Saturday, December 31, 2022

Three Favorite Films of 2022

As the first year when movies and moviegoers truly returned to cinemas in full force in the three years since the global pandemic began, 2022 made for an interesting and unusual year in film. Some releases had been delayed and pushed back for nearly that long, like Tom Cruise’s long-awaited Top Gun: Maverick, a decades-later sequel that’s mostly impressive as action movies go (or on the flipside, Michael Bay’s Ambulance, an almost comically breakneck action flick that fewer people saw but that I still enjoyed as an offbeat summer movie). And that seemed to be the trend this year from a business or industry perspective since 2022 felt slightly imbalanced in terms of what was on offer at the box office. The studios behind a hefty backlog of mainstream movies that waited out the lengthy period when seats at venues had remained emptier could finally capitalize on their products, alongside some smaller movies that were made during the pandemic and often had to leap over sizeable hurdles to accomplish the task. The mainstream offerings are rarely the movies that interest me most, however, and for the most part, my three favorite films of 2022 were no exception. I did watch each of them at least twice at the cinema, and in one case even multiple times, and I felt equally involved during every repeated viewing.

Max Walker-Silverman’s sublime lyric poem of a movie, A Love Song, was the film that moved me the most in 2022, so much that I watched it at three different cinemas three nights in a row. The film’s pitch-perfect lead actress, Dale Dickey, had received the Excellence in Acting award at the Provincetown International Film Festival back in June, and I attended her conversation on stage about her career while I was at the festival, though I hadn’t watched A Love Song there. I liked how relaxed and offhand she was with her answers, as someone who’s been a successful character actress in well-known films for many years now. Her leading role as modern-day nomad Faye is long overdue then, but what an ideal role it is, fully inhabited and imbued with the spirit of someone who’s experienced enough of the world to be slightly weary of it, yet who’s also managed to retain her sense of wonder in the face of loss.

We’re never quite sure about why Faye ended up living in her camping trailer out in the desert wilds of Colorado at a peaceful lakeside location dotted with wildflowers (which often get their standalone still-shots at key points in the film). We simply see Faye flip open a calendar to a month and date sometime after March of 2020 and watch her write “TODAY,” resetting the present moment for herself in the wake of something that pushed her previous life off course, which happened to so many people throughout the pandemic. She has a tiny perch of a bookshelf with only two books on it: John James Audubon’s Birds of America for birdwatching and learning to identify birds by their calls, and a book on astronomy for stargazing and identifying the constellations. On my second viewing of the film, I noticed that the movie actually begins while the screen is still dark, when we hear the sound of a mourning dove cooing. That bird and its sound will play a pivotal role during the film’s quietly powerful climax with Faye alone on a windswept mountaintop at night later in the film, my favorite moment from any movie this year.

We also learn that Faye is awaiting the arrival of Lito (beautifully portrayed by Native American actor Wes Studi), a long-ago friend of Faye’s from high school days, with whom she shares an unresolved attraction. A young girl and her band of brothers who live nearby stop by to ask if Faye can move her trailer so that they can unearth the body of their long-buried father from under the site, to which she kindly replies, “Someone’s expecting to find me at this one.” The gentle dance between Lito and Faye plays out in semi-silence and through songs, both songs that they perform and songs that they spin the radio dial to see what fate will play for them. To see how that relationship unfolds, you’ll just have to watch the movie to appreciate how delicately it’s handled. Some might compare A Love Song to recent Oscar-winner Nomadland, which shares a few elements of its storyline and a similar locale, but whereas Nomadland is drawn on a wide canvas, A Love Song draws its energy from intimacy and quietude, paying homage to the tiny yet universal details that rescue us from heartbreak and urge us to keep going.

Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis is a film that I was surprised to enjoy as much as I did. While I’m fine with all of Luhrmann’s previous movies, the flashiness of his style never quite drew me in entirely. Elvis, while also obviously flashy at times, operates on a different scale and in a different register, perhaps because it’s ultimately attuned just as much to its subject’s quietly tragic fall and early death, not simply to his turbulent but meteoric rise to pop stardom and worldwide fame. Austin Butler’s nuanced and tireless powerhouse performance remains my favorite performance of the year, and even if he doesn’t win an Oscar for it, I can’t imagine that the award should go to anybody else. His performance feels deep and transformational in a way that the central role in a biopic rarely ever can (notably, in a year that also saw the release of a worthwhile biopic of Whitney Houston, another top-selling popstar whose life ended tragically early). 

Perhaps because Austin Butler’s face and voice were up until now less familiar to audiences overall, he was able to slip into Elvis Presley’s skin and persona more subtly. When we watch him perform the songs and recreate pivotal moments from Elvis’ career, he’s believable in ways that span generations. One friend of mine who saw the movie at the cinema said that everyone from her kids to her father enjoyed it, and she mentioned how rare it is to find a movie like that these days. Coincidentally, I watched the movie at one cinema with an older audience and at another cinema with a younger audience of mostly high school students, and both were equally and clearly under the considerable spell that the movie casts over its viewers, certainly in scenes where Elvis’ own audiences breached the standards of propriety in that era as the United States careened towards the civil rights movement.

Although the movie explores the biographical details of Elvis’ life, from his family’s conflicted ambitions for his career to his problematic business partnership with the shifty, self-christened “Colonel” Tom Parker (played by Tom Hanks with relish in a performance that I admired more than other moviegoers in the United States did), the film’s real focus is on Elvis’ music and its popular appeal to the American public, over whom it washed like a tidal wave for two decades, winding through genres from rock & roll to blues to pop to country to gospel to film soundtracks. That broad cross-section of musical styles seemed intentional, and it’s one reason why Elvis became the template for later popular artists like Madonna, Prince, and Michael Jackson, each of whom refused to be tied down to any single genre of music, bending the rules to defy those conventions. Several scenes depict how Elvis sparred with his handlers and often improvised on the spot to avoid being ensnared by giving his listenership exactly what Tom Parker thought they might want at every particular moment. The standout montage scene is the recreation of a major televised production that was supposed to be an innocuous Christmas special that found Elvis instead swerving to elevate it to an upper echelon that matched his talent.

Of course, the movie does eventually descend into Elvis’ struggles to hold onto his relationships with his wife Priscilla and his young daughter Lisa Marie, whom it became harder for Elvis to keep as the focus of his life when his worldwide fame (alongside various dangerous addictions) began to overwhelm his attentions, not to mention his mental and physical health. But by the time the forces around him try to help him rally to keep things together, it’s already too late and slipping out of his control. At those moments especially, Austin Butler’s performance seems to access a higher level of authenticity and veracity. Some have argued that at 30 he might have been too young an actor to play the role at Elvis’ later stage, but since Elvis’ career started in his teens and he died at 42, the casting feels smart and well-timed to me. As things stand, Butler totally owns the performance, and by the time we arrive at a clever diptych that segues from Butler’s recreation of a late televised performance of Elvis singing “Amazing Grace” back to Elvis’ original performance, the film’s magic has been fully consummated and the deal is sealed.

Finally, Halina Reijn’s Bodies Bodies Bodies surprised me by being the movie that made me laugh the hardest in 2022 both times I watched it at cinemas. At my first viewing, the audience was mostly a crowd of younger women who often laughed when they heard me laughing from the back row since many of the film’s cleverest moments spin along the generational lines of gender. My second viewing was with a group of college students from my university whom I took to see the movie the week before fall classes began, and they were just as into the film as the first crowd I saw it with. It’s a movie that’s been somewhat categorized as a horror film, though I think a spoof of a horror movie is about as close as it comes to fitting that description. For me, it’s actually a satire of a satire of Generation Z, who get colossally skewered by the intelligent screenplay and the actors who are all-in from start to finish, giving Gen Z the most precise X-ray of itself that it’s likely ever to receive.

Bodies Bodies Bodies (or Bodies x 3 as I’ve come to call it) is set at a “hurricane party” poolside and then mostly inside a big country estate owned by the parents of one of its richest characters (memorably played by Saturday Night Live’s Pete Davidson, doing his goofy lost-boy thing at its best), a sprawling mansion that loses electricity in the storm for the greater portion of the film. With the exception of a ripped older guy portrayed by Lee Pace in a performance that should galvanize his career for a whole new generation of viewers (plus one other male character who wanders in briefly at the tail end of the film), the rest of the cast is totally female, and importantly so, given that the movie was written and directed by women and begins with a long lesbian make-out scene between the two lead characters (Amandla Stenberg as Sophie and Maria Bakalova as Bee), which intentionally recalls the notorious opening scene of Larry Clark’s Kids.

A lingering masculine face-off between the two male characters, though, is the fallout of the central game of the film’s title that’s also the movie’s initial gimmick, a bit of a red herring that’s meant to mislead the audience into miscategorizing the movie. It’s like a deadly version of hide-and-seek that’s supposed to end with a character pretending to be dead, but instead ends up with a character who’s actually dead. Far from a Clue-like whodunit, however, Bodies x 3 uses that gimmick to spin out into a trenchant social commentary about how little its characters trust each other and why, in fact how much they actively dislike one another, even when pretending outwardly just seconds before that they do like each other. As the characters wander around the darkened house lit by their multi-colored glowstick necklaces and glowing cell phone screens, the scenario opens up the possibility for all of the characters to turn against each other, much to the delight of the audience. Some awesome lines arise from those circumstances, which touch on class status when an African-American character is told she’s not middle-class but upper middle-class because her parents are professors at a university. Her simple and hilarious retort: “It’s public.” Issues like gun control and police brutality also get thrown into the mix to great effect, delivered with the best comic-timing pause of the year (“You shot me! With a gun!”).

Like a wry Shakespearean drama, the bodies upon bodies do pile up on the set by the film’s end; their deaths are often brought about by the very breaking of the bonds of social trust that pitted the characters against each other. (Nobody who’s seen the film will soon forget Lee Pace’s tightly constructed and finely edited scene in the mansion’s gymnasium.) One character’s death that set everything into motion early on turns out to be the most pitifully tragic and also somehow the funniest, too, making a clear statement about how a generation that’s supposedly connected by technology also became treacherously disconnected from reality in the process. Bodies Bodies Bodies, like my other two favorite films of the year, recalls plenty of now-classic Hollywood movies in its structure, characters, and themes. I have a feeling that all three of these films will last and find their audiences for a very long time.

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