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.