Five Favorite Films of 2017

As popular cinema grew ever more mainstream and dominant throughout 2017, in a year when even the political realm became more corporate and corrupt (who thought that could be possible?), the small arthouse films that appealed to me the most also got riskier and more ambitious than usual. When the artistic stakes are higher, it makes sense that this type of counter-balancing would take place, a kind of aesthetic resistance and survival instinct, which is also a refusal to give in to market demands, saying that artful movies aren’t going anywhere, and saying it more demonstratively and provocatively than in prior years.

David Lowery’s A Ghost Story lingered with me longer than any other movie that I saw in 2017. Even while I was watching it at the cinema, I knew that would be the case. Framed in a square with rounded corners in the center of the screen, to evoke the look of old printed snapshots from photo albums, the movie is a valentine to the idea of time, as well as a bold and resonant excavation of the meaning of time. On its quiet and undisturbed surface, it’s a story of grief, and one that many people who chose not to see the film thought was driven by a gimmick. A ghost under a flowing white sheet with eye-holes cut out of it haunts the home that Casey Affleck’s unnamed character shares with Rooney Mara’s unnamed character after Affleck’s character dies in a car crash early in the film.

Long, silent scenes in which the camera doesn’t move at all set up the action of the tale, as it were. The body of Affleck’s character, seen from a distance across the room, lying under a white sheet at the hospital. Mara’s grief-stricken character, sitting alone on the floor of their dark kitchen, methodically devouring an entire pie over several minutes. These scenes are not meant to try the viewer’s patience, but to put us in the characters’ mindset, and to begin to ask what it means for minutes, hours, days, and years to pass, both in the presence of others and in the absence of others. And an image that might seem sentimental elsewhere — the ghost repeatedly attempting to scratch open a painted-over crack in a wooden doorframe, in which Mara’s character has slipped a secret note — felt perfectly logical and moving to me.

When the succession of humans isn’t in the house, the ghost is never alone for too long. It can see another ghost in a similar predicament in the house across the way, and the two ghosts can even communicate with one another, at least for the audience’s purposes. Because this is a film that’s better to watch knowing less than more, I’ll leave the movie’s other rich details and innovations unexplained, except to mention that the film’s ambitions deepen and quicken when the entire movie pivots and the ghost cascades through time and space, only for time and space to loop back on themselves until the experience of the film circles into a seamless whole and vanishes all at once. Few films work on poetic association and pull it off, but this one does.

God’s Own Country, a British debut directed by Francis Lee, was the best gay-themed movie that I watched over this past year, and not just because everything turns out fine for the two central characters in the end. Set in the austere and rolling hills of Yorkshire, it’s the first gay movie since Alain Guiraudie’s Stranger by the Lake that’s so fully formed by its immersive landscape and atmosphere. The story follows Johnny Saxby (Josh O’Connor), who’s become increasingly withdrawn and dissatisfied from living and feeling entrapped on his family’s remote sheep farm. A fast and discreet encounter with another young man after a livestock auction near the start of the film shows that Johnny’s not comfortable with anything more than casual sex, though a conversation with a female friend of Johnny’s outside of a pub also suggests that he has been somewhat openly gay, if also obviously self-stunted by his rural environment.

The appearance of Gheorghe (Alec Secareanu), a young Romanian man who comes to help out on Johnny’s farm, gradually changes all of that, and the film draws its intimate power from the slow dance of attraction in which the two men become entangled. It’s impossible not to compare the film to Brokeback Mountain, of course, and God’s Own Country alludes directly to its predecessor not only thorough sheep-herding, but also via articles of the men’s clothing that are shared and left behind. In a film whose dialogue is often spare, subtle and precise symbols convey more readily what the two men are feeling: repairing a stone wall together that they nonetheless remain on opposite sides of, an abandoned sweater that Johnny pulls over himself, echoing a riveting earlier scene in which Gheorghe protects a tiny lamb in a way that nudges harshness into tenderness. While I felt the screenplay ran out of road a bit by the end (and it’s an end that also seems a bit too easy to me), the film’s performances are beautifully calibrated, and Josh O’Connor’s transformation as Johnny struggles to re-emerge from himself is remarkable.

Unlike the two previous films, there’s very little that’s quiet in Darren Aronofsky’s mother! Starring his current real-life girlfriend Jennifer Lawrence, the movie has been almost universally lampooned and reviled, with just a brave handful of critics coming to its defense. It’s definitely the most demanding and artistically ambitious movie that I saw in 2017, as well as one of the funniest and most brutal films of this past year. The laughter and horror that I felt while watching mother! at the cinema were so close to each other that they sometimes almost coincided, and I haven’t experienced a film in a very long time which has accomplished that. Aronofsky also references everything from Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? to Rosemary’s Baby, yet he still manages to create a film that’s rarely derivative and totally unique.

Most interpretations of mother! that I’ve read and heard since watching the film skitter along the allegorical surface of the movie; Jennifer Lawrence’s character represents Mother Nature, some viewers think, and how she’s been exploited by human beings. Others mention the biblical underpinnings of the farcical plot in the film’s first half, when Ed Harris’ character brings his wife, played by Michelle Pfeiffer, to visit the home where the god-like figure of Javier Bardem, a reclusive poet, resides with his young wife played by Jennifer Lawrence. It unfolds as a strange comedy of manners until the two sons of the visiting couple crash the party, setting the second half of the film into motion with an act of violence that’s clearly intended to be likened to the story of Cain and Abel.

Beyond that point is where the film gets interesting and the metaphors go deeper. Although I don’t think Bardem’s character is a stand-in for Aronofsky himself as director, the film certainly does transmit messages about authoritative male power in that creative context, alongside and in contrast to how women (and particularly Hollywood actresses) get treated by audiences and the publicity machine of moviemaking: adored, sexualized, worshipped, scrutinized, shunted aside as time passes, then brutalized by the cult of celebrity as they age. (I couldn’t help thinking how this movie was made just when Hillary Clinton was being savaged in the press, the ultimate misogynistic takedown of a woman in a position of power.) The film’s most brilliant stroke is that the cult of celebrity becomes an actual uncontrollable cult, a cult that dismantles the entire house piece by piece and utterly invades the central couple’s privacy, to put it mildly. All of this unfolds as the mass violence of the past century stampedes across the screen in ways I’ve never before seen on film, and in ways I’m not sure any other director could achieve.

My favorite documentary of 2017, and the easiest film to love this past year, was Faces Places (or Visages Villages in French), directed by filmmakers and street photographers Agnès Varda and JR. A smart combination of a road movie, odd-couple comedy, and public art project, the film traces the journey of JR’s traveling “photography truck,” which produces larger-than-life printed images directly from a slot on the side of the vehicle. The pair drive from town to town through the French countryside, finding everyday people to photograph and meaningful stories to tell, always with some sort of humanistic or political slant. Then, they wheat-paste their large-scale images onto particular surfaces for particular reasons, creating outdoor art installations that may last for years and attract widespread attention, or become ephemeral within a brief period of time.

Early in the movie, the filmmakers encounter an older woman in an industrial town, who staunchly refuses to move out of her home and vacate it for developers. Because she’s resided there for nearly her entire life and now lives alone, her story immediately resonates with viewers; we feel like we know her in only a matter of minutes, just in time for her face to be emblazoned across the front of the building that she has a right not to leave. Three wives of shipyard workers in a port city also see their images blown up to gigantic sizes after they pose before towering stacks of multicolored shipping containers; their stories are as just as significant as those of the men who surround them.

Agnès Varda herself is a legend of French New Wave cinema, a contemporary and close colleague of Jean-Luc Godard (who has a certain kind of unflattering cameo late in the film), so her own personal stories are equally important in the documentary. After sharing her recollections of friends and artists from her youth, she and JR undertake one of the most memorable photography projects of the film, affixing a long-ago image of one of her deceased friends to the side of a military bunker from World War II that fell from a cliffside to the beach below, only to become upended and permanently lodged in the sand. She remarks how her friend (the late fashion photographer Guy Bourdin) now appears as if he’s in a cradle, just like he belonged there.

On the same day (Thanksgiving) that I saw Faces Places for a noon matinee at The Quad cinema in New York City, I went back to see another excellent documentary later that night. I had stayed a bit longer in New York to watch a preview in Union Square of the much-anticipated gay movie Call Me by Your Name, which left me more than a little disappointed, so right afterwards I walked back over to The Quad to watch Brimstone & Glory, Viktor Jakovleski’s dazzling short documentary about the Mexican town of Tultepec’s annual National Pyrotechnics Festival fireworks extravaganza. To go from the relative lack of expected fireworks in Call Me by Your Name to the abundantly real fireworks of Brimstone & Glory provided me with exactly the boost that I needed, accompanied by an intense soundtrack of percussion that had me drumming away on my pant-legs in the otherwise empty theater.

In addition to showing how the residents of Tultepec spend many months of each year manufacturing their fireworks by hand, the documentary focuses on both parts of the fireworks festival: the Castles of Fire, and the Burning of the Bulls. The first part of the festival, attended by thousands of spectators annually, features enormous ten-story towers of fireworks with many spinning parts. We climb up these towers with workers (who are wearing tiny portable cameras on their hats) as they’re being constructed, and we even see one tower get struck by lightning in a storm and begin to go off prematurely. The second part of the festival is much more interactive, with spectators carrying and running with piñata-like bulls the size of trucks, packed with and trailing fireworks, which the onlookers all then chase and dance in the wake of. A team of medics treats the injured who’ve been burned or gotten hot cinders in their eyes, including young children, who then jump right back in to chase the bulls some more, a community ritual in which they want to partake. To be amazed by such daring footage captured so close up and wonder how the filmmakers did it lifted me out of the theater and into the sky.

13th Annual Provincetown International Film Festival (June 15th - 19th, 2011)

Having attended the annual film festival in Provincetown since 2005, I found the roster of films at the latest festival — in its thirteenth year — to be as solid as previous years. In the spirit of this blog, I’ll focus my comments on the handful of films that I enjoyed the most at last week’s festival, all of which I very highly recommend seeing when they arrive at your local cinemas over the coming months.

The documentaries are almost always a bit more satisfying for me than the narrative features. This could be due to the whole “truth is stranger than fiction” phenomenon, or more likely, it’s because telling a fictional narrative in an engaging way is a more difficult task these days. Most stories have already been repeatedly rehashed from many possible angles, but even more problematically, a narrative feature film needs to present itself with a distinctive storytelling style that also doesn’t seem false to the viewer. Finding an individual style or voice is perhaps the hardest element for any artist to achieve, film directors included.

My favorite movie in the festival was We Were Here, a powerful documentary about the early AIDS years in San Francisco. The film had played at the gay film festival here in Boston last month, and since I missed it then, I was glad to have a chance to see it in Provincetown. The movie delicately intersplices memories and anecdotes of five finely selected interviewees: four gay men and one female nurse. The four gay men, some HIV-positive and some negative, have all done important work as activists and otherwise in San Francisco over time: a visual artist, a street-corner flower vendor, an AIDS hospice volunteer, and the executive director of the GLBT Historical Society. They all speak with candor and quiet wisdom about witnessing first-hand, and from the epicenter, one of the most devastating (and ironically uniting) medical crises in American history, during which nearly 20,000 men in San Francisco lost their lives, the population size of many small cities.

I was most struck by the film’s seamless tone; the carefully interwoven interviews all felt contemplative, direct, and untampered with. The hospice volunteer movingly recounts how he never fit into the landscape of anonymous gay sex in San Francisco at the time, and once he began doing work as a caretaker, he realized that was how he could become close with other gay men. The visual artist tells a heartbreaking story of rushing his partner who was living with AIDS to the hospital, only to have him die before they arrived there. And the flower vendor recalls watching one man progress from riding around on his bike, to becoming ill and walking with a cane, to being very ill in a wheelchair; then, as new drug treatments were introduced, the man went back to walking with a cane, to walking past without the cane, and he finally returned to riding by on his bike again, older than before but back to his previously healthy self. That image is both instructive and life-affirming, just one of many moving examples from this profound and humane documentary.

Equally moving and profound is Buck, a documentary about Buck Brannaman, the real-life “horse whisperer,” who trained the actor Robert Redford for his role in the film of that title. While the documentary does explore Brannaman’s unique methods for taming and training difficult and unwieldy horses, it’s also concerned with the people who own those horses, and the people are often more in need of assistance than the animals to whom Brannaman so caringly attends.

Mainly, however, the film focuses on Brannaman’s own personal history and the reasons why he ended up in this unusual line of work. The scenes of Brannaman painfully remembering his early childhood — he and his older brother were violently abused by their alcoholic father — are deeply sad but ultimately redemptive. His memories of the foster parents who showed him the meaning of family and unconditional love after his mother’s death provide ample explanation of how he learned to have such insight into the horses’ behavior and his own. A frightening segment near the end of the film, when a wild horse that Buck is training brutally attacks its owners, culminates in a lesson which could describe both the vicious horse and Buck himself: “You can’t hold it against him for how his life has been.”

Errol Morris’s latest documentary Tabloid is also worth mentioning here. Far more offbeat than the other two documentaries that I enjoyed in the festival, it’s also original, bizarre, and hilarious enough that I was in tears laughing at several points during the film. It’s the story of former teenage Wyoming beauty queen Joyce McKinney and her alleged late-’70s “kidnapping” of the young Mormon boyfriend with whom she eloped to London. Morris pieces together the tale and so skillfully arranges its manic details that the effect becomes nearly hallucinatory. I’ve never been on a drug trip, but about halfway through the film, I was sure that it must be similar to what one would feel like.

From a cultural standpoint, Morris is invested in examining how any story becomes “the truth,” since Joyce McKinney’s "manacled Mormon" jaunt-gone-awry was sliced up, devoured, and dramatically reconstructed by the British tabloid press. Her own retelling of the situation is enthusiastically counterpointed with memories of the dueling tabloid editors who greedily bought and sold her story to a public hungry for vicarious thrills and sordid revelations, a predilection which our culture has obviously never outgrown. And neither has Joyce McKinney. She returned to the United States with thirteen suitcases filled with tabloid clippings of her own story, and today she’s still obsessed over the man she fell madly in love with so many years ago.

Keeping with the theme of crazy love, the narrative feature that I enjoyed most in the festival was Weekend, a downbeat gay romantic film from the UK. Two young guys in Nottingham, Russell (Tom Cullen) and Glen (Chris New), meet at a club and get to know each other over the course of a couple of lazy weekend days. Drinks, drugs, intense dialogue, and frequent sex are all involved, and it doesn’t hurt that both men are gorgeous in an unassuming hipster way. The film is at its most authentic when it delves into issues that resonate with many young gay men today: questions of dating, relationships, monogamy, marriage, loneliness, and self-fulfillment.

Glen is the more “out” guy in the pair, and also the one who’s more willing to interrogate social norms, while Russell is comfortably open but enjoys hanging out with his straight friends more. Who are we in relation to those around us, and how does intimacy with another person affect all of that? Wisely, Weekend avoids providing any clear-cut answers, but instead presents a genuinely intriguing and open-ended double-portrait. The cinéma vérité style of the film brings us in closer proximity to the characters and their situation, making the entire experiment feel naturalistic and true. The movie also demonstrates how gay couples all have to deal with problems that are both similar to those faced by heterosexual couples and different from them in key ways at the same time. Growing up with a sense of ourselves as “outsiders” gives gay men a greater need to connect, and it also often prevents us from being fully able to do so.

A straight and even younger outsider, Oliver Tate, has an equally tricky time connecting with those around him in Submarine, another UK romantic flick that’s set in Wales. The debut feature by director Richard Ayoade, Submarine puts a fresh and vibrant spin on the misfit’s coming-of-age tale. Craig Roberts is pitch-perfect in his performance as Oliver; he sustains the audience’s interest as thoroughly and intently as Holden Caulfield did in Catcher in the Rye. The lovelorn Oliver pursues his sullen classmate Jordana (Yasmin Paige) throughout the film, catching her but then losing her to a less frenetic sort of guy.

Visually and structurally innovative, the film goes a little over the top with a revenge subplot involving an affair between Oliver’s mother (Sally Hawkins) and a quirky New Age motivational guru (Paddy Considine). Yet we never really lose sight of Oliver’s hilarious and tortured journey into early manhood, which manages to be both wrenching and endearing. There’s more than a dash of Bud Cort’s title misfit from Harold and Maude laced throughout Roberts’ portrayal of Oliver, and the cinematic appeal of his character shows the potential for having a similar endurance. At one point late in the movie, Oliver muses that every person has a “sub-aquatic” mental and emotional life that makes it impossible for us ever truly to know what somebody else is thinking. The stunning fantasy sequence that follows Oliver’s break-up with Jordana, during which he curls up on his bed and literally floats away on the ocean, is alone worth the price of admission.

Perhaps the most exciting moment of the festival for me came when director Darren Aronofsky (Requiem for a Dream, The Wrestler, Black Swan) gave a brilliant answer to a question of mine at the festival awards ceremony. Aronofsky was the recipient of this year’s Filmmaker on the Edge award, so during his Q&A session with the audience, I asked him about an interesting comment that Natalie Portman had made when accepting her Golden Globe for Best Actress in Black Swan earlier this year. Portman remarked that she appreciated how, after pushing her through many exhausting takes for a scene, Aronofsky would tell her, “Now do this next take for yourself.” I asked Aronofsky how he knows, as a film director, when it’s the right moment to offer that to an actor. He responded that it’s like deciding whether or not to go for the fourth blue ghost when playing the Pac-Man arcade game! I’ll plan to see any future movie that’s directed by someone who can offer such a flawless ’80s video-game metaphor right off the top of his head.