Judging from my five favorite movies of
2015, or the five films that stayed with me the most, this has clearly been a
somewhat unusual year for cinema. Genres like animation and outer space
adventure tales, which I’ve previously enjoyed but never taken too seriously,
suddenly offered films that left me thinking more deeply than they had before.
Two of my favorite movies of the past twelve months were box office hits, rare
for the films that appeal to me the most during any given year. It makes sense
in a way, as global capitalism marches on, that there’s a gratifying balance to
be found between the blockbusters and the small independent movies; some
talents will trickle up, while others will trickle down.
Ryan Gosling’s directorial debut, Lost River, which was booed by the
audience and trashed by critics when it premiered at the Cannes Film Festival
in 2014, is a film that almost nobody saw this year for that reason. Its
cinematic release was extremely limited. The movie showed in only three
theaters in New York and Los Angeles and grossed just over $45,000 in the US.
Fortunately, I happened to be in New York the one week that the movie screened
at the Angelika Film Center there. Although many have accused Gosling of
ripping off David Lynch (and yes, Lynch’s films obviously influenced the
movie’s elliptical style), Gosling’s shy brand of coolness is stamped
all over the movie.
The narrative of Lost River is intentionally slim: a young man named Bones (Iain De
Caestecker, handsomely approximating Gosling himself) strips copper from
abandoned urban buildings and sells it to help support his kid brother and his
mother (Christina Hendricks), who ends up in a rather interesting line of work
herself. They’re trying to save the house that they’re about to lose. Several
subplots emerge: Bones has a quasi-romance with a neighbor (Saoirse Ronan),
gets pursued by a towering, brutal bully (Matt Smith), and discovers a flooded
town that explains the movie’s title. The scrappy characters and dreamlike,
frequently transfixing images, underscored by Johnny Jewel’s pulsating
electronic soundtrack, mean more than the sum of those storylines.
The result is a very American product
(by a Canadian-born director) that’s both contemplative and phantasmagoric,
combining the grotesque surrealism of writers like William Faulkner and
Flannery O’Connor with the hypervisual verve of a graphic novel.
Coincidentally, I watched the film immediately after I saw
the fun and riveting horror flick It
Follows at the same theater. Both movies were filmed in Detroit, and both use that legendary
location’s current decrepitude and ruined grandeur to sad and exhilarating
effect, another element that makes Lost
River feel distinctly American to me.
The most important film of 2015 is Tom
McCarthy’s Spotlight. I saw it when I
was at a conference in Chicago, but it’s set here in my home city of Boston.
Following a team of investigative reporters at the Boston Globe who won a Pulitzer Prize for exposing the tragic
breadth of the Catholic church’s cover-up of the city’s decades-long priest sex
abuse scandal, the impeccable ensemble cast (especially Mark Ruffalo as the
film’s ethical backbone) and the cumulative emotional impact work with
devastating precision. What impresses me even more in retrospect is how
carefully such explosive subject matter is handled in the film. Never once does
the material tip in the direction of the sensational, rooting the movie in
genuinely moral territory from start to finish.
Disney/Pixar’s Inside Out, directed by Pete Docter, is perhaps the only cartoon
that will ever appear on a list of my favorite films. It’s often as profound in
its ideas as Spotlight, and that’s
really saying something. The movie takes place mostly inside the mind of an
11-year-old girl named Riley, who’s recently relocated with her parents from
the midwest to San Francisco. As Riley starts to grow homesick, missing her
former town and her friends there, the emotions in her head, voiced by an array
of comedians and TV personalities, begin to wrestle it out with one another:
Joy (Amy Poehler), Sadness (Phyllis Smith), Anger (Lewis Black), Disgust (Mindy
Kaling), and Fear (Bill Hader).
The inside of Riley’s mind, wide and
sprawling as a world of its own, comes to life in a way that couldn’t be
conveyed in any other medium. The film is mostly about memory, and the sorrow
inherent in the notion that some of our memories, notably those from childhood,
will simply be lost over time. In the film, memories are represented by
colorful spheres; as Riley’s memories rack up, workers keep them safely
shelved, plucking out the ones that have turned gray. The wasteland of
forgotten memories where Joy finds herself later in the movie, an endless slope
of darkened, discarded spheres, is an image that hasn’t left me since I saw the
film several months ago. Neither has the movie’s central message: sometimes
Sadness has to be allowed to take control.
Ridley Scott’s latest venture, The Martian, I saw at a beautifully
restored art deco theater in Brattleboro, Vermont. The packed Saturday night
audience was easily the most subdued and well-behaved I’ve had the pleasure of
viewing a movie with in years, reminding me of just how important that aspect
of moviegoing can be, and how much it can affect our enjoyment of a film. The crowded
house also provided a nice counterpoint to the on-screen desolation; an
American astronaut, played with equal parts humor and gravitas by Matt Damon,
gets stranded alone on Mars after a storm separates him from the rest of his
mission crew. What follows is high and gripping entertainment, as Damon’s
character engineers ways to grow food and survive on an inhospitable planet,
while we await his rescue by the NASA folks down on Earth.
Of course, recent hits such as Alfonso
Cuarón’s Gravity and Christopher
Nolan’s Interstellar could easily
have made The Martian seem like a
copycat film. And as much as I loved Gravity,
I think there’s a bit more humanity in The
Martian overall. The science of Ridley Scott’s movie also feels more
thought-out and authentic, perhaps because of its fictional source material,
the eponymous 2011 novel by Andy Weir on which the film is based. It’s
refreshing to see a scientific film that seems both accurate and respectful of
its audience’s intelligence.
Finally, another movie that I saw in New
York over Thanksgiving, Josh Mond’s James
White, is a little film that I’m very glad I had a chance to watch. A
family drama set in Manhattan, just after the death of the protagonist’s
somewhat absent father, it comes complete with a boost of adrenaline, thanks to
the energetic performance of Christopher Abbott in the title role, an aspiring
magazine writer who’s trying to find his path and seriously flailing. Cynthia
Nixon’s fierce and soulful portrayal of his mother, a cancer patient nearing
the end of her life, is award-worthy, masterfully evoking her character’s
delicate strength. A heartbreaking dialogue between the two in
their apartment’s bathroom contains the finest writing and delivery of any
scene that I saw this year.
