25 WORTHY FILMS, 2000-2009: #21 - STANDARD OPERATING PROCEDURE

21. Errol Morris' Standard Operating Procedure (2008)

Along with Martin Scorsese, Errol Morris was granted an overdue Academy Award this past decade for a subpar work that will come to rest in the bottom tier of his oeuvre. Scorsese won his coveted Best Director Oscar in 2007 for the well-crafted genre exercise The Departed, while Morris, despite having been the greatest of American documentarians of the previous twenty years, received the 2004 Best Documentary statue for The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara, a feature-length interview with the Vietnam War mastermind and former Defense Secretary that began life as an episode of the director's unfortunately short-lived cable program First Person. That film was celebrated and hyped by critics and audiences, due partly to the easily digestible truths it offered about the Vietnam War and that conflict's parallels to our current presence in Iraq. It is a remarkable interview to be sure, but as a film it lacks the imagination and depth of Morris’ 90s masterpieces such as Fast, Cheap & Out of Control and Mr. Death: The Rise and Fall of Fred A. Leuchter, Jr. 

Of much grander historical and artistic import was 2008's Standard Operating Procedure, Morris' investigation of a United States military combating charges of having tortured Iraq War “detainees” at Abu Ghraib Prison in 2003. The film focuses primarily on the scapegoating of low-level MPs such as Lynndie England and Sabrina Harman by a Pentagon looking to distance itself from policies of sanctioned brutality and a media circus content to relay the Rumsfeldian theory of rogue servicemembers short-circuiting and violating their chain of command. Also probed exhaustively is what, exactly, the incident's famous photos, especially the one showing England holding a detainee by a dog leash, do and don't indicate about their subject. It's as much an analysis of institutional disavowal as it is an expose of the myriad contexts of a photographic series that horrified the world.

Standard Operating Procedure is a departure aesthetically from The Fog of War, which relied heavily on archival footage (as did the show from which it was developed) and a circular Philip Glass score. Instead, SOP uses the painstaking re-enactments that Morris has developed since The Thin Blue Line (1988) to illustrate the crimes themselves; he also evinces a burgeoning skill with computer effects, used here to present graphically the mind-boggling amount of photographic material that a CID agent sifted through while ascertaining the time-line for and extent of the abuse. Both films' interviews utilize Morris' ingenious Interrotron, which encourages interview subjects to look directly into the camera due to the lens' placement behind a video screen presenting the filmmakers' image -- it could be described as a teleprompter whose words are replaced by a live video feed of the interlocutor's face -- that renders a rattling intimacy between film and viewer (1).  While the footage of McNamara peering directly at the audience while describing Armageddon revealed a chilling detachment, SOP's testimony of military police on the ground in Iraq is much more disarming, both morally and emotionally.

What the respective statuses of Fog and SOP (the former won awards during the pinnacle of public disenfranchisement with the war and grossed over $4M at the domestic box office; the latter fizzled out at less than $500,000 in ticket sales, failing to connect with a shame-fatigued public and disinterested critics) seem to indicate is that we are only comfortable with exploring truths about our foreign policy insofar as they can be held at a historical or allegorical remove: we may righteously import McNamara's lessons gleaned from Vietnam so long as we've had thirty years to mull them over and reach a politically correct, self-congratulatory consensus (2). SOP, however, came out either too early or too late: possibly too early for us to look the event squarely in the eye (it may take the next war or the next series of incriminating photographs before we can find the film useful) or too late in that it came on the heels of a clot of Iraq documentaries that were far more successful, noteworthy or less morally inflammatory in their pat celebrations of grunt bravery and condemnations of the war itself. (3)

SOP also jars loose what we’d come to accept about the events at Abu Ghraib, even upsetting the political left's antagonistic interpretations of the abuse. The film countermines the spoonfed dogma that a few bad apples had perpetrated the attacks and acknowledges an institutional basis for the cruelty, but it also describes the moral failings and self-pitying justifications of the servicemen and women that led to their being turned into criminals and pariahs. Both hawks and doves found Morris' conclusions difficult to swallow.

"It's important for the American people and the world to know that while these terrible acts were perpetrated by a small number of U.S. military, they were also brought to light by the honorable and responsible actions of other military personnel." - Donald Rumsfeld (4)

Emphasizing the role played by "a small number of U.S. military," effectively obscures the systemic nature of the torture, as well as the direct involvement of private contractors who had more or less instructed the military in interrogation techniques without binding themselves to its disciplinary procedures or rules of war. This is what cannot be teased out of the photographs. Throughout the film, phantom contractors and their CIA cohorts appear as faceless wraiths haunting the halls of Abu Ghraib, much as their presence in the infamous images of naked pyramids and hooded men masturbating is spectral and evasive.

Also disconcertingly obscured by Abu Ghraib: Media Event was our reliance on photography to determine truth, which has become an obsession of Morris' (his "Zoom" column at the New York Times' website is always fascinating [5]). We were outraged and horrified by the photos, but didn’t stop to think much about them, or what they don't contain. This is also the central conundrum of Michael Haneke’s brilliant Cache, another film, albeit fictional, about unfortunate, unintended record-keeping and its role in reconstructing events and unveiling motive. It was the photographs, rather than the events themselves, Morris argues with his film, that led to England becoming the public face of a crime in which her role was vital but inessential. Rumsfeld would resign two years after reports of the abuse began circulating but the phantom contractors fail to register in the public imagination; Lynndie England, on the other hand, was dishonorably discharged immediately and sentenced to three years in prison.

As a portrait, it’s haunting and vivid (Robert Richardson's slow motion cinematography underscores the horror) and damning. We will look at it in ten or fifteen years -- just as we've only now absorbed the lessons of the Vietnam and Cold Wars -- after we’ve begun torturing Iranian or North Korean POWs, and say that history is now repeating itself. We'll blame whoever is in the photographs, and forget the men -- the contractors and public servants -- behind the curtain. And while hindsight may be 20/20, what we won’t be able to say is that during the tragic fallout of Abu Ghraib we acknowledged fully its moral and historical implications in anything close to their proper dimensions; we focused instead on a series of grainy digital photographs and relied on them to tell us everything we needed to know. That’s a moral failing, but it has become, and may continue to be, standard operating procedure.




Notes:

1 - An interesting interview with Morris detailing the machine can be found here, while a diagram of its function can be found here.

2 - SOP's tally is still almost double the box office take for Taxi to the Dark Side, the Oscar-winning documentary released a year before SOP, but far far far less than any of Michael Moore's documentaries, let alone the average studio drama.
 
3 - The year before SOP's release, three of the five Academy Award nominees for Best Documentary were for films specifically about the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq: No End in Sight, Operating Homecoming and (the winner) Taxi to the Dark Side.
 
4 - A transcript of Rumsfeld's reaction to the publication of the photos (it cannot properly be called a response to the events themselves, which Rumsfeld himself is culpable) can be found here.

5 - A link to his "Zoom" series can be found here.

25 WORTHY FILMS, 2000-2009: #22 - THE ROYAL TENENBAUMS

22. Wes Anderson's The Royal Tenenbaums (2001) 

It is the last great Wes Anderson film, and sadly may also be the last great Wes Anderson film. 

The precipitous decline into neurotic hording that has spoiled the consummate auteur's work since The Royal Tenenbaums (The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou in 2004, The Darjeeling Limited in 2007 and this year's Fantastic Mr. Fox) can most easily be attributed to the departure of Owen Wilson as Anderson’s writing partner.  The bewildered innocence of Bottle Rocket’s Dignan and Max Fischer’s wound-concealing hubris in Rushmore have been supplanted by a savage, unforgiving wit that inches out most recognizably human emotions.  After Tenenbaums, an inverse gravity has taken hold in the Anderson universe, with knick-knacks and tchochkes occupying the films' center and the human beings marooned at the periphery.  His films have, with the aid of recent collaborators (and navel-gazing filmmakers in their own right) Roman Coppola and Noah Baumbach, become so insular and mean-spirited as to be uninviting for audiences looking to engage with anything beyond the director's contempt for his characters or his penchant for obnoxiously superfluous detail. Tenenbaums was the last film he's made that felt like it existed beyond his bedroom walls.

The Royal Tenenbaums is an ambitious, funny, warmhearted, thoroughly original and clever film that created its own vision of a timeless New York City (rivaling, in its purity, Kubrick's dream of the city in Eyes Wide Shut) without forsaking the actuality of the soon-to-be-suffering metropolis.  Anderson’s melancholic, autumnal Big Apple was the perfect American Fantasy for 2001, preserving our iconic city’s capacity for self-definition and eschewing its miseries in as unassuming a manner as possible.  The intimately epic saga of a once-regal family of near-geniuses whose talents and identities have begun to fade, The Royal Tenenbaums sports all of Anderson's now-restrictive trademarks (eclectic pop soundtrack, a cruelly dry wit with an absurd twinge and an immensely deliberate production design) without succumbing to their narrative limitations.  It was supposed to signal the arrival of a filmmaker whose eye for character and design were equal in strength, coming into his own as an authentic American voice; it now seems like the last gasp of a once-promising collaboration.

Each member of the Tenenbaum clan is lovingly and carefully assembled, and, fittingly, each performer (Gene Hackman, Ben Stiller, Anjelica Huston, Gwyneth Paltrow, Luke and Wilson, Danny Glover and Alec Baldwin as narrator) has arguably never been better.  Their shared history has the breadth of a novel and the punch of a short story.  Anderson's characters since have tended to be monomaniacal cads surrounded by sycophantic morons; they elicit neither sympathy nor interest. The characters of Tenenbaums, however, are fraught with humility, distrust and love for one another in a manner that is genuinely moving and bracingly funny. 

The film may also hold the decade's best soundtrack cue: as eldest son Richie Tenenbaum recovers from a ghastly suicide attempt, he checks himself out of the hospital and boards, still clad in hospital-issue scrubs, a New York City bus to the tune of Nick Drake's ethereal invocation "Fly".  The stone-faced Richie returning home to his frayed clan is perfectly synchronized with Drake intoning "please / give me a second grace / please / give me a second face". It's a desire for turned corners and new leaves that inspires smarting familiarity.

How depressing it is to think that Anderson may be long out of perfect moments such as this, let alone films, such as this one and its two predecessors, that are so full of them (1).  Here's hoping, however, that he allows himself a second grace.

1 - Those would be his debut Bottle Rocket (1996), a comedic heist movie possessed by a mischievous charm and Rushmore (1999), his comic masterpiece detailing a fuzzy love triangle between a kindergarten teacher, a prep school overachiever and a depressive tycoon. 

25 WORTHY FILMS, 2000-2009: #23 - IN THE MOOD FOR LOVE

23. Wong Kar-Wai's In the Mood for Love (2000)

“We won’t be like them.”

So promises a cuckolded husband to the woman married to the man who’s sleeping with his wife in 1960’s Hong Kong. Shaken by their partners’ mutual infidelities, Chow Mo-Wan (Tony Leung) and So Lai-zhen (Maggie Cheung) develop an intimate, though chaste, refuge together, the most visible product of which is distressed, silent longing. Wong’s tactile direction gives an aching body to the frustrated interlude. It’s the pinnacle of his sensualist cinema, wherein all of the elements sing in conspiracy: the voluptuous colors (of the décor, the light, the wardrobes) pursue a rhythm all their own, the lyrical decoupage moves masterfully between truncated episodes and Christopher Doyle’s photography captures perfectly the subtle physical details out of which the protagonists construct a companionship.  It’s heartbreakingly beautiful watching the betrayed fumble a tentative love of such promise, but the intensity of their affections surpasses the limp pronouncements and tired postures of a thousand empty screen romances. It was the decade's first great love story, a documentation of a love that might have existed. 

 

25 WORTHY FILMS, 2000-2009: #24 - CHILDREN OF MEN

24. Alfonso Cuaron's Children of Men (2006)

Using an Eastern European long take aesthetic, a Mexican director situates a British novelist’s science fiction tale about an African refugee -- whose pregnancy is humanity’s first in almost two decades – within the contexts of U.S. anti-immigration fervor and War on Terror atrocities. That Alfonso Cuaron’s Children of Men is terrifically entertaining without sacrificing an inch of its political breadth is something of a miracle. In collaboration with the great director of photography Emmanuel Lubezki (who also shot Malick’s The New World), Cuaron uses a series of frenzied long takes to create a zippy cousin to Bela Tarr’s forsaken glacial drifts, but it could be said both are charting historical degradation of a sort. In Cuaron's film, a gun-phobic former radical, the droll Clive Owen, escorts the planet's lone fertile human (the race's sterility is never explained, though numerous potential culprits populate the narrative) through a looking glass of squalid immigrant detention and urban warfare in an effort to get her unborn child to The Human Project, a team of scientists hoping to repopulate the dying earth. It’s an art film and an action picture: a nightmarish chase picture set in a barren future of nearly unremitting xenophobia, war, paranoia and fascism. Cuaron should be forgiven an occasionally condescending approach to both race and radicalism and applauded for an attempt at drawing parallels between domestic (immigration law, class conflicts) and foreign policies (the war on terror, preemptive strikes). Aesthetically, Children of Men boasts the greatest, most haunting sci-fi production design and photography since Blade Runner. Despite its prognosticated bleakness, the film is anything but cynical: after a decade of apocalyptic action films in which humanity must survive its own ravages, Cuaron’s vision is the only one that elects to preserve earnestly the hope that not only will human bodies weather future cataclysm, but that a shared sense of Humanity might as well.

25 WORTHY FILMS, 2000-2009: #25 - TONY MANERO

25. Pablo Larrain's Tony Manero (2008)

I wrote a thorough analysis of the film here, but it bears repeating that Larrain's synthesis of surreal gallows humor, carefully wrought handheld cinematography and an unnerving central performance made it the most harrowing, revelatory film seen on American screens in 2009. The story of a murderous John Travolta impersonator in Pinochet-era Chile, the director's second feature secures his place as one of the decade's most brilliantly perceptive discoveries. Inexcusably absent from most lists of this year's best films, Tony Manero is likely to simmer (or perhaps fester) in the recesses of the arthouse imagination in the years to come, eventually overtaking 2009's relatively pallid contenders for immortality such as Fantastic Mr. Fox, Up in the Air, Precious and District 9. Larrain is a poet of the shared historical world; by neither pandering to nor betraying his status as an artist, he captures a horrifically familiar hierarchy of art, sexuality and politics while obeying the imperative of his unique sensibilities. Only the great films refuse disloyalty to audiences and themselves equally.

25 WORTHY FILMS, 2000-2009: AN INTRODUCTION

Each year, almost every “Most” or “Best-Of….” round-up begins with a missive in defense of list-making as a critical activity.  Often this precedes a defense of the arrived-at final number of included titles: Is 50 too many? Why not 65 or 33? What’s so ontologically magical about the number 10? For lists concerning decades, what immediately follows is a sheepish acknowledgment of the arbitrariness of decades, centuries, millenia, etc. as useful parameters for discussing the relative merits of artwork, events or persons.  My own belief is that as arbitrary as these numbers may be, we’ve agreed (more or less) that they ought to mean something and they’ve thus come to mean quite a bit.  This is shaky tautology to be sure, but as far as this chronicler is concerned, a decade is a worthwhile chunk of time to look at, largely because we’ve come to believe it so.  If, in the course of life, we think of ourselves as constructing and participating in 10-year increments, then these increments should reflect the value of this intention by virtue of their tendencies and idiosyncrasies.  It’s a suitable, if permeable, temporal boundary that defines our lives and our shared history to a large extent.  Our willful submission makes this possible, and defensiveness on the subject is largely pointless and self-defeating.   

As I haven’t seen a fraction of this year’s important films, I’ll forgo a list of 2009’s best titles.  I am much more familiar with the decade’s key works, and feel justified in posting a list of films made between 2000 and 2009 that might conceivably be considered “the best,” “my favorite,” or, to abandon brevity in favor of description, “the most artistically revelatory and/or profound.” In a word, they are “worthy” films. That is to say they’re worthy of being discussed and remembered as representatives of their time. I stop short of using “significant” as a criterion so that I can indulge the films I love rather than the films I feel I ought to think about or respect or otherwise consider independently from my mind’s pleasure center.  As several critics have claimed, Miami Vice and Avatar heralded separate but equal technical sea changes for Hollywood and are therefore worthy of “best-of” consideration. For me, however, Vice and Avatar are each little more than high-gloss junk and I’d just soon as soon leave them off of a list that feels excruciatingly brief, even at 25 entries.  

The number 25 represents nothing more than a suitably round number for such a list, but one sizable enough to preclude unbearably painful omissions.  Limiting myself to 10 was maddening, resulting in a list far too meager to encapsulate a decade.  Using 100 feels appropriate only when considering a century, the symmetry irresistible.  Even 50 felt excessive or indecisive.  A few critics, especially those publishing on the internet, have, after happily casting off the pretty number mandate, chosen to stop whenever they felt all worthy films had been discussed.  To each his own, but I find the pleasure in these endeavors is the selection and ranking process.  A final tally of 25 ensures both a painful selection process and a spaciousness befitting ten years’ time.

IMAGE 2

Abbas Kiarostami's Close-Up

A significant portion of Kiarostami's 1990 masterpiece Close-Up is dedicated to this image and its variations. The man looking into the camera, Hossain Sabzian, has been arrested for impersonating Iranian filmmaker Mohsen Makhmalbalf and having convinced a well-to-do family that their home and children are ideal subjects for his next picture. Kiarostami documents the trial (the source of this image), interviews all participants, re-stages (using non-actors portraying themselves) portions of the crime and orchestrates a tender encounter between Sabzian and Makhmalbaf himself that poignantly concludes the film.

If Close-Up is essentially about anything, and it's debatable whether or not it can be satisfactorily reduced or encapsulated, it is about Sabzian's performance as Makhmalbaf: his own interpretation of it, its impact on intended and unintended audiences, and the parallel attempts by the court and Kiarostami at discerning its meaning.

Here we are given a close-up of Sabzian in the courtroom as Kiarostami -- his off camera voice registers enough for the filmmaker to be considered another central character -- asks him to recount the ruse's disintegration. The close-up, however, is complicated by the background presence of an observer, a visual approximation/stand-in of the filmmakers, the court (he's clad in official garb, though his precise position is undocumented), and the audience. Throughout the film's last third, this repeated angle features the sober-eyed Sabzian recounting the details of his alleged crime while the figure behind him displays an array of responses, ranging from the pensive to the indifferent. The filmmaker could easily have isolated his ostensible subject and consequently limited his story's focus; instead he lends half of the frame to a mere observer at the proceedings. Despite the film's title, this frame inhabits the no-man's-land between the close-up and the two-shot.  Kiarostami's image presents explicitly the phantom occupants of any film's close-ups: the audience.