The best films tell us something about ourselves, something
about what it means to be human. Sometimes, the picture is not so rosy, but
look out the window. It is not so rosy out there either. The world is perched on
a ledge, and it could tip at any moment. I do not mean to sound like a
harbinger of doom here in my little movie column, but when we go to the cinema,
it is because of what is going on in the world. Either we are seeking an escape
from the darkness or a reflection of it.
Well, I have never been one for escape, so each of my top 10
films of the year is representative of the society we have built and the
culture we have bred. If it sounds like a dour evening of programming, it is in
some ways, but in these depictions of a world askew, I find hope. These are
bleak films, yes, but this is because they dare to confront us with human
truths, and if we are to find a way forward or some kind of light at the end of
the tunnel, we must first open ourselves to honesty.
In one way or another, every film below is about people – or
a dog or a machine – trying to take the next step toward a deeper understanding
of themselves and the world they inhabit. Their circumstances may be dire, and
they may not always succeed in their quests, but the search for truth and
meaning is always worthwhile. These are the top 10 films of the year because
for whatever else they are, they are celebrations of the search for truth.
Before we get to the list, here are five other fantastic
films from 2015 that exemplify the perilous march forward, either for
individuals or whole movements:
The Second Mother;
Everest;
Room;
Suffragette;
Macbeth.
The Top 10 of 2015:
For Nira (Sarit Larry), the kindergarten teacher at the
center of the story, beauty comes with a responsibility. If one is capable of
recognizing something beautiful, it is incumbent upon that person to share it
with the world. Nira would love to be that beautiful thing, but she knows she
is not. Instead, she finds it in the poetry of a 5-year-old boy, Yoav (Avi Shnaidman).
Once she finds it, she can think of nothing else but sharing this boy’s poems
with an ungrateful world.
Lapid has called Nira a warrior for poetry, a warrior for
beauty in a world that has neither the time nor inclination to enjoy it. Lapid
creates a universe – not unlike our own – in which people would rather watch
inane television shows, talk about their sex lives, and drink away their
worries. That Yoav is destined to be unappreciated causes great pain in Nira,
and she acts out. Perhaps her decisions are irrational or extreme but only in
the world in which she and Yoav live. In a better place, where beauty and
poetry meant more, Nira would be hailed as a righteous hero, and it is that
world for which she fights.
All of Ex Machina
is a test. We learn this almost from the beginning. Nathan (Oscar Isaac) brings
Caleb (Domhnall Gleeson) to his secluded compound to test a new artificial
intelligence program, Ava (Alicia Vikander). The goal is to see whether this
machine can imitate humanity so well as to be indistinguishable from it. The
obvious ethical question is if Ava is so human she fools Caleb, does she
deserve to be treated like a human, or is she still simply a robot? Ava asks
what will happen if she fails the test, and she is told her memory will be
wiped and she will be broken down. At this point, Ava demonstrates the most
human thing of all – the will to survive.
Isaac, Gleeson, and especially Vikander are tremendous as
three characters who each represent a different path for humanity. Nathan is an
innovator, but he is cruel. Caleb is kind but weak. Ava is strong but alien.
Garland suggests only one of these will inherit the earth, and he forces the
audience to choose an allegiance. We can create the future, fight the future,
or be the future, but if we choose wrong, then we have failed the test, and the
repercussions will be severe.
Mundruczó set out to make an angry, unflinching film about
his native Hungary and the growing inequities that have torn the country apart
from within. He certainly has made that, but he has also made a beautiful fable
about a girl and her dog. That two such disparate stories could be told not
only parallel to each other but in concert is a testament to the remarkable
filmmaking and storytelling on display in White
God.
After Lili’s (Zsófia Psotta) father forces her to abandon
her beloved dog, Hagen, the film charts the course of these two outsiders as
they try to make their way back to each other. Both are abused and degraded by
systems set up to keep them on the outside looking in. The wonder of Mundruczó’s
story is that he makes Hagen the hero. Hagen is the one who finally cannot take
it anymore and rises up with an army of the oppressed.
That they are dogs is what makes the story a fable, but in
that fable, Mundruczó uncovers undeniable truths about the despicable ways we
treat each other. He argues that if we cannot find some empathy inside
ourselves, we are doomed to be destroyed, not by some outside force but from
within.
Adam McKay’s
The Big Short
has received much acclaim and many accolades this year for the way it tackles
the financial crisis and housing market meltdown of the mid-2000s. That film is
a big, flashy, star-studded, smart-ass look at the world of Wall Street, but
for me, it does not compare to
99 Homes.
Bahrani’s film chooses substance over style and has the guts to examine the
human toll of the crisis. While
The Big
Short laughs and jokes its way around big numbers and big ideas,
99 Homes goes for the throat, takes hold,
and never lets go.
There are no winners in Bahrani’s film, only those who keep
their dignity intact and their souls unstained – and there are not many of
those either. Dennis Nash (Andrew Garfield) is a good man who wants to do right
by his family, but the only way he can do that is to give up a piece of
himself. Rick Carver (Michael Shannon) is a bad man who also wants to do right
by his family. He has already given up every part of himself to the system he
serves and spends his days collecting the broken pieces of others. Bahrani
creates a dichotomy in which we can either give in and be destroyed or fight
back and be crushed anyway. 99 Homes
may be a dark statement on our time, but it never feels anything but true.
It would be hard right now to find another auteur operating at
the consistently high level at which Iñárritu works. The Mexican-born director
has made just six feature films, and each is a masterwork. In 2014, he gave us
the acid-tongued satire Birdman,
which amazed with its vibrancy and technical wizardry. In 2015, he returned
with The Revenant, a stone-faced adventure
epic set in the Old American West. The technical mastery remains – in particular,
director of photography Emmanuel Lubezki’s lush cinematography – but this time,
Iñárritu uses his storytelling gifts to far more humanist ends.
The story of Hugh Glass (Leonardo DiCaprio) dragging his
broken body hundreds of miles through the snow to find those who left him for
dead could easily be positioned as a revenge saga. In fact, the marketing would
have you believe that is all it is. It is not. The Revenant is about grief and guilt, survival and strength,
nature and progress. Against the vast expanse of frozen tundra, Glass is barely
a speck on the horizon, and his personal tragedy is just one of many tragedies
suffered every day on this land. As he wills himself back to civilization, he
discovers his true home and his duty to the universe.
Complacency is a byproduct of a successful society.
Certainly in the U.S., most of us have the luxury of being insulated from the truly
terrible acts committed in this world. Even if we are not satisfied with what
we have, we have the choice to go out and seek something more or something
else, which is its own kind of privilege. Mustang
is an important film because it has the ability to shock us out of complacency
by showing us a world in which people do not have a choice.
Five sisters in a small Turkish village are held hostage by
their family and forced to participate in a culture that has no place in a
modern society. They fight back against their oppressors, but an entire system
has been set in place to hold them down. However, Ergüven wisely does not fill
her film with sorrow but rather rage. Mustang
is an angry cry against inequality and an urgent call for justice. The
subjugation and degradation of women is not a cultural issue but a human rights
issue about which none of us can afford to be complacent.
Every scene in A
Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence is shrouded in death, but
this is not a film about dying. It is a film about being alive. There is no
more precious gift than life, and if it sometimes takes a morbid reminder of
this fact, then so be it. Life is not always pretty or fun or sweet, as we are
all well aware, but you know what – it sure as hell can be all those things,
and when it is, the struggle and the pain seem worth it.
There is no story to speak of in Andersson’s film, just a
few connecting threads here and there, loose tendrils of lives intersecting
almost imperceptibly. In fact, the frame is filled constantly with life. People
go about their business in the foreground, and the rest of the world goes about
its day in the background. It quickly becomes clear that neither is more
important as the next scene, or three scenes later, could focus on one of those
background players, or we may never see any of these people again. Few films
capture the simultaneous majesty and randomness of life as well as this, and as
the film wanders, it pulls viewers along, making us a part of its wondrous
tapestry.
Put next to films about the financial crisis, the systemic abuse
of women, and rampant inequality, the small-scale marriage drama 45 Years may seem to involve fairly low
stakes, but for its characters, the stakes could not be higher. Haigh’s film is
a deeply penetrating look at the damage we inflict on each other when we refuse
to be honest with ourselves. It concerns the way old wounds do not heal when
left unattended but rot and infect everything they touch. The tragedy is that it
could all be easily avoided if we were stronger, more open people. Instead, we
become guarded, thinking we are protecting ourselves, but we are just causing
further pain.
Kate and Geoff (Charlotte Rampling and Tom Courtenay, who
give two of the best performances of the year) have been married 45 years and still
seem deeply in love, but when news from the past shakes the foundation of their
bond, they realize the fragile nature of everything they have built. Bit by
bit, Kate’s world crumbles around her, and all she can do is sift through the
rubble, searching for a reason to carry on with life the way it was before. She
wants to bury the past, discard the truth, and ignore all those old wounds, but
she cannot. Everything is in the open now, and she must confront her new
reality or be destroyed by it.
Spotlight is
another film about people who would rather ignore the truth, and the film’s
heroes are the Boston Globe reporters who refuse to remain silent. They uncover
decades of abuse hidden by the Catholic Church, and everyone else would prefer
to pretend the problem does not exist or will go away on its own. The Spotlight
team, however, cannot abide the lie and goes to great lengths to ensure the
truth will see the light of day.
McCarthy and co-writer Josh Singer’s screenplay works as
both a thrilling legal procedural and a moralistic drama. The film understands
the mechanics of journalism and the lives of reporters like few others before
it, but it never gets so bogged down in minutiae that it fails to tell a human
story. The victims are the heart of Spotlight,
and in his construction of the film, McCarthy guarantees we never forget the
real people who suffered because of a corrupt system.
Finally, what Spotlight
reminds us is that this work is never done. The Catholic Church still harbors
and hides pedophile priests in cities around the world and places not fortunate
enough to have teams of reporters, lawyers, and investigators dedicated to the
truth. In the end, justice is our responsibility, and we must seek it
everywhere, not just from the Catholic Church but from governments and Wall
Street and schools and big business. Spotlight
is a great film because it shows us how good people can change the world one
truth at a time.
For sheer audacity, there is no film that could match
Slaboshpitsky’s tale of humiliation, rage, and defiance set at a Ukrainian
boarding school for the deaf. Apart from being told entirely in Ukrainian sign
language, the film is shot in a remarkable series of long takes that makes the
audience complicit in the abuses and atrocities being perpetrated in this insular
society. After a while, the silence becomes so unsettling it is almost
unbearable. We want to scream for these kids and the suffering they endure, but
we cannot. We remain quiet, passive observers, and in so being, it feels like
we are allowing this to happen.
Sergei (Grigoriy Fesenko) is a new student at the school and
quickly becomes embedded in the school’s ruling gang. The gang controls the
student body through intimidation, fear, and brute strength. They sell drugs, deal
in other contraband, and operate a prostitution ring. Anya (Yana Novikova) is
one of the prostitutes. Sergei falls in love with her and wants to escape this
life together, but she rebuffs him. This is the life she knows, and she refuses
to give it up. From there, the story spirals into hate, madness, and violence
so rapidly the audience is left gasping for air.
There was no other film this year that offered the mix of
sensory overload and emotional devastation in The Tribe. It is not a fun night at the movies, but it is something
more. Cinema is a beautiful medium because it inserts viewers directly into the
lives of others. If those lives are not always pretty or happy, so much the
better. In life, we shut ourselves off from the pain of other people, either
because we wish not to feel pain or because we do not want to be reminded of
our own. The Tribe is a daring,
confrontational rebuke of that numbness. We want to hide, but The Tribe forces us to open ourselves to
feeling.
Thank you for being a part of Last Cinema Standing's 2015 Year in Review. Be sure to check out the other installments in the series by clicking any of the links below, and keep coming back for continued coverage of this year's Oscar race and the year in cinema that will be 2016.
