up the problem with Coppola's film - she basically sits back and expects people who have trouble paying their God damn mortgage to feel bad for this poor, lonely, alienated little rich man. Look how boring it is to be rich! Look how dull it is to drive a really fast and expensive car, look how passe it is to sit by your swimming pool, look how "meh" it is to have an almost absurd amount of big breasted women throwing themselves at you every time you turn around. I weep for this man.

Perhaps the stripped down aesthetic is the problem - Coppola is not the most expressive of visual artists, and the use of minimalism basically necessitates that you be able to tell stories in a purely visual way. Coppola's images don't feel evocative, they feel literal, and that makes the endless static images, long passages of silence and sparse dialogue more dull than poetic. Also, Dorff is good enough, but he's not a strong or dynamic enough actor to be able to express the things that Coppola wants him to wordlessly, as Bill Murray did in Lost in Translation.

The best moments in the film depict the relationship between Marco and his daughter, Cleo (Elle Fanning) - essentially, this is a tale of a father reconnecting with his daughter, and the two of them have some moments together that are truly magical; especially affecting is a sequence when a tearful Cleo is leaving for camp, and Marco apologizes to her for not being more involved in her life, but his apology is drowned out by the sound of a helicopter. In spite of this, it still feels like Coppola is reaching to places she can't quite achieve through purely visual expression. Especially after the ambitious and extremely underrated Marie Antoinette, this feels like a retread to safer, more familiar territory.

An effective balance of social realist and mystery, Debra Granik's Winter's Bone is a sensitive class portrait and an engaging, suspenseful neo-noir. There is a real poetry to the film, espeically in its quieter moments; Granik and her cinematographer Michael McDonough capture the sparseness and stark beauty of their Missouri backwoods, expressing both the desolation of their setting and the literal and figurative loneliness of their main character, Ree Dolly, unforgettably brought to life by Jennifer Lawrence. Dolly, whose father has been in jail for dealing drugs and whose mother has had a mental breakdown, is forced to raise her two siblings in spite of being only 17 herself when an officer comes to her home and informs her that her father has skipped bail and, since he put the house up for collateral, their house will be claimed in one week unless he turns up. Ree then essentially takes on the role of a detective, searching for the truth of what happened to her father, and being delivered standard noir warnings by the townsfolk along the way; "stay out of it", "mind your own business", and so on.

The biggest problem with Winter's Bone is the dialogue, which tries too hard to approximate Southern dialect - it lays it on more than a little thick, and the performers with the exception of Lawrence frankly aren't talented enough to sell it. It tarnishes the illusion somewhat when you're constantly reminded that you're watching actors reciting lines; indeed, the films greatest flaw is that it feels the need to oversell all its point via the script, which isn't any great shakes. Still, Winter's Bone brings enough new ideas to its genre to make it worthwhile. But it could have been so much better.



Woody Allen, while not quite "returning to form", certainly rebounds from last year's despicable Whatever Works with the surprisingly pleasant You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger. Though still chock-full of token Allen cynicism - everyone cheats on everyone, every relationship is doomed to failure, and so on - there is a gentle feel to what is on the plot level standard Woody boilerplate. While Whatever Works essentially condoned immorality with its titular philosophy, Allen forces his characters in You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger to confront their mistakes, and the result is a moving, if imperfect film. Anchored by terrific performances from a great ensemble cast, You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger is one of the year's most pleasant surprises.

We are introduced to Helena (Gemma Jones) as she tells a "clairvoyant" about her recent break up with her husband (Anthony Hopkins) , who is going through a life crisis and doing the things men apparently do when they go through said crises: break up from their boring old wife, get obsessive about physical appearance, and bag a bimbo half their age (and I.Q.) whose just sleeping with them for money (literally - his new girlfriend is an ex-hooker). While this is going on, their daughter (Naomi Watts) and her husband (Josh Brolin) are having - wait for it! - marital issues of their own; Brolin is a struggling writer whose novel he's sure will be rejected by his publishers, and Watts is resentful of being forced to be the breadwinner by working in an art gallery while her husband sits on his ass waiting for the phone to ring and stares out his apartment window at a young guitar player (Freida Pinto), who apparently only owns red clothing. Their fights lead them, naturally, to grow more fond of acquaintances than one another - Brolin begins making advances towards his neighbor while Watts finds herself falling for her boss (Antonio Banderas). You can imagine where things go from there, but Allen enriches this borderline soap opera by making his characters more alone by the end than they were in the beginning - acknowledging that the answer to your problems can't be found in the warm embrace of another person, but only within yourself.

While in his previous picture Allen just shrugged his shoulder at his characters' wrongdoing, here Allen grapples with his characters callous shortsightedness. This is typified by a scene where Pinto breaks off her engagement with the man she was to marry, and tearfully apologies to her fiance and his family for her wrongdoing. It's hard to remember the last time Allen didn't merely accept infidelity as a given - that is, didn't reductively characterize it as one of those things people do to each other - and acknowledged that it is profoundly hurtful to the person who was cheated on, and this in and of itself adds a dimension to Allen's work that has been long absent. In You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, Allen does what he does best - that is, finding comedy in sadness and tragedy in the humorous.

Kids Today: The Social Network

Two artistic styles that, separate from one another, I've found obnoxious in the past - David Fincher, who found profundity in the grotesque and banal before becoming an Oscar-baiting softy and Aaron Sorkin, best known as a smartass writer of trite melodramas on the big and small screen - form an effective synthesis in The Social Network, aka "The Facebook Movie" (even though "The Mark Zuckerberg Movie" is more accurate and less reductive, but anyway). It's not that their temperaments compliment each other so much as they cancel each other out - Fincher's ice cold detachment effectively counterbalances Sorkin's hacky, show off writing style, while Sorkin supplies Fincher's stoic seriousness with a sense of life and energy. In tandem they've created perhaps the best "Give me an Oscar!" movie in a while, though that's admittedly a bit of faint praise.

One thing that I think is important before continuing: The Social Network is not, ostensibly, a movie about "the Facebook" - that would be boring. I feared that it would be based on the trailer released earlier in the year, but it's a movie about the people who made Facebook. There is a distinction, and a fairly large one at that. Though it's an ingrained part of the world today - honestly, it's hard to imagine going to a party without being tagged in a photo album the next day, and it's hard to meet someone without asking them if they have a Facebook - analyzing Facebook as social phenomenon when it's been around less than a decade would be pretty much a futile effort, and thankfully Sorkin and Fincher avoid that line of thought, for the most part. Though the movie can't resist making a few sweeping generalizations about connection in the digital age, mercifully these examinations comes in the context of Zuckerberg as a human being as opposed to a sociological one. What I find disappointing is that The Social Network is ultimately a combination of two rather cliched stories: triumph of the underdog, of the nerd vs. the jock(s), and a tale of a person who gains everything and loses his soul in the process. And I don't think it brings enough new ideas to these older-than-dirt stories to be a really great movie.

If The Social Network is a great movie - and I don't think it is by any means - it's because of Jesse Eisenberg's performance as Mark Zuckerberg. He so perfectly balances arrogance and insecurity, loneliness and congeniality, bitterness and charisma, that he rises above the rather mediocre material. We're introduced to Zuckerbeg while he's having a typical Sorkin rapid fire conversation with his girlfriend in a bar, and he says something obnoxious about his being allowed into clubs and introducing his girlfriend to "people she wouldn't meet otherwise", which she (understandably) takes a large degree of offense to, and walks out on him, though not before saying to him "When you're alone, it won't be because you're a nerd, it'll be because you're an asshole". I have no issues with taking artistic license, but the real Zuckerbeg has claimed that he had no interest in joining college clubs, and I see no reason to not believe that. Why would he? It's clear he planned to make a ton of money working with computers, so why would he waste time with a bunch of spoiled little shits while they do body shots and play beer pong when he was a blatant careerist, even as an undergrad? But Fincher and Sorkin don't really see it that way, and early on the movie includes a rather hackneyed juxtaposition between Zuckerberg and his group of computer nerd friends working on a website and one of those illicit college parties - you know the kind, with blasting techno music in a darkened hall, where super skinny girls take off all their clothes (in slow motion to boot!), where the cool kids play strip poker while doing ecstasy and - wait for it! - smoke pot, and have sex with each other, and do all those super cool things that I'd imagine Fincher and Sorkin were never invited to do, because this rather unfortunate sequence is played with hostility. Basically, it's a cliched movie party that exhibits how out of touch the two of them are from any kind of modern reality - they're just basically saying "Look at these kids, with their Northfaces and their marijuana and their alcohol and their sexy parties and their internet" - not a particularly unique point to be making, and it honestly makes Sorkin and Fincher look like a pair of cranky fuddy duddys. I think this speaks more to their view of "the cool kids" than to Zuckerberg's, which is fine, but to take such extreme artistic license while projecting your own anti-social anxieties onto another human being is borderline character defamation.

Not to say Zuckerberg isn't worthy of some criticism - he's a ladder climber who stomped on people on his way to the top. He perhaps not un-coincidentally donated $100,000,000 to Newark public schools about a week before the film's release, and I don't think you need to have a PHD to deduce that he was probably trying to pre-emptively repair his image in light of a film that is, really, extremely critical of him - he's called an asshole or something to that effect no less than 20 times during the course of the movie. I don't know how serious a flaw in terms of storytelling that is, but I think this is fairly representative of A) the current hatred of the wealthy elites and B) the resentment of genuine innovators in this country, which admittedly isn't exactly a new development. Zuckerberg created - and he did create it - a tool that fulfilled such a primary function and spoke to such a profound need that it's hard to imagine a world without it. Coming up with something so simple is undoubtedly a form of genius, and if he's as much of a back-stabbing shit as Sorkin and Fincher make him out to be, well, welcome to America. That's how you make billions of dollars. Bill Gates "stole" an idea in the same way Zuckerberg did - and, like Gates, Zuckerberg improved the initial idea, made it simpler, more accessible. You don't become a billionaire by being nice and doing everything by the book. It just doesn't work that way.

What I've frequently found most bothersome about David Fincher's sensibility is his detached point of view, but that detachment helps diffuse some of the idiocies of Sorkin's script. Sorkin's script is just so conventional, and even the interwoven structure - which has invited comparisons to Citizen Kane - feels like it's there strictly to impress. The dialogue is the driving force of The Social Network, and I think it speaks to Sorkin's lack of ability that many of the film's best moments are wordless ones. An event so frequently cited as proof positive of Zuckerbeg's dickishness and cockery, the now famous "I'm CEO, bitch" incident, is played as such an expression of youthful arrogance that it's heartbreaking, with Zuckerberg looking over the cards with the aforementioned expression on it alone in the office of Facebook and wondering what the hell he was thinking - and Eisenberg absolutely nails this poignant moment. Fincher works Sorkin's script, somehow, as it's easy to imagine another director either playing the film as either too much of a celebration or condemnation of Zuckerberg, but Fincher's detachment gives way to a sense of objectivity. Though Sorkin does not deny Zuckerberg's humanity, I still feel like he's a little too harsh on him; yes, he's a bit of a jerk, but he was also a sophomore in college when he suddenly found himself in charge of a multi-million dollar - and, soon enough, multi-billion dollar - corporation. We can cut the guy a little slack I think, as I'm sure there are lots of people who, if they had their every move from their early 20s enshrined in the popular lexicon, wouldn't come out smelling like roses either.

The backbone of The Social Network is a great and truly amazing story, a real life account so littered with drama that it was almost tailor made for a movie. However, Fincher's directorial disconnect helps keep the film from becoming a soap opera, and it is this very disconnect that creates a feeling of isolation, which in turn helps align our sympathies with the lonely Zuckerberg. Though I feel Sorkin and Fincher are too hard on Zuckerberg throughout the picture, ultimately they understand that his know it all exterior is a facade concealing a much more complex person. "You're not an asshole, Mark, you're just trying so hard to be" , a lawyer tells him, echoing his ex-girlfriend's harsh words to him in the beginning of the picture, and though this line is more than a tad sappy - I was so embarrassed upon hearing it that I looked around for a place to hide - it still works, and it's still necessary to the duo's portrait of Zuckerberg. Most affecting is the film's final moment, (again, wordless) which shows Zuckerberg looking over his ex-girlfriend's Facebook profile and adding her as a friend, and hitting refresh on an endless loop. The implications of a man who brought so many people together being unable to forge a human connection himself elevates this insider account of the creation of a social networking site to a more general statement on the nature of loneliness, and is all the richer for it.

Growing Pains

With seemingly endless visual invention and wit, Edgar Wright brings comic books and video games to vibrant life in Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, an enjoyable if standard romantic comedy from a director who has proven in three features that he is amongst the great visual artists of his generation. Many, if not all, of Scott Pilgrim's finest moments are a result of Wright's spectacular use of audio/visual technique, as this strikes me as Wright's weakest feature yet - though Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz were marketed as spoofs in the Brooks or Zucker mold, they were both piercing satires of class and British society, as well as explorations of genre worthy of De Palma. Conversely, Scott Pilgrim vs. the World is a fairly rigid satire of superhero movies - another in what feels like an endless line of post-modern comic book adaptations - that relies on the audience's knowledge of the genre for its ultimate effect.

Scott Pilgrim (Michael Cera, doing what Michael Cera does - which, no, I don't think is necessarily a bad thing) is the 22 year old bass player in a rock band "Sex Bob-omb" (a cute reference to the Mario games) that he freely admits sucks, still suffering from post traumatic stress disorder after a particularly painful breakup with Envy Adams, now a famous rock star, which has resulted in his dating a 17 year old by the name of Knives Chau - a move that causes his bandmates and friends to question his sanity. "It's just... simple, I guess", he explains to his sister early in the film, highlighting Pilgrim's refusal to grow up at the crossroads of young adulthood and adulthood - and the film's many attempts to connect with this kind of youth-in-extremis vibe struck me as pandering. When he meets Ramona Flowers (Mary Elizabeth Winstead, who is quickly becoming a favorite of mine, both physically and as an actor), his desire for a more adult relationship - one with things like physical contact - causes him to pursue Ramona while he's supposed to be dating Knives, and the film plays his infidelities as another part of the refusal to grow up schtick that's supposed to be endearing, which I instead found obnoxious. The film's take on romance- even taking into account that it's young romance played in a comic book context - leaves much to be desired.

The film is never once critical of what a selfish asshole Pilgrim is, celebrating his confused, aimless, mixed up life as a symbol of counter-culture hipness. The films are wildly different, but I kept going back to Wes Anderson's Rushmore in my head when watching Scott Pilgrim vs. the World - imagine if Anderson's film treated Jason Schwartzman's Max Fischer know-it-all exterior not as the facade of a confused adolescent, but as a genuine persona, and you basically have the cinematic Scott Pilgrim (I have not read Brian O'Malley's series of comics, so I can not comment on whether or not this element is true to the source material) - he doesn't just think he's hot shit, the film treats him as such, and to my mind this is Scott Pilgrim vs. the World's critical flaw, celebrating the main character's vanity.

And it is not just Pilgrim's vanity that the film celebrates, the film exalts Ramona Flowers' narcissism as well - every relationship you enter has baggage, but Flowers has caused so much pain in her past relationships (she "dabbled in being a bitch", she tells Scott) that her former significant others have created the league of "Seven Evil Exes", whom Pilgrim must battle to the death if he wishes to date Ramona. It's an inventive, humorous device, but one that I feel wears out its welcome by the film's end - especially tiresome is the second to last battle with the Katayanagi twins, the dispensing of which would have made for a much leaner picture. What I find dubious is the way the film plays Ramona's 'troubled past' as a tragedy - events that happened to the characters in middle school and 9th grade are depicted in an almost mythic manner (and in the style of O'Malley's art for the comics), and I'm not so sure it's played in a way that's supposed to be ironic; Wright is deeply invested in his characters and their emotions, even if to a fault, in a film that's supposed be a goofy post-modern mash up. But the film offers no commentary on the way young people's lack of perspective causes them to make mountains out of molehills with respect to failed relationships, instead playing the juvenile high school crush phase as a kind of true love that some characters never get over.

It is Wright's considerable visual panache that saves the film from failure, and the inventive use of technique is too numerous to even mention here, but some things that really stuck out: the opening 16 bit version of the famous Universal logo, complete with MIDI soundtrack; the inventive use of cinematic space, established in the opening shot which transforms a basement used for Sex Bob-omb's rehearsal into the widest of valleys; the opening credits (which my pal Jake Cole astutely notes as Brakhage-esque in his great review), a pure expression of Wright's sense of music and its relation to image, as well as his considerable sense of color and cinematic rhythm; the De Palma esque use of split screens; the somehow not campy integration of comic book aesthetics into a motion picture - perhaps no film ever has better captured the feeling of reading panel-to-panel; the integration of video game image and sound that, again, is never campy or cutesy - particularly memorable is the use of The Legend of Zelda's theme music, which Wright called "the lullaby of a generation"; the visual humor (there is a moment where the film spoofs super hero film's traditional "suiting up" sequence, which I thought was the film's most inspired moment); Jacon Schwartzman's character Gideon, a clear channeling of Paul Williams' performance as Swan from De Palma's masterpiece Phantom of the Paradise (a film whose influence is all over Scott Pilgrim). Wright's aesthetics combine every element of pop culture - there are references to work in virtually every medium - into a phantasmagoria of image and sound that, if hollow, is never boring for a second, and Wright balances the film's hyperactivity so expertly that it's never overwhelming. Still, in spite of the wildly inventive aesthetics, I feel that the film's attitudes toward romance and entering adulthood are every bit as shallow as its main character.

A Time to Forgive: Life During Wartime

Todd Solondz poignantly sums up the emotional state of a war torn nation in his latest film Life During Wartime, a sequel to the director's Happiness which revisits the same cast of characters, played here by different actors - a brilliant device that aptly sumps up the degree to which the world has changed since 1998. Life During Wartime is the most observant and relevant American movie of the year, a film that dares to suggest that you forgive and attempt to understand those who have wronged you - a notion that, in the years following 9/11, is even more foreign to popular consensus than the Middle Eastern nations that our media spends so much time demonizing. Empathy is dying, and Life During Wartime is a moving, challenging attempt to resuscitate it.

Seeing my home as a warzone on September 11, 2001 was a key moment in my life that awakened me to a world beyond my day to day existence as an adolescent in New Jersey. One image that sticks out in my mind is seeing people in the Middle East celebrating the attacks on the news, realizing that there are people out there in the world who hate us very much, and then came the more unsettling notion that perhaps they have good reason to. It was a true revelation, and it's a moment in time that I keep going back to as the true formation of my political worldview. I bring this up because I feel a similar shift has occurred within the films of Todd Solondz since September 11th; his first few features (all of which I at least admire) are more or less a portrait of New Jersey as Hell on Earth (The Garden State is, for whatever reason, indie cinema's favorite go-to hellhole), analyzing the manner in which a largely upper-middle class society is, in its own way, as bourgeois as the upper class elites. He criticizes, at times brutally, middle class entitlement, while also attempting to reveal the darker side of humanity, which he argues is not as sequestered as we would like to believe. However, in his last two features, instead of bitterly highlighting America's dark side he has challenged his audience to sympathize with characters society says we should hate - and though I don't think this shift is entirely due to 9/11, the attack has left a clear mark on his subsequent work.

I was not a fan of Happiness, perhaps Todd Solondz's most well known film, which I found to be cruel and condescending towards virtually all of its main characters for the purpose of making a pedophile and rapist (here played by Ciaran Hinds, giving what may be the best performance of the year thus far) the most sympathetic character in the film's warped ensemble. Happiness is centered around a trio of sisters, and his portrait of them - Joy, a free spirit whose work is reforming criminals; Trish, whose highest aspiration is being a middle class wife and mom; Helen, who is a prototypical suffering writer - is harsh and critical to the point that it comes off as resentment. He is contemptuous of Joy's desire to heal the world, even playing the fact that she is drawn to a pervert (who she winds up marrying, the beginning of Life During Wartime reveals) toward the end of the film as a cruel joke; he is contemptuous of Trish's desire for normalcy, and he punishes her for this desire for complacency by making her seemingly normal husband a pedophile; and he is contemptuous of Helen's sanctimonious bohemian suffering, painting her as ultimately shallow in spite of her lofty artistic aspirations.

However, this resentment has given way to a profound understanding in Life During Wartime - what was cruelly ironic in Happiness is cast in a tragic light here, and the opening scene, which depicts Joy and her husband Allen out to dinner to celebrate their anniversary, establishes this. It is an echoing of the opening scene of Happiness (which featured Jon Lovitz in one of the most memorable cameo roles I've ever seen, playing Joy's boyfriend Andy), right down to the detail of Allen giving Joy an ashtray identical to the one that Andy gave her in the opening of Happiness. This sets the stage for the theme of history repeating itself - as Joy sings in the titular song later in the film, "We made a mistake/It's just like Vietnam". The players change, but the game stays the same.

And though he has a different face all these years later, Allen is the same as he was in Happiness (when he was played by Phillip Seymour Hoffman) - still a pervert, still using drugs, still making elicit phone calls to strangers - and this revelation (if it can even be classified as such) is what prompts Joy to spend some time apart from her husband, and she travels to Florida to be with her divorced mother and her sister Trish. The film makes constant visual parallels between Israel and Florida, depicting The Sunshine State as a haven for spirituality, specifically Judaism. In spite of attempting to escape her problems, Joy is still haunted by the past - she walks out of her bed one night and goes to a restaurant where she is haunted by a vision of Andy (here played by Paul Ruebens, in a stunning and unforgettable channeling of Lovitz's performance in Happiness), whose suicide she blames herself for. Though the fact that she can't heal these broken spirits is a cause of endless distress for her, she should have realized long ago that people never change, no matter how much we want for them to and no matter how hard we try. She brings this anguish on herself.

When we catch up with Trish, she is in the midst of finding romance (with Welcome to the Dollhouse's Harvey Weiner, making Solondz's filmic world a true universe of its own) for the first time since her marriage to Bill the pedophile, and when we first see her she is in the ecstasy of newfound love - and this may be the first time Solondz has allowed his characters true happiness, however fleeting it may be. As Trish sits at lunch with Harvey, she exclaims "You're just so... normal!" with a beaming smile on her face, and it's this same characteristic that Solondz painted as a damning flaw in Happiness. Yet viewing this statement in context with the ordeal she suffered through in the previous film, who can blame her for this desire for normalcy, the only thing in life she has ever aspired to? These first two sequences with Trish and Joy rhyme one another, showing them both in restaurants attempting to bury the scars of the past and, at the very least, appear normal.

Shortly after this we are introduced to (or reacquainted with) Trish's son Timmy, who is on the verge of his Bar Mitzvah and, in his mind at least, becoming a man. Solondz's richest portrayals are often of children, as he perfectly captures feeling as though your future is a void, and living in a time when the future of the world is equally uncertain only serves to compound that anxiety. Timmy Maplewood may be Solondz's greatest achievement yet, because as he is living a relatively carefree, privileged existence in his Florida home, a classmate discovers the truth about his father (whom he thought was dead most of his life) on the internet - and this discovery, naturally, creates an identity crisis in this young man. He runs home, tears streaming down his face, confronting his mother with what he's learned at school - was dad really a pedophile? If so, what am I? He desperately cries out "I don't want to be a faggot!" - a perceptive if unsubtle observation on the way youth, and our culture in general, demonizes homosexuality - as though being gay and wanting to fuck children of any gender are even remotely comparable, and his mother 'reassures' him that he is not a faggot, though she's probably trying to convince herself as much as she is trying to convince Timmy.

As this is happening, Bill is being released from prison, and Ciaran Hinds beautifully captures the essence of a broken man attempting to re-enter society in a largely wordless performance. He expresses this profound sadness through body language: through his eyes, through facial expressions, through the most subtle of gestures. We are immediately reminded of Bill's heinous crime (if we could ever forget it), when he makes eye contact with a child on the street, and forces himself to walk right passed him, attempting to fight desires that he knows are wrong. He checks into a hotel and looks over his wallet that he last saw over a decade ago, and this detail helps reinforce the theme of living in a world that has changed so radically - the last time he saw his driver's license the World Trade Center was still standing. There were still levees in New Orleans. A black man had never been President. We were not engaged in any large scale wars. The economy was good. It was, if not a simpler time, certainly a time when the United States was more dissociated from the problems of the world - and it was this idyllic bubble that Solondz's early films were such scathing critiques of. Though he has his freedom back, Bill is thrust into a world he no longer understands, if he ever understood it at all; a world that he has no place in.

Bill tracks down his family and breaks into their Florida home when no one is there, observing details of the life that has passed him by while he was rotting away in a jail cell. He looks at the pictures on the walls of the Maplewood's Florida home not as though they are family, but as though they are strangers, which they may as well be (and, again, the recasting reinforces this sentiment). This life that could have been literally haunts Bill - he has a recurring dream in which Timmy is the central figure, a simultaneously beautiful and troubling visualization of Bill's tormented psyche. He walks up the stairs to his son Billy's room - Billy was an adolescent during the events of Happiness - and he walks into the bedroom of your typical college man: messy, hemp and music posters on the wall and, most importantly, a college calendar on the wall - Bill's next destination.

Next, we catch up with Joy, who got sick of her mother and decided instead to fly out to Los Angeles to visit her estranged sister, Helen. Though the portrait of all the other characters from Happiness is considerably more nuanced and sympathetic in this picture, Solondz still has little use for Helen, who is now living an unhappy life as a Hollywood screenwriter. Though she lives in a mansion littered with awards, she is still a brooding negativist, and in a brilliantly ironic image, she laments what a terrible, war torn world we live in while sitting beside her swimming pool and while her personal chef prepares her dinner behind her. This is certainly an attack on the Hollywood establishment that Solondz remains on the outskirts of (he is a true independent), criticizing the fact that they pander to leftist sentiments while living an insulated and privileged existence - and Solondz hammers this point home when he frames Helen against a portrait of an Israeli war tank in her living room. While Helen is moralistically screaming about how "We are still a country at war!", as though we could forget, Joy is writing a song that attempts to sum up what it really means to be a country at war: a time to forgive, a time to forget - a time to understand those that have been labeled our enemies.

Solondz challenges the notion of forgiveness and empathy by asking us to understand perhaps the most warped of human beings: a pedophile. During a dinner when Timmy and Trish's other children finally meet Harvey, they see Timmy standing outside, looking contemplative and distressed. Trish urges Harvey to talk to him, as Timmy is clearly bothered by something - he's writing his Bar Mitzvah speech on the concept of forgiveness, and this has caused him to seriously consider what it means to forgive and how far you take it. Do you forgive someone who punched you in the face? Does it depend on the reason? How about a pedophile? What if a terrorist bombs your office building - do you forgive him? This line of questioning causes Harvey and Trish to toss out a plethora of Bush-era cliches: terrorists aren't people. They hate our freedom. They hate democracy. They aren't like you and me, and other such insanity that we've been expected to swallow as justification for the nonsensical and heinous wars that the United States is currently involved in. With this challenging, bold sentiment, Solondz connects his portraits of suburbia as hell to a larger political context, thoughtfully contemplating the essence of forgiveness - not just as a buzz word, but the spiritual essence of moving passed the wrongs that you have suffered at the hands of others.

This is the point in the film where Trish's overzealousness with respect to pedophilia takes on a tragic ramification - it manages to ruin a relationship of hers for a second time. Timmy requests a few words with Harvey in private, like he is the over protective father making sure this would-be suitor is good enough for his daughter. Since his father hasn't been around and his brother has been off at college, Timmy has viewed himself as the "man of the house" and acts accordingly. Timmy asks Havey, point blank, if he's ever had sex with a boy - and Harvey realizes that this is just a wounded, confused boy who has lacked a father figure most of his life, and goes to give him a simple hug. He remembers his mothers oft-repeated warning - that if a man ever touches him, you scream - and screams at the top of his lungs. When Trish barges into her son's room, the fate of Harvey and Trish is implicit - it's simply not meant to be. Unfortunately, this is the world we live in, where we're so afraid that someone is a child molester or rapist that even the most innocuous of contact between adult and child is expressly forbidden. Sometimes all a child needs is a hug.

The film brings us to Billy's college, where he and a group of friends are having a contest: who has the most fucked up family? Billy refuses to participate, for obvious reasons, and goes to his dorm room to be by himself, when he hears a knock at the door. He is understandably shocked when he opens the door to find his father, who inhales some scattered candy that Billy has littered on his bedside table and chugs a bottle of water that Billy offers to him. He came for one reason, and one reason only: to make sure that Billy didn't turn out like him, as he can't live with even the vaguest suspicion that his son may have also become a pedophile. Bill hates himself for who he is, has tried to cure himself, has tried taking medication, "Nothing works", he dejectedly tells his son, and this sequence - a tragic family reunion that reopens the deep wounds of the past in a direct, straightforward manner - is likely amongst the most heartbreaking moments you are going to see in a movie this year. Solondz captures this moment in all its awkwardness and sadness without resorting to sentimentality or cliche. As he walks out the door, he tells his son to "Keep pretending, like before", and Billy pleads with him to stay - in this instance, Billy has ceased to see him as the pedophile who fucked up his family and his life and sees him as only his father. As quickly as he came, he is gone - like a ghost (the past haunting the characters - literally and figuratively - is a recurring motif).

Timmy's Bar Mitzvah serves as the film's climax, which brings all the central characters together. Though this is nothing more than a party for all the other people attending (Solondz hilariously sums this up with a brilliant use of a techno remix of "Hava Nagila"), Timmy views the Bar Mitzvah as a spiritual experience, a genuine morphing of child into adult, and he leaves his own reception to go find Harvey and apologize for his terrible mistake. Instead he finds his son Mark (who, in Welcome to the Dollhouse and Palindromes, essentially serves as the mouthpiece for Solondz's worldview), begins to sob, and apologizes profusely for his terrible mistake - he was, after all, still a child; he didn't know. Even if Harvey is a pedophile (which Mark assures him he's not), Timmy reasons, that doesn't mean he shouldn't be allowed to get married and live a happy life. However, the accusations of pedophilia have deeply wounded Harvey, and he is moving to Israel - a Jew escaping persecution. In this sequence, Timmy is simultaneously more an adult and more a child than he has been in the entire film to this point, at once a human being who has come to truly grasp the concept of forgiveness (coming to understand it through the spiritual experience of his Bar Mitzvah), and a child simply yearning for his father, who he fears is now dead, "for real this time". As Timmy declares "I just want my father", the ghost of Bill Maplewood walks in the background behind him, disappearing into eternity - a moment that, I must confess, devastated me as few moments in any movie have. Solondz simultaneously makes you hate and love Bill Maplewood, making him an impenetrable yet entirely sympathetic character. The evil other - the type of person that the media so often oversimplifies as a 'monster' - has been so powerfully humanized that his death is truly tragic, and only Solondz could create these complicated, almost contradictory feelings. Solondz makes you understand (if not forgive) a person who has committed amongst the most unfathomable atrocities imaginable, and Solondz seems to be suggesting that if we can understand him, then we can understand anyone.

In the two features he has made since 9/11, Solondz has evolved from a perceptive (if somewhat snarky), sharply critical observer of American society to one of the most sensitive artists currently working in the United States. His notions of forgiveness in a time of terrorism, war, and recession are truly daring, especially when most American entertainments pander to our biases and hatred of one another - I struggle to name another American film where a pedophile is anything other than a villain, a purely evil character whose purpose to reinforce a black and white view of the world (even at its worst, Solondz's worldview is certainly never black and white). Life During Wartime is the most beautiful prayer for peace since Spielberg's Munich, and Solondz, like Spielberg, challenges us to rethink, reflect, and forgive - and it's a challenge I'm not sure we're up to.

In Nolan's Dreams

That Christopher Nolan chose dreams as the concept for his latest portentous and pretentious blockbuster Inception is all too fitting, because it perfectly highlights the severe limits of the director's imagination. These are surely the most workmanlike, banal dream sequences in the history of the medium, with Nolan managing to make even the most unreal (not surreal) of imagery come off as completely commonplace - what other film maker could do virtually nothing with imagery such as an entire city folding in on itself, a train riding down the middle of a street, or an entire cityscape crumbling? Nolan never uses his storytelling device as anything other than a device, rather, it's merely an attempt to convince the audience that there's something profound going on beneath a mechanical heist movie.

Inception tells the story of Dom Cobb (an ultra serious Leonardo DiCaprio), an 'extractor' who, via a concept the film continuously refers to as "shared consciousness" (something Nolan never fleshes out and just expects us to swallow), infiltrates people's dreams to steal their secrets. Alas, not the good kind of secrets - surely the subconscious isn't quite as timid as Nolan depicts - the heist movie kind of secrets, in this case, the code for a safe that houses a document that will help Saito (Ken Watanabe) bring down a business rival. While Nolan uses copious amounts of CGI to flesh out what he constantly tries to remind us is supposed to be a psychological landscape (the words "projection" and "subconscious" make frequent appearances in the film's script), it never looks like anything but the world we inhabit, even when he introduces things that are supposed to clash with our perception of reality. All I could wonder during sequences that I felt were intended to blow my mind is if Nolan's dreams are actually this boring, or if he doesn't have the directorial capacities to visualize dreamscapes in an effective manner - is it a failure of vision or a failure of execution?

Nolan makes it clear from the outset that he's in way over his head - he is a film maker fascinated with process and details, so perhaps dreams weren't the best thematic vehicle for his particular sensibilities. Rather than expressing himself via imagery (and, really, how else do you make a movie about dreams?), Nolan feels the need to explain via contrived dialogue the significance of every solitary event in the story, to the point where his characters feel less like flesh and blood human beings and more like mouthpieces with which to explain the film's themes, which makes his rather trite attempts at melodrama come off as disingenuous. It's like Nolan feels the constant need to prove - either to himself or to his audience - that what we're watching really is meaningful, yet he rigidly confines himself to genre and cliche to express ideas that are at once cosmic, intimately personal, and intensely psychological - Nolan even turns Cobb's visions of his dead wife (Marion Cotillard) into a cheap plot device by having her play what amounts to the film's villain. The approach he takes in Inception doesn't do his chosen topic justice.

Even if you were to judge the picture on strictly action movie terms, it's still a mess. As my darling girlfriend remarked as we exited the movie theater, watching Inception is like going to a restaurant and ordering a cheeseburger, but being given a whole cow instead. Truthfully, I can't remember the last time I was so profoundly bored in a movie theater, as Nolan's film feels aimless and structureless, lacking even the shallow pleasures offered in the similarly problematic The Dark Knight. The action sequences display Nolan's propensity for chaos over continuity and, as with his previous feature, it's an impossible task to deduce where one object within his frame is in relation to another. While he uses quick cutting and disorientation in an attempt to create excitement, I've always found action movies that seek to disorient to be the dullest kind, and that's become a defining feature of Nolan's blockbusters, unfortunately.

Since his debut film Following, Nolan has essentially been a trickster at heart - the "Gotcha!" endings of Memento and The Prestige pretty much sum his artistic M.O. - yet it is this very desire to confuse, impress, and mystify that makes his films ultimately hollow. Christopher Nolan is literal minded to a fault, and the logical approach he takes to dreams is inherently contradictory, as dreams are by their very nature illogical - and it is this paradox that Nolan fails to reconcile in any meaningful way, instead inventing a lot of arbitrary rules for his imagined world that he can obey or not as he pleases. What Nolan fails to realize is that he's the only one who has stolen our dreams.

A Child's Plaything

Evaluating the films of Pixar poses a unique dilemma, as the pictures have praise so readily heaped at their feet that any critic using superlatives must preface the review with something on the order of "Sorry, but I really do think it's that great". In addition to this, since the film's target audience is allegedly children (I would argue that the 'target audience' is really said children's parents, who must take their kids to the latest family fare as surely as they must buy into the latest fad, but I digress), this forces some to attempt to render any effort of examining the film critically in the positive or negative sense moot with the reminder that "It's just a kid's movie". Third, any dissenting opinion generally incites one, if not all, of the following comments: "99% of people like it, therefore the 1% who don't are wrong", "It's just for kids" or "You have no soul/hate children/just want attention/are insane" and so on. Pixar Studio's unique place in modern culture - at once regarded as high art by critics and loved by audiences - creates this flaw in the evaluation of their movies.

All Pixar is wrought with compromise, and the latest installment in the Toy Story franchise is no different. What I find so frustrating about Pixar is that all their films contain hints of what they are capable of if they weren't forced to create art with hundreds of millions of people's expectations in mind, and if ever a film illustrated the folly of giving the people what they want (or what men in suits think they want), Toy Story 3 is it. It begins with a stroking of the audience's nostalgia by providing a literal recreation of the first film's opening sequence, but making it a large scale action set piece invalidates the original's point, which is that imagination is the most exciting thing of all, but that's not even the real problem: the sequence is just mindless, unimaginative spectacle. This proved to be the tipping point that, instead of treading new ground, Pixar is content to simply rehash what has come before.

It's a shame that the plot never becomes anything more than hodgepodge of the first two, because the concept is inspired: Andy, now leaving for college, winds up donating the toys to a local daycare, and the toys band together and believe in each other and work with one another to escape from it (of course, it was a misunderstanding that led to the toys being donated - it would be too harsh for Disney to admit that a young man has no use for hunks of plastic anymore). This would seem to open the door for ruminations on the nature of love and mortality, but as usual with Pixar there is a wide gap between the kind of movie the film's makers wanted to make and what is actually presented on the screen. I respect that they try to lend weight to the characters that have become so iconic, but the fact is that by not exploring the toys' existential crisis more in depth Pixar actually trivializes the suffering they're attempting to depict (and, in some cases, Pixar even plays said suffering for laughs - such as when Barbie™ is abandoned by Andy's sister). It feels as though Toy Story 3 wants to be a much more serious movie than it can possibly be, more serious than it's allowed to be, and this makes much of the largely low brow humor seem disingenuous, as though it wandered in from a different movie. While the first two films had clever writing, Toy Story 3 relies on toilet humor (literally, in one instance) and lowest common denominator pop culture references to provide cheap laughs.

Never has the need for compromise in the work of Pixar been more evident than in the picture's climax, which has already become a famous sequence in its own right. The toys, through a convoluted series of misadventures (no, really) find themselves on a conveyor belt that leads to an incinerator, and this sequence is some of the most effective imagery Pixar has ever created; the flames are animated so vividly that you can almost feel the heat (and I saw it in 2D). This sequence culminates in the most fully realized individual moment in any Pixar film, as the toys fall in to the incinerator and interlock hands with one another, and Woody, always the hero thinking up clever ways of escape, realizes he is powerless and accepts his implicit fate. Only it's not implicit, as a literal Deus Ex Machina comes in to save the day, morphing the sequence from an examination of mortality and family into just another cheap thrill in literally the blink of an eye. Coming from someone who grew up with these films (I was 7 when the first came out), it's impossible to deny this sequence's effect, but it's devoid of any real consequence because it's not even a remote possibility that Pixar will kill the toys, even though that's probably the most fitting ending imaginable. After this, we're given an embarrassingly saccharine ending where Andy gives the toys to a neighbor's child, playing with them one last time before moving into adulthood. It's one of those moments like Pauline Kael described in her review of The Sound of Music, where you can hear all the noses blowing in the theater at once. This is yet another of Pixar's manufactured sentiments, a cheap and borderline insulting attempt to package the depth of human experience in a nice little bow.

All of Pixar's films contain brilliant, fully realized moments, but for every moment they force you to step back and marvel at their artistry there are many more moments that are compromised, mechanical, and banal; context is everything. While Pixar attempts to create art in an environment that exists only to stifle it, they - unwittingly or not - take part in the great lie that we have always told, and will continue to tell, children: that things will always turn out alright in the end if you just have faith, stick together, and believe in each other. The bad guy will get his comeuppance and all will learn a valuable lesson. It's the Disney way.

Writing Politics: The Ghost Writer

Roman Polanski's new thriller The Ghost Writer is about the way political images are manufactured. The film is a multi-faceted take on the political thriller, a picture full of pointed insights into the political process. While functioning as a tightly crafted genre effort, what intrigues me most about The Ghost Writer is the way it engages with a time when the media sets the tone for political discourse, and how the narrative that the mainstream media forges is as carefully honed and crafted as fiction, perhaps even more so. In an era where the media is omnipresent, The Ghost Writer tackles the power - and danger - of political myth making.

Ewan McGregor stars as an unnamed ghost writer (credited only as "The Ghost" in the credits) assigned to edit the incoherent memoirs of an ex British Prime Minister ("All the words are there, they're just not in the right order", he remarks after reading the manuscript) after the original ghost writer dies. The Ghost quickly finds himself in the midst of a political firestorm as the International Criminal Court announces that the Prime Minister is going to be arraigned on charges of war crimes, specifically sanctioning torture against terrorists. So pronounced are the parallels between the film's fictional Prime Minister, Adam Lang (Pierce Brosnan), and Tony Blair that the character may as well be named after him: he left office by resigning, and is accused of being in the tank for America (specifically for helping to sanction the Iraqi Occupation and global War on Terror). Olivia Williams plays Lang's wife, and the film makes it very clear from the get-go that she was, and remains, the power behind the throne (an accusation leveled at many famous political wives).

As the scandal surrounding Lang gets more and more intense, the Prime Minister's office forces The Ghost to move in with them, so as to avoid the press finding out who he is. He is hesitant to do this, as he thinks moving in with clients makes it difficult to maintain a strictly professional decorum, and he is quickly proven correct, as almost immediately he gets intimately involved in the personal and political dealings of the Prime Minister's office. And when The Ghost helps draft a political speech, one designed to save face in the midst of this scandal, Polanski and screenwriter Robert Harris make one of the most sophisticated political barbs in modern movies, brilliantly equating political speech writing with fiction. Especially considering that many of our current leaders would more than likely be unable to speak without their teleprompters spewing words at them that are more heavily scripted than most television, this sequence has a particular bite to it.

Roman Polanski's direction expertly toes the line between restraint and expressionistic, allowing the tension to build slowly and deliberately before it explodes. Even sequences of dialogue have an underpinning of unease to them, and that's because Polanski instills many moments with a dark sense of foreboding, as though you don't know what's around the next corner. His direction is tight and economical, and Alexandre Desplat's score perfectly underlines the drama and tension.

It's difficult, if not impossible, to ignore the parallels between the exiled Prime Minister and Polanski himself, who edited this movie from a Swiss jail cell. I'm sure many things intrigued him about Robert Harris' novel, but I don't think it's unreasonable to suggest that this element of the story was probably the hook for Polanski. He poignantly dramatizes what exile does to the human psyche, while never telling us exactly how to feel about the Prime Minister's predicament - rather, he just wants us to understand it. Polanski paints the portrait of the Prime Minister as a man with very serious flaws - that he was in over his head, too ideologically compromised, subservient to the agenda of others, and more about image than substance - but a man, nevertheless, mercifully avoiding mean spirited vilification or idol worship.

The Ghost Writer also stands as an extremely perceptive deconstruction of the political machine; as The Ghost sinks further and further into the mystery of his deceased predecessor, it becomes more and more apparent that Lang is a puppet, serving the interests of a global military industrial complex as opposed to the people of his country. The Ghost happens upon a file left by his predecessor that leads him to Professor Paul Emmet, a shady character who clearly has some sort of connection to Lang's past, though he emphatically denies this until confronted with photographic evidence. As The Ghost digs deeper, he realizes that this man is a C.I.A. agent and was Lang's American handler - and this, obviously, is the reason for all the pro-American decisions he made while in office. It's revealed that Lang was an actor while in college, and this is undoubtedly why he was chosen: he could play the role of Prime Minister and allow others to make the decisions for him. Like many of the world's current leaders, Lang was just playing the role of a leader and making appearances, while others behind closed doors pulled the strings.

Like Martin Scorsese's Shutter Island, this is the sort of story that Hollywood used to tell well; an ingeniously scripted, tightly directed genre effort. The story isn't merely told, but rather it unfolds, and we feel like we're uncovering the clues - and therefore the truth about modern politics - right along with The Ghost. It culminates in an ending that is both surprising and foregone, and a final shot (reminiscent of the famous final shot from Stanley Kubrick's The Killing) that is both comic and tragic, a brilliant evocation of the hopelessness of trying to tell the truth in a world that knows only lies. It's hard to tell whether Polanski wants us to laugh or cry.

America's Ghosts

Major Spoilers Herein

Who but Martin Scorsese could take a text that, on the surface, reeks of genre tropes and turn it into an intensely personal work of art? Scorsese has given the ghost story a radical face lift - Shutter Island is less about things that go bump in the night than it is about the ghosts in our soul, the ones that don't ever go away, the ones that haunt us individually and as a society. No doubt some will look at the picture and see nothing but the labyrinth plot, myriad twists (including a third act revelation that most will probably see coming a mile away), and the period details and think that's all there is to it, but like the best of Scorsese's work this is a film with a dark, tortured soul. Though on the surface this is a radical departure from what we've come to expect from Martin Scorsese, it's perfectly consistent with themes the director has been presenting his entire career.

The film's protagonist, Teddy Daniels (Leonardo DiCaprio, in another great performance under Scorsese) is a veteran of World War II and a Federal Marshal assigned to investigate a missing patient at the titular island, the home of a mental institution for the criminally insane, the kind of people that other hospitals won't take. We're introduced to Daniels in a claustrophobic close up as he battles a bout of seasickness en route to Shutter Island, and this unsettling image highlights immediately that this is going to be one of the Scorsese pictures that plunges us square within the psychological state of mind of its main character. Scorsese, who has at his heart always been an expressionist, is often at his best when dramatizing a wounded psyche and a tormented soul, and DiCaprio's Teddy Daniels is certainly not without his share of personal tragedy: in addition to fighting in World War II and being present at the liberation of Dachau, we learn that his wife (an ethereal Michelle Williams) died young.

While the use of World War II and Holocaust imagery could have easily been nothing more than dramatic placating, Scorsese so intimately relates that horrific imagery to his character's personal tragedy that it's not just a cheap narrative device. From his early short The Big Shave (initially titled Viet '67, which gives you a clearer idea of what Scorsese was going for) and Taxi Driver, Scorsese is an artist who has been able to dramatize what war does to the human condition, and the massive guilt and psychological transgression that results from witnessing and participating in such extreme violence. The Big Shave stands as a testament to the frame of mind of a nation dealing with war as well as the trauma of the individuals who fight it, as the main character shaves himself in front of a mirror, first shaving away all his facial hair and then eventually cutting himself; though he lays on the political sentiment a little thick, the film is nevertheless incredibly effective. In Taxi Driver Robert De Niro's Travis Bickle is also a veteran of Vietnam, and this is a key element of understanding Bickle's behavior throughout the film, as he sees the streets of New York as a jungle that only he can tame. I bring up these two early works because I feel they are both important to understanding the drama at the heart of Shutter Island, though instead of post-Vietnam anxiety Scorsese here is summing up post-World War II and Cold War dread.

Which is not to say that the film doesn't work on the level of film-noir mystery/thriller. The film is extraordinarily well constructed, and with the exception of a few short sequences that feel like tired exposition to throw the audience off balance with respect to the central mystery, nary a moment passes that doesn't fit into the tapestry of the film. Scorsese's intimate knowledge of film history helps bring the genre and period details alive; the film has an atmosphere that feels like big budget Val Lewton filmed by Hitchcock. The script is tightly constructed and captures the '50s without having to resort to hackneyed and cliched period shorthand. The plot feels fairly by the numbers - Daniels and his partner, a pitch perfect Mark Ruffalo (who captures the unique spoken tempo seen in film noirs of the 50s), are sent to the island to investigate an escaped prisoner who's crime was that she drowned her three children in a lake behind her house - or so we're told. As Daniels digs deeper and deeper into the investigation , he begins to suspect something is afoul at the mental institution, and attempts to uncover a massive conspiracy involving fun activities such as Nazi-esque experiments on the mind, funded by no less than the House of Un-American Activities.

Much has been made of the aforementioned third act revelation, some stating that they find the twist to be a cheap parlor trick beneath a master like Martin Scorsese. But I find it impossible to engage with how the picture is distinctly Scorsese, far more so than his other collaborations with DiCaprio, without acknowledging the way this twist plays into themes the director has been dealing with throughout his career. After DiCaprio's Teddy Daniels spends the duration of the film chasing lead after lead, it's revealed that Daniels, real name Andrew Laeddis, is actually a patient at the mental hospital and what we've been watching is a radical role-playing experiment, designed to help Laeddis come to terms with the heartbreaking tragedy of his past. Not merely the passing of his wife and the devastating sights he'd witnessed while fighting in World War II, though that is certainly no small part of it, but that it was his wife who was mentally unbalanced and drowned their three children in a lake, and he'd forged the Daniels identity and created the conspiracy in his own mind to avoid acknowledging his personal tragedy.

This revelation, in addition to providing an ending that "keeps you guessing" (as the ads proudly proclaim, as though that's even much of an accomplishment), is an absolute kick in the gut from a dramatic standpoint. There is a reason that conspiracy theories - from Pearl Harbor to JFK to the moon landing to 9/11 - take on a life of their own. Though they imply a much darker, more sinister reality, they also imply an order to the world that simply does not exist - in their own, bizarre way, conspiracy theories are actually more comforting than the chaotic, anarchic world we inhabit (take this from a former tin-foil hat wearer): a world where bad things happen to good people, where the depth of tragedy knows no bounds, where the one good thing you have in the world can be suddenly and violently ripped away from you. The sequence that illustrates DiCaprio's character breaking through and acknowledging his own past - a vivid, haunting nightmare of a sequence where Laeddis comes home from work to find his wife soaking wet and his three children dead in the lake, pulls them out and lays them to rest in the yard, and then shoots his wife dead after he asks her to "set [her] free" - is so fully realized in the dramatic sense that it breaks your heart. Of all the tragic, horrible, fucked up things Martin Scorsese has put in front of a camera in his career as a director, this may stand as the most tragic, horrible, and fucked up yet. Considering the magnitude of Laeddis' personal tragedy, it's difficult to blame him for living in a fictional reality - in spite of his alternate reality's dark implications, it's still far easier to cope with than his personal tragedy. A large part of this sequence's effectiveness stems from DiCaprio's remarkably nuanced portrayal - though some will never be able to look past his heartthrob phase, he has shown much depth as an actor, and he has evolved considerably under the watchful eye of Martin Scorsese.

This is the point where the key Scorsese theme comes in to the film - penance. From that early short The Big Shave through Mean Streets and his great Paul Schrader collaborations Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, The Last Temptation of Christ, and Bringing out the Dead has been atoning for one's sins - some would say that this is merely Catholic guilt manifested cinematically, but Scorsese relates the concept of shame to human experience richly enough that it's not expressly theological. After his breakthrough, Laeddis is informed that if he doesn't accept reality - that if he regresses back to thinking he's Teddy Daniels investigating the big-bad mental hospital - then they will be forced to lobotomize him so that he can no longer harm other patients or hospital workers (he is, after all, trained as a solider and Federal Marshal). Immediately after the sequence when Laeddis acknowledges the truth of who he is and what he's done, there is a short sequence of him talking to his 'partner' (who is revealed to be his psychiatrist), and he seems to have regressed back to the Daniels persona - he talks to his doctor like he's his partner, asking him what their next move is, and Laeddis' doctor makes a gesture to the medical staff that, tragically, their experiment did not work and a portion of his brain must be removed. But Scorsese throws in a line that complicates things that, from what I understand, is not in the novel - he says to his partner/doctor "This place makes me wonder which would be worse: to live as a monster, or to die as a good man", and he marches off, and his fate is implicit. The question, though, is whether he honestly regressed or if he knowingly baited them into thinking that he had regressed, so he no longer had to live within himself. It adds an incredibly moving element of complexity and ambiguity to the film, though either way the implications are both tragic and deeply disturbing.

While the film is viewed by some amongst the critical community as a slight genre effort from a renowned master after a string of Oscar-bait (though I don't feel either of these criticisms are accurate), this is the most distinctly Scorsese of all of his DiCaprio collaborations - Gangs of New York was a long gestating passion project, Aviator was more a DiCaprio project that Scorsese finessed, and The Departed was the slight genre effort Shutter Island is being written off as that retroactively became Ocar-bait by virtue of the fact that it won an Oscar. Though Shutter Island can indeed be appreciated as the thrill-a-minute-keep-you-guessing mystery film that it's being advertised as, Scorsese has managed to manifest his personal vision in a work that seems fairly atypical of its genre, and what may be the year's first truly great film is the result.