The Best Films of 2003: Foggy, Cold, Dirty, Shattered and Lost
Jan 31 '04 (Updated Apr 11 '04)
The Bottom Line Read on...
[Do I honestly need to go through this drill? This posting is LONG. Look through at your own pace. Find what you want to read. Enjoy. But no fair blaming me for the length.]
Due to a professional shift since I wrote my list of the Best Films of 2002, I've spent more than my fair share of time this past year watching television. And while television is, as always, a vast wasteland punctuated by rare oases of HBO-style quality, I need only look at 2003's television output to see how pathetic a year it was for films.
No cinematic comedy produced during the entire year made me laugh as much as a single episode of FOX's underwatched Arrested Development. Or a single episode of the BBC's The Office. Or a good episode of HBO's Curb Your Enthusiasm. Or a good episode of The Simpsons.
OK. That's not entirely true. I laughed a lot at the first hour of Intolerable Cruelty and I laughed some at A Mighty Wind and Bad Santa, but none of those three movies were, overall, worthy of my Top 10 list.
No three hours of filmmaking left me as emotionally shattered as the first part of HBO's Mike Nichols adaptation of Angels in America. It goes without saying that your basic two-hour film can't hope to create a character as complicated as, say, Vic Mackey of FX's The Shield (a show I respect, but don't enjoy), but why didn't the years movies manage to create a character I embrace as totally as Adam Brody's Seth Cohen on FOX's The O.C.?
It was a year in which many of our finest directors were simply busy with other projects. After two very good 2002 efforts, Steven Spielberg waffled and finally began to make Terminal. After a flawed masterpiece in 2002, Martin Scorsese (never a speedy worker to begin with) get started on The Aviator. After seemingly directing two films per year for the past decade, Steven Soderbergh took a deep breath.
And many of the great filmmakers who produced work in 2003, came in under their own high standards. Robert Altman went from the dizzying brilliance of Gosford Park to the interesting ballet esoterica of The Company (a fine film, but not listworthy). Tim Burton sacrificed his twisted edge in a bid for Oscar gold with Big Fish, but was denied. The Coen Brothers had half an idea for Intolerable Cruelty, but not enough to make a full movie. Even Ron Howard, inappropriately crowned a genius after A Beautiful Mind, followed up that Oscar winner with The Missing, a total bomb.
This wasn't an awful year for films, but it certainly wasn't a good year, particularly for the studios. My list only includes three films that I count as studio productions, and that includes a big budget effort from Miramax.
As always, my list merely represents the best English-language films of the year. Something like the suddenly lauded City of God would likely have made my Top Five, but I just didn't see a representative enough sample of foreign films this past year to call this an all-encompassing list.
As for the English-language films that I have yet to see, I acknowledge the possibility that The Station Agent or heaven only knows what, might conceivably make their way onto one list or another. Fortunately, these lists are fluid. I can always come and make alterations if need be.
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THE TOP 10 (OR 11) MOVIES OF 2003
11)Gerry (Director Gus Van Sant)
Because I'm an odd and idiosyncratic sort, I had to have at least one totally absurd film on this list and her it is. Matt Damon and Casey Affleck go out for a hike in the desert and get lost. They're in the middle of nowhere (the film started shooting in Argentina and concluded shooting in Death Valley, so their literal location never really exists) and they're screwed. So they walk and walk and walk. Occasionally they talk a little, entirely in the short-hand of lifelong friends, but mostly they don't. The film has no opening credits and virtually no musical score, much less plot, dialogue or characters. It's absurdist nihilism, but for the entirely running time I was hypnotized. It's hard to know if what Affleck and Damon are doing is "acting" per se, but they're entirely immersed, both in the people they're playing and in the spectacular scenery rendered with perfection by Harris Savides. The tracking shots are endless and masterful, melding the two stars into the landscape in a way that's completely devoid of ego. Let's get real: I wouldn't recommend this movie to 98% of my friends nor to 99% of my readers and yet there are scenes in Gerry that I was astounded by. The sequence, told almost entirely in a single shot, in which Affleck finds himself somehow marooned atop a gigantic boulder, leaving Damon standing helplessly below may be my favorite cinematic moment of the year. I spent half of the movie wondering how the movie was going to end, a quarter of the movie wondering if it was going to end at all and the final quarter being crushed by the inevitability of it all.
10)Shattered Glass (Director Billy Ray)
My Review: http://www.epinions.com/content_117410074244
I don't know if there's such a thing as a perfect movie. If there is, I haven't seen it. However, among small movies, it's possible for a film to achieve the exact measure of its potential. As written and directed by Billy Ray, Shattered Glass is as effective a rendering of the sordid story of disgraced journalist Stephen Glass as I can imagine. As prestige films get more and more bloated, Shattered Glass is a tight 95 minutes of interestingly rendered characters, semi-realistic journalistic intrigue, moderate tension and genuine ethical debate. Nonfiction writing is both idealized and problematized here, in a film that asks readers of newspapers and magazines what we're looking for in our features and profiles and whether we're willing to sacrifice the truth to get it. Hayden Christensen is full of ticky, insecure obsequiousness in the lead role, suggesting Glass's need for acceptance but also the way in which he was able to fool so many people for so long. It's a performance that illustrates, but never justifies. Even better is Peter Sarsgaard in a tricky performance as Glass's editor. In order to set up a certain moral binary, Sarsgaard's character, as written, is idealized, but as performed, we see the conflicts of a man whose desire to do the right thing may destroy the publication he works for. I also applaud Mychael Danna's score, which adds Hitchcockian menace even when what's on screen is something as benign as a wall of magazines.
9)The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (Director Peter Jackson)
My Review: http://www.epinions.com/content_122229722756
I'm odd and idiosyncratic, but I also know that if, for the third year in a row, I leave the annual Lord of the Rings installment off of my Top 10 list, people will send me mean and threatening e-mails. Also, if I attempt to argue that Gerry is a better movie that Return of the King somebody is also likely to send me to the nuthouse. Regardless, think of this as something of a cumulative honor to Peter Jackson for achieving the semi-impossible, for pumping out three ambitious, expensive, challenging and frequently lovely epics in three years without any kind of noticeable dip in quality. This is an honor for Sean Astin's deepening performance as Sam and for Ian McKellan's ever-welcome presence as Gandalf, for the legions of computer generated orcs and for the vast New Zealand vistas. This is an honor for Howard Shore's score and for all of the teenage girls willing to pretend that Orlando Bloom can act (or at least to pretend that it doesn't matter that he can't act) and for Christopher Lee, even if he wasn't able to be with us in the third part (can't wait for the DVD). This is an honor for the best computer generated character to grace the big screen (Gollum, that's you) and for the British actor whose obsession with the character helped him become an even bigger part of the proceedings (Andy Serkis). This is not an honor for the film's ill-conceived final act, in which Jackson never really figured out how to provide both a cinematic end and an end that would satisfy the book's legion of fans. Nor is this an honor for the endless helicopter shots which never tired Jackson, but probably should have. Now will Jackson please put his King Kong plans on hold for a year and go make a cheap, gory and funny zombie film? Please? Pretty please.
8) Mystic River (Director Clint Eastwood)
My Review: http://www.epinions.com/content_114982620804
The fact that Mystic River has been somewhat overpraised probably shouldn't take away from the fact that it's still 2003's meatiest slab of steak. This is red-blooded manly filmmaking based on a red-blooded manly book made with a cast of red-blooded manly actors directed by one of the most red-blooded manly actor-directors ever produced by American cinema. Sure, Laura Linney and Marcia Gay Harden both do strong work, representing the distaff side of the equation, but as always with Eastwood movies, this is about the awful things that men do to other men, and the legacy of violence that clings to masculinity like some sort of Original Sin. The entire success of this movie stems from Eastwood's insistence that he be allowed to shoot in the Boston area, because heaven knows that Dennis Lehane's novel couldn't have been moved elsewhere and shooting anywhere else would have rendered the whole endeavor false. Maybe none of the stars perfectly capture the cadences of South Boston speech, but Kevin Bacon, Sean Penn and Tim Robbins all manage to physically fit in. Tom Stern's shadow-filled, cool (temperature-wise) cinematography both symbolizes the film's air of moral ambiguity, but also belies its shattering emotional heat. The things that done work in the film, including the roles of all three of the film's principal women, are better explained in Lehane's novel, but Brian Hegleland's adaptation seems to make most of the correct tough choices.
7)In America (Director Jim Sheridan)
My Review: http://www.epinions.com/content_121246682756
I have friends who accuse me of just hating any movie that indulges in any kind of sentiment. That's not true. I just hate ham-handed sentiment, films that try to make me cry without earning the emotion. Films don't get much more sentimental than Jim Sheridan's In America. There are little kids doing voice-overs, a dead child in the backstory, a main character dying of AIDS and it's all bathed in nostalgia and yet Sheridan tells the story so beautifully that I went along with nearly every sentimental narrative swell. Set nominally in the 1980s in New York City, the movie basically recounts a year in the life of a Irish immigrant family trying to get their lives together. The narrative is rarely plot-driven and when it is, Sheridan often nearly falls on his face. Djimon Hounsou earned an Oscar nod for his commanding work here, but that doesn't change the fact that his plot line is obvious, artificial and belabored, easily the film's least believable aspect. What's more believable is the depiction of the anguished, but loving marriage between the luminous Samantha Morton and Paddy Considine. Additionally, Emma and Sarah Bolger give two of the finest child performances you're ever likely to see, managing to seem like real human kids, rather than the over-cute or over-earnest versions of what Hollywood too-often interprets children to be. Mixing film work and digital video, Declan Quinn's cinematography is magical, both intimate and realistic and stylized and lovely depending on the moment. Yes, In America does tug at your heartstrings, but it does so with such immense storytelling craft that I couldn't help but get involved.
6)Raising Victor Vargas (Director Peter Sollet)
Making an independent film is never easy, particularly when you're working with a cast of inexperienced actors, a budget of less than a million dollars and it's your own first film as well. Why, then, does Raising Victor Vargas appear to be so effortless? Only writer-director Peter Sollet knows for sure. This is the story of a young man (Victor Rasuk) who thinks he's a player until he falls in love with a young woman (Judy Marte) who makes him examine his own life. That sounds fairly conventional, but there's nothing conventional about this speedy 88 minute movie, which often feels entirely improvised and never feels less than natural. Marte and Rasuk have the kind of screen presence that could never be taught to a Paul Walker or a Hilary Duff and yet you can never imagine a casting director finding a way to properly use them. Sollet makes the Lower East Side locations into a character of their own and gives Victor Vargas a look that suggests it could take place at nearly any time. Although the characters are identifiably and distinctly Latino, the core emotions are completely universal. Despite a story and style that could either go the way of Kids or American Pie, this is an earnest and straightforward depiction of young love that manages to both suggest the occasional mistakes and immorality of youth and the humor of romantic misadventures without ever being forced or prurient. This is a small movie, but also a genuinely special effort, a triumph for its 27-year-old director.
5)Pretty Dirty Things (Director Stephen Frears)
***ADDED 4/11/04***
I got to this one a little late in the game, which I regret. The premise is a fascinating set-up for a thriller: A night porter at a flop-house is called in to investigate a blockage in a toilet only to discover a human heart. Ultimately, though, Pretty Dirty Things isn't really all that thrilling. What it is is a striking depiction of the darker underbelly of living in a multicultural melting pot. The horrors inflicted on the immigrants in Steven Knight's London are the kinds of things that we try to pretend don't occur in Western countries, but here they are. With the help of cinematographer Chris Menges, Frears makes a striking contract between a naturalistic depiction of the chaos of cosmopolitain London and the hyperstylized interiors occupied by Chjwetel Ejiofor's Okwe. This is provocative cinema as well as artful filmmaking.
4)American Splendor (Directors Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini)
My Review: http://www.epinions.com/content_109390827140
Harvey Pekar isn't a particularly pleasant man and he doesn't live in a particularly pleasant universe and he isn't surrounded by particularly pleasant people. That's my best explanation for why this film, as textured and literary as any released in 2003, didn't catch on any better than it did. Oops. This is a trailblazing biopic, blending documentary and animation elements along with the straightforward narrative of a man whose story could never be told in a mainstream film, because nobody would care. When I first reviewed the film, I assumed that Paul Giamatti's embodiment of the gruff, uncouth and annoying Pekar would earn awards notice and I'm still somewhat baffled by how he ended up being ignored. This is an actor throwing himself completely into a character without the slightest interest as to whether viewers identify with him, which may ultimately have been the film's mistake. The unflinching depiction of Pekar's Cleveland home and dead-end life just weren't what Hollywood people wanted to see and it's easy to understand how a community that would embrace the blatant falsehoods and mock heroism of something like The Last Samurai wouldn't have any interest in a movie that says that even if what you know is awful or mundane, there's still poetry in writing about it. Hope Davis and Judah Friedlander (as Pekar's large, odd co-worker Toby) are also fantastic and the film's debate about Revenge of the Nerds is about as funny as movies got in 2003.
3)Cold Mountain (Director Anthony Minghella)
My Review: http://www.epinions.com/content_123211976324
Maybe I just ignored what this movie was actually supposed to be about and took great pleasure in what it actually seemed to be about. I've read one critical review after another complaining about the implausibility of the film's central romance between carpenter Inman (Jude Law) and the inappropriately beautiful Ada (Nicole Kidman). Frankly, that drives me insane. Those people treat the movie as if it were When Harry Met Sally, a contemporary linear romance about two people who are supposed to be in love and are supposed to be together and that we're supposed to root for throughout. What if the movie isn't that simple? What if it's about how people sometimes need at least the idea of love to survive a horrible time? As I read the movie, it isn't about the eternal and genuine love that Ada and Inman had for each other, but about how with the world falling down around them, they reached out for any kind of purity they could find. If they had actually known each other, yes, perhaps they would have realized that they weren't meant for each other. But since they didn't, they both fell in love with pictures and with having another human being to live for amidst the horrors of war. It's a wildly romantic notion without the need for a conventional romance. All that aside, Cold Mountain is the work of a consummate filmmaker, an epic about grand romantic notions, if not a grand romance. The battle scenes are harrowing and graphic, the performances are heartfelt and convincing, and the cast is the deepest you'll ever see at the movies. From Law to Kidman to Phillip Seymour Hoffman to Brendan Gleeson to Ray Winstone to Natalie Portman to the broad spirit of Renee Zellweger, this is a cast with nary a weak link. This is a David Lean movie for the new millennium and marks Anthony Minghella as one of our finest filmmakers. That being said, just as The English Patient and The Talented Mr. Ripley were films that alienated many viewers, I guess it's no surprise that this movie found a divided audience.
2)Lost in Translation (Director Sofia Coppola)
My Review: http://www.epinions.com/content_112616115844
Like Cold Mountain, this is a romance that isn't necessarily about two people who are really in love. And like Cold Mountain, it's a movie about people reaching out for each other across a cultural void. That's were the similarities end, so I'm not gonna go any further with this comparison. Lost in Translation continues Sofia Coppola's progress from an actress to mock to a director to respect. Bill Murray and Scarlett Johansson play two accidental tourists in Tokyo. He's a sagging movie star making commercials for the quick cash, while she's generally adrift, looking for meaning in Japan while her photographer husband (Giovanni Ribisi, who was also in Cold Mountain) is on assignment. They're both alone, alienated and perplexed by Tokyo's modernity and so they gravitate towards each other. The relationship that develops is the year's most complicated cinematic pairing, a union that never progresses in any kind of predictable manner. And yet, at all times, we tend to understand why she sees in him and what he looks for in her. As she did in her first feature, The Virgin Suicides, Coppola achieves a languid and poetic pace, as well as a narrative style that resembles a dream, or at least gauzy state of drunkenness. Johansson is beguiling and ever-open to the camera, while Murray achieves a Buster Keaton-esque mixture of comedy and melancholy. The cinematography is beautiful, the music is flawlessly selected and the result is quite funny and yet seriously introspective.
1)Fog of War (Director Errol Morris)
My Review: http://www.epinions.com/content_122642468484
I take back what I said about the Murray-Johansson relationship being the year's most complicated cinematic pairing. It's child's play compared to what's going on between filmmaker Errol Morris and former Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara. Although there's the sense throughout that Morris wants to eviscerate McNamara, who is often seen as the architect of our failed military intervention in Vietnam, the consummate documentarian allows his subject to justify himself. McNamara manages to win both sympathy and further condemnation, but it's left for the viewer to decide which is most persuasive. The result is a powerfully ambiguous film which should be shown to any military or government official who holds the life of young soldiers in his hand. It isn't an argument against war so much as an argument against going to war casually. More universally, Fog of War is a movie about how many of us view our lives in retrospect and how people justify the choices from their pasts. Fog of War is especially impressive because it ranks at the head of a bumper crop of high quality documentaries given wide release in 2003. Other worthy possibilities include Capturing the Friedmans, Lost in La Mancha, Stevie and the 2002 release Winged Migration, to say nothing of The Real Cancun. Sorry. Decided to go out with a joke.
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SOME 2003 SUPERLATIVES:
5 BEST PERFORMANCES BY AN ACTRESS THAT THE ACADEMY CHOSE TO IGNORE:
1) Evan Rachel Wood, Thirteen
I challenge any member of The Academy to watch Whale Rider and then to watch Thirteen and to tell me in what insane world Keisha Castle-Hughes' performance is better than the work turned in by Wood. Yes, Whale Rider is a slightly better movie than the somewhat amateurish and slightly exploitative Thirteen, but while Hughes gives a good performance for a young actress, Wood gives an emotionally shattering performance that would be outstanding by a person of any age.
2) Scarlett Johansson, Lost in Translation and Girl With a Pearl Earring
The only reason I put Wood ahead of Johansson is because her performance had a higher degree of difficulty. That doesn't take anything away from Johansson's enchanting work in two award-worthy features this year. I wouldn't want to take anything away from the supporting actress nominees, but I would pull any one of them in favor of Johansson's Translation work.
3) Zooey Deschanel, All the Real Girls
While the film itself is a semi-improvisational acquired taste, Deschanel gives a complicated and beautiful performance as a small-town girl in love with the town playa.
4) Hope Davis, American Splendor
Never merely the meek girlfriend, Davis' Joyce Brabner is perfectly presented as the one woman in all the world who could actually love Harvey Pekar. She makes it make sense. Plus, mention should be made of Davis' excellent work in the difficult, but underseen Alan Rudolph film The Secret Lives of Dentists. Campbell Scott was also compelling in that film.
5) Ludivine Sangier, Swimming Pool
I don't really remember that much of her performance, but I can't emphasize enough how much I enjoy looking at Ludivine Sangier. She wasn't enough to draw me to Peter Pan, but she's pretty darned remarkable.
6 BEST PERFORMANCES BY AN ACTOR THAT THE ACADEMY CHOSE TO IGNORE:
1) Paul Giamatti, American Splendor
I believe I've already said my piece on this movie and this performance.
2) Peter Sarsgaard, Shattered Glass
Just because the character doesn't die, freak out or break down in a crying fit doesn't mean that there isn't an awful lot of acting going on here.
3) Sean Astin, The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King
I'm kinda amazed that I feel this way, but by the end of the trilogy, Ian McKellan was the only actor to earn an Oscar nomination, Viggo Mortensen was the ordained movie star, and Elijah Wood was the guy who got to host Saturday Night Live, but Astin was the one who made me care about his character.
4) Bill Nighy, Love Actually
Although I recommended it, Love Actually is an awful movie. But every time Bill Nighy's wasted rocker shows up on screen, it suddenly becomes OK. That takes talent.
5) Billy Bob Thornton, Bad Santa
Any time you do most of your acting opposite a fat child, a dwarf and Bernie Mac, it's tough to know what to expect. Thornton is so committed to his disgusting mess of a character that he carries a one-joke movie through countless patches were the laughs are as rare as Christmas spirit in my household.
6) Chjwetel Ejiofor, Pretty Dirty Things
Because she's all beautiful and stuff, Audrey Tautou became the centerpiece of this gem's marketing campaign, but that doesn't mean that Ejiofor wasn't its star and moral center.
MOVIE THAT I'D LIKE TO HAVE ADDED TO THIS LIST JUST TO ANNOY PEOPLE:
The Hulk (Director Ang Lee)
My Review: http://www.epinions.com/content_103540821636
I have a hard time convincing most people that this was the best popcorn movie of the summer. I have a hard time explaining to people that after Gollum, the Hulk was the year's second most engaging CGI character and that Nick Nolte's performance was a work of over-the-top genius. My opinion that the film's editing should have been nominated for an Oscar keeps getting laughed at as does my wish that Ang Lee would get a chance to direct a sequel. Oh well. For my money, The Hulk offered comic book thrillers, but also offered a much more interesting critique of repressed masculine aggression. Three muted cheers for The Hulk.
MOVE THAT I MIGHT HAVE ADDED TO THIS LIST EXECEPT THAT IT'S NOT REALLY A MOVIE:
Kill Bill: Volume 1 (Director Quentin Tarantino)
My Review: http://www.epinions.com/content_115167825540
I loved the stylistic excesses of Tarantino's Asian-flavored revenge epic, but there was never any excuse for it being parceled into two films. I'd have rather he made the cuts necessary to deliver a single, three-hour whole product than having to sit through a developmentally half-baked portion of a movie. Yes, I really enjoyed watching Volume 1 of Kill Bill, but the movie just sits there. Perhaps after the second part is released this summer there will be a multi-disk DVD in the offing that will give the two pictures as a single whole. That might make me happy.
SEVERAL MOVIES THAT WEREN'T ACTUALLY VERY GOOD NO MATTER WHAT ANY OTHER CRITIC (OR EVEN I) MAY HAVE TOLD YOU:
ALTERNATIVELY, OVERRATED MOVIES OF 2003
1) Bend it Like Beckham (Director Gurinder Chanda)
Appealing subject matter and Parminder Nagra's winning lead performance were almost enough to temporarily convince me that Gurinder Chanda's film was good. It's not. It's horribly directed, constantly breaking rudimentary rules of cinematic grammar (and not in an experimental way). With the exception of Nagra, it's also badly acted, particularly "It" Girl Keira Knightley and the horrid Jonathan Rhys-Meyers. Predictable at every turn and sometimes embarrassingly written, I'm still amazed that this became a breakout hit in a country that still mostly thinks of David Beckham as a pretty boy who married a Spice Girl.
2) The Cooler (Director Wayne Kramer)
Good performances by William H. Macy, Alec Baldwin and Maria Bello don't change the fact that at the end of the day, this is a movie that has absolutely no story to tell beyond the facile irony of a guy who's woefully unlucky until he, well, gets lucky. Yawn. Damon Runyan would have needed more material to build such a character into a short story, but Kramer piles on the plot holes and wild coincidences for 101 minutes, punctuating the boredom with strong violence and strong sexuality. Oh well.
3) The Last Samurai (Director Ed Zwick)
Yes, I gave this a slim recommendation, but if you want to talk about a movie that didn't wear particularly well in my mind, this is one to talk about. Endless beautiful, empty vistas, half-hearted philosophy and a typically egocentric Tom Cruise performance do not an Oscar winner make.
2) and 1): Matrix Reloaded and Matrix Revolutions
How can generally panned movies be overrated? Well, because they weren't universally panned. No two movies in 2003 annoyed and offended me worse than these two pieces of tripe and that includes Daredevil, Darkness Falls and Boat Trip.
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