YEAR IN REVIEW: Andrew's Top Ten Movies of the Year

This was an exceptional year for film. Unlike in 2013, however, most of my favorites did not make the Oscar shortlist. This was my first year reviewing movies, and I have to say that – at a time when the most talented storytellers are being outsourced into the now-illustrious television – filmmakers are giving us more reasons to attend the cinema. There really is nothing like sitting in a theater, with other people, with maybe a some popcorn (I had my fair share this year.)

You might notice that this is a LONG piece: feel free to skip to the summary nuggets of my criticism towards the last paragraph. But I really wanted to review the movies that I didn’t get a chance to review because of this late-budding urge I had. This is my critical time capsule, to remember why it is that these movies worked so well for me, because – maybe in two years time – I won’t remember the specifics. And this was a revolutionary year for filmmaking, a year that truly pushed the borders of storytelling. 

Here’s my 2013 list:

1. 12 Years a Slave

2. American Hustle

3. Blue is the Warmest Color

4. Her

5. Stories We Tell/The Act of Killing

6. Enough Said

7. Nebraska

8. Short Term 12

9. Gravity

10. Blue Jasmine/Philomena

And here begins my 2014 list:

10. The Immigrant (Tie)

Though a box-office bomb, The Immigrant managed to ravish, dazzle and mystify in a way few movies did this year. This strange and macabre voyeur through 1920’s New York tells the story of Ewa (Cotillard), a Polish immigrant taken under the wing of pimp Bruno (Joaquin Pheonix). She is rejected by her American family; she has no one else to turn to except Bruno, and is manipulated into being one his show girls, an exotic mistress in a sexy Lady Liberty costume. God’s eye is on every sparrow,” magician Emil (Jeremy Renner) tells her, in love and hopeful that he might protect her from Bruno's unrelenting grasp and rescue her sister from deportation. Bruno - rife with jealousy, fearful of losing his prize - kills him, however, drawing Ewa further into his bind.

Pheonix and Cotillard are doing excellent work here, expanding their repertoire of already impressive material (including Cotillard's collaboration with the Dardennes, a year best performance).  James Gray's writing and directing is at once stunningly atmospheric and deliciously melodramatic, a slow-burn examination of the American institutions that glamorize and perpetuate female bondage. It's arty, cerebral and really creative. A truly well done film.

10.) Whiplash (Tie)

Whiplash is Damien Chazelle’s feature debut, a film with the startling pace of a horror movie. It’s about music and the drive for perfection; unlike Black Swan, however, its intensity is always grounded in a recognizable humanity. The story is based on Chazelle’s own experience at Julliard, and the familiarity and confidence he brings makes Whiplash, not simply one of the best first-feature debuts of the year, but one of the best films of the year, period.

Miles Teller and J.K Simmons are a ravishing pair. JK Simmons, a technical virtuoso with both the snarling bite of an attack dog and the sociopathic smile of a Cheshire cat, is simply sensational and terrifying. Teller bleeds, sweats and drums like a victimized animal, fighting for his life, his soul and his art, letting go of all that matters to him to pursue his goal of being the best. While the narrative is not as tight by the third act and the tertiary characters – the Dad, the girlfriend – don’t complement the main plot in the way Chazelle might have intended, Whiplash, nonetheless, is a roller-coaster ride, one that I wouldn’t hesitate to ride again and again.  

9.) Foxcatcher

Foxcatcher is disturbing in its portrayal of masculinity. If one image from this film endures, it is John Du Pont (Steve Carrell) looking at the wrestlers he has brought together, having fun and basking in a camaraderie, yet feeling separate and desperate in his attempts to integrate himself. The movie is also very much about the abuses of power: Du Pont takes Mark Schultz under his wing, laughs with him and then, afterwards, Du Pont insults him by calling him monkey. It is sudden, but it reflects the sociopathy of the accumulated wealth John Du Pont has acquired. The brooding nature of repression haunts every image, from the stuffed birds, to the frigid and green landscapes of Foxcatcher farms. 

Many (I'm not citing, but many reviews indeed did) unfairly criticized it for skirting over the topic of homosexuality. But Miller uses his masterful cinematic eye to suggest a sexual repression so buried and desperate, it can only culminate and end in tragedy. Set in a time before Reagan acknowledges AID’s, this bristly morality tale reminds us what lies underneath the façades of American masculinity.

Mark Ruffalo does his finest work, breaking down in front of the John Du Pont documentarian, when he refuses to call him his hero. Tatum, as well, is fiercely committed to his desperation and angst. Carrell is excellent as well, navigating Du Pont's psychosis with ease and grace, showing a refreshing sense of discipline and control. These are all actors working at the top of their game, playing really well off of each other. Bennett Miller gives us a fascinating character study, an impeccably crafted film and the most refreshing and original takes on American masculinity this year (and this, to be mean, is meant to actively target A Most Violent Year, which did not do nearly enough as I thought it would).

8.) Love is Strange

In an impressive year for gay cinema, Love is Strange stands out from the rest. Though his previous film Keep The Lights On suffered from a loose focus, strongly indicated themes and a melodramatic execution (it was superbly acted, though), here Sachs never rings a false note, achieving a disciplined balance between melodrama and comedy, allowing his actors rather than his ideas to drive the narrative.

A gay-couple getting married after 39 years of marriage, George (Molina) loses his job as a composer at a church for officially coming out, which forces him and husband Ben (Lithgow) out of their New York apartment. Ben rooms with his nephew’s family, George (Molina) with young gay neighbors.

Love is Strange encompasses many stories and subplots without ever feeling over-stuffed: Kate (Marisa Tomei) and Joey (Charlie Tahan) play their annoyance at George's intrusion very well, as we see them undergoing their own crises of identity, perhaps the intensity of their situations is too much to bear.

How they relate to a man that is old and not as sharp as he once was, unable to detect social cues, selfish and unaware as old age can make some? Molina's experiences are a bit more comical as he learns his neighbors’ party lifestyle doesn't quite mesh with his own.

Contained within the space and plot machinations of the film, is an allegory for the inevitable separation that occurs when one partner leaves the other. Is it possible to find your happiness apart from the person you’ve shared your life with, to paint or compose with the same drive, to live fully and happily? The film grapples with impermanence as an inevitable fact of growing older: Sachs uses every character, from Tomei’s to Molina’s, to effectively explore his themes. 

Love is Strange is about what it means to love your friends, your family and your partner, and explores the various strange forms this love might take. It is the type of movie that is hardly made anymore but needs to be.

7.) Selma

Ava Duvernay’s Selma is an ambitious work of filmmaking, tackling the Selma to Montgomery marches with not only the intention of chronicling but with exploring, as well, the various the personalities who made it happen: Amelia Boynton, John Lewis, Annie Lee Cooper, Diane Nash, James Bevel and many others, balancing the intimate with the grand, the political with the personal.

This a movie that explores the various meanings behind "coming together". Lyndon B. Johnson is not passionate about passing the Voting Rights Act of 1965 until he sees the police beating the protesters on his television screen. SNCC (Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee) and SCLC (Southern Christian Leadership Conference) struggle against each other, until they realize victory is only won if they stand tall side by side. Coretta King, marginalized in the household by MLK's protectiveness, instead emerges herself by the end as a triumphant voice for racial injustice. Duvernay casts an eye not only on the cruel beatings and gassing on the Edmund Pettus Bridge, but on quiet moments, opening on King (Oyelowo) adjusting a necktie, showing us his sorrows and anxieties in a jail cell, his comforting demeanor to the grief-stricken father of Andrew Young, explaining to Coretta with conviction that he loves her deeply.

Ava Duvernay avoids the stuffiness of most period dramas. These are real people, figures we can recognize, heroes with flaws and temperaments and anxieties. Selma inspires you by faithfully chronicling this crucial chapter of the civil rights movement, by giving racist villains such as George Wallace and Jim Clark their due indictment yet never letting them descend into caricature. By proving that the ultimate enacters of change are ordinary people, not god-like heroes, and by showing us what is at stake when we don’t participate in the political process, Selma takes deliberate pains to remind us that history is not best left in the past, but must continually be dealt with. 

She never lets itself become too comfortable with standard story-telling, creates fascinating juxtapositions between King’s political activism and King’s home-life, balances the atmospheric with the humanistic and invites our audience to remember history and recreate it once more.

6.) The Babadook

It’s no secret: horror films consistently rank among the weakest genre-films being made today. Repetitive formulas, cheap thrills and over-worked folklore make the medium hit-or-miss, with misses far more common than hits (and even then...). Famed directors, from Kubrick and Hitchcock to Polanski and DePalma, have given us the gold standards of the horror genre, works of art as well as works of horror, and they've been long gone. Horror moviemaking also happens to be a grossly male-dominated world, as is typical in Hollywood – but, in one of the best surprises of the year, Jennifer Kent outdoes her male counterparts with her debut feature, The Babadook. Unlike contemporary hits Insidious or The Conjuring, this film dares to embrace the banal conventions of horror to create something unique and truly meaningful, an homage to its predecessors as well as a (finally!) truly feminist and humanistic interpretation of the genre.

The unsettling suspense of the film builds to the last thirty minutes, in which Amelia’s confrontation with the Babadook rips your heart out. Because, while entertaining us, Kent effortlessly draws out this touching narrative about a mother fighting for control of her own mind. Davis gives one of the years best performances, going from a deeply loving parent, to a possessed monster, to a person desperate to gain back control. Sam can only helplessly watch as his mother is devoured by the Babadook’s unrelenting grasp, as his mother confronts the menacing and overwhelming monster.

As freaky as a twisted Dr. Seuss tale and a more brutally honest a take on motherhood as I've seen recently, The Babadook charts new territory. It shamelessly entertains, reminding us that artful horror is not dead.

5.) Two Days, One Night

Two Days, One Night is about the morals of cut-throat capitalism and the will one must possess to survive in it. Marion Cotillard’s quiet yet exhilarating performance anchors the Dardenne brother's sparse script and hands-off directing style. It’s a documentary, almost, in its ability to bring about these powerful moments through the most seemingly straightforward conversations and moments. No music to set a mood, no elaborate cinematography, no perceived artistry to be found, only the uncompromising style the Dardenne brothers usually approach their work with.

The plot is deceptively straightforward - a woman is fired at the expense of employee bonuses and confronts her co-workers to demand they stand with her in solidarity. It’s a stunning morality play, but it is what underlies the story which makes Two Days, One Night such a transcending work of art. She’s battling not only with those who want to keep their bonuses and see her gone, but with her depression as well, a debilitating self-loathing that sees itself realized when her boss informs her she is no longer needed. “It’s always darkest before the dawn,” the clichéd quip goes, and Sandra – after two weeks of barely recovering from a nervous breakdown, on hearing this terrible news – must fend off the encroaching dark clouds of depression and self-loafing to keep herself, her relationship and her family afloat.

If the social structures of the solar panel company crumble faced with this ethical dilemma, it is simply the fascinating backdrop of an extraordinary odyssey undergone by 2014’s most complex and fascinating heroine. (I explore her complexity in my review: check it out!) The Dardenne’s have fashioned one of the best movies of the year: Sandra’s story is our story.

4.) Leviathan

God is everywhere, God is omniscient, God is unrelenting. But what God does each of us worship? The characters in Andrey Zvyaginstev’s Leviathan are looking for a sign of God, which they maybe hope to see in the presence of whale; this whale is a metaphor for a hope that never comes. We only see colossal bones, littered near the ocean, chalk white and eerily cavernous. The small coastal Russian town our characters inhabit is isolated and scenic, filled with humble men and women, many whom have grown up together, working filthy jobs, whose sweet tonic is vodka (everyone drinks a lot in this!), who pride themselves on sticking together.

Roman Madyanov is a revelation as Mayor Vadim Shelevyat, a character desperate for power and respect. A portrait of Putin hangs menacingly as a reminder of the powerful state. Throughout, we watch him converse with the priests, justify his actions to evict Kolia and threaten his best friend with death, theorize about God’s power and his own. He is at once a monster and a pawn, an arbiter of control as well as a small cog in a larger machine of Russia’s corrupt political machine. 

Leviathan draws from Dosteovsky and the Bible, Kafka and Hobbes, Coppola and Shakespeare, but its uniquely immersive and suffocating and contemporary. The Russian-Orthodox effigies that haunt the film are extensions of governmental power – indeed, the grand theme of this film is that religion and politics are inseparable and all-encompassing; Phillip Glass’s score punctures into us by the end, the shot of the waves crashing have us gasping for air, for a reprieve, but there isn't one offered to us. Leviathan is an indictment of these superior powers that push us down and herald our suffering. It's the years most thoughtful film, and - man - does it pack a punch.

3.) Mr. Turner

“I believe you to be a man of great spirit and fine feeling,” Sophia Booth (played immaculately by Marion Bailey) tells Mr. Turner, the mysterious guest who frequents her Margate-inn. Indeed, Mike Leigh’s Mr. Turner is both a spiritual and emotional journey about a man hopelessly searching for the many meanings and forms art takes in one’s life. In 19th Century London, a time when paintings are being mainly valued as commerce and commodities (aren't they still?), JMW Turner strives for artistic purity and integrity. 

Throughout the film, Mr. Turner, a heralded visual artist, must deal with his art becoming politicized and debated by wealthy buyers (I think of the HILARIOUS John Ruskin, who had me in tears) and mocked and ridiculed by the general public. Timothy Spall’s insanely hilarious and heartbreaking performance betrays vulnerability and bitterness, artistic drive and sexual repression, anchors Leigh’s own vision of a world seen through the eyes and the heart of an artist.   

The idea of JMW Turner, an artist ahead of his time yet intrinsically bound to his era, a man of great flaws and deep existential anguish, is felt not only in Spall’s brilliant performance but in the colorful tableaux’s framed by cinematographer Dick Pope and in the quaint vignettes Leigh’s script gives us. Whether having us stare in disgust as he fucks his vulnerable servant on a bookcase or stare in awe of his peculiar genius as he splatters red paint on his work, Leigh invites the viewer into the moral and physical of 19th London, never raising judgments against Mr. Turner or the ignorant world that surrounds. Mike Leigh’s Mr. Turner explores JMW Turner’s artistic temperament while heralding a unique cinematic language all its own, as visionary and heart-breakingly enigmatic as the multifaceted main character who mans the movie’s helm.

2.) The Grand Budapest Hotel 

Wes Anderson’s best film to date, The Grand Budapest Hotel is a truly original and groundbreaking piece of filmmaking, bringing together many actors from the Anderson-arsenal to deliver a ravishing tale about the rise and decline of the mythic Grand Budapest Hotel.

If this movie should be characterized with one all-telling adjective, it’s nostalgia: the story-within-a-story-within-a-story suggests as much. The quixotic, melancholic fable is told by former lobby boy Zero Moustafa. It is a recollection of his days a lobby boy in the Grand Budapest Hotel, a relic of an old world much like its dedicated concierge M. Gustave (Ralph Fiennes) who takes the orphan under his wing. 

When Madame Céline Villeneuve "Madame D" Desgoffe und Taxis (Tilda Swinton) dies and M. Gustave inherits her treasured ‘Boy with Apple,’ a series of events ensues putting M. Gustav and his dedicated lobby boy Zero into conflict with both the Taxis family and the Nazis. Admist the trouble, Zero falls in love with the baker Agatha, Gustave chips his way out of a jail Alcatraz-style and Jopling stalks them with the ferocity of a savage detective.

It brings together many classic plot lines and tropes to weave a tale not only of grand artistry but great fun as well. European architecture, old-world customs, slap-stick humor, Edgar Allen Poe,  gourmet confections, gangster-like bullet slinging, Alcatraz jail escapes and family-inheritance trysts: Anderson’s masterpiece The Grand Budapest Hotel has it all.  It’s escapist and fantastical movie-making at its oh-so best!

1.) Boyhood

Boyhood has already received unanimous praise and critical treatment so I won’t yell at deaf ears. I’ll only say it’s the year’s best for a reason. It’s not only an incredible achievement and admirable committed work on behalf of Richard Linklater and his acting ensemble, but it’s a truly original, a time capsule. Its an authentic look at coming-of-age, one that struck me particularly because of how much I saw myself in Mason. It’s effortless and genuine and a lot of fun. I saw my life through Mason’s, and it was a cathartic experience to see him grow-up before my own eyes. Unequivocally, 2014’s best film. A masterpiece on so many levels. 

Television review: Checking in on HBO half-hours GIRLS, TOGETHERNESS and LOOKING

(HBO)

Girls

There’s an air of pointlessness clouding Girls at this point.

Though Lena Dunham remains intellectually-engaged with her breakout half-hour, the currently-airing fourth season is landing flat. This was never an especially comedic or dramatic series – its creative juice has long been mined from the perceptiveness in its ideas and language – but at this stage, it seems to be weightlessly humming along. There’s a thematic unity in the predicaments faced by Hannah (Dunham), Marnie (Allison Williams), Jessa (Jemima Kirke) and Shoshanna (Zosia Mamet) alike – they’re in definitive moments, where they can either make a serious leap forward or regress once again – and, occasionally, there’s an inspired, biting engagement, as in the goings-on at the Iowa Writers Workshop. Even at its least cohesive, no one should accuse of Girls of being stupid. But with Marnie drowning in a romantic subplot, and Jessa coming out of another slight, inconsequential storyline, and Shoshanna entering the working world, Dunham’s work isn’t cohesive right now; rather, it’s awkwardly segmented.

Girls has never seriously developed its characters, and part of that is the point: one, these characters are stuck; and two, evolutions in the relationships are what chiefly matter to Dunham as a storyteller. The problem, then, is this: the characters are mostly separated right now, and they’re just not interesting enough. They lack gravitas, depth – and they’re not particularly funny, either. Girls appears trapped within a cynical, finite premise about a group of friends falling out and drifting apart. The show is perpetuating this conceit and therefore is dependent on our investment in its characters’ individual challenges. But we have no real reason to invest if what’s going on isn’t especially funny, or romantic, or profound. This may be a show that just doesn’t age that well; crafty dialogue and a contemporary feel can only get you so far. But there’s no sense of history – remembering what Jessa did in season two takes a minute, and when you finally do, you realize it doesn’t even matter – and so, when things are naturally slower, Girls is an excessively uninvolving experience. Thank God Elijah (Andrew Rannells) comes around every so often to spice things up a little bit. C+

Togetherness

The Duplass Brothers don’t really transcend. The appeal of their work, and the joy of experiencing it, is derived from its lived-in nature. As writer-directors, Mark and Jay put beautifully naturalistic dialogue on the page and, when behind the camera, translate it to the screen with unmistakable intimacy and subtle verve. But as far as slices-of-life go, they don’t take that artistic leap, as we’ve seen Jill Soloway do on television with Transparent or as Ira Sachs did in film last year with Love Is Strange. Even so, I’d argue television is an optimal format for them, and thus far, Togetherness is working quite well as a result.

I’m struck by how quickly the series has created a lush sense of familiarity and comfort with its characters; the Duplass team is bouncing them off of each other as most shows typically do in later seasons, when the groundwork has been laid. In Togetherness, between the beautifully grounded performances of its quartet, everything already feels ripe to explore. The series’ third episode, as an example, focuses individually on Melanie Lynskey’s Michelle, who decides to take a night out for herself rather than join her husband and friends at a party. Lynskey is so connective as an actress that she, just 90 minutes in, feels remarkably fleshed-out; as such, watching Michelle patrol nighttime Los Angeles is an evocative, gently informative experience about where she is in her life, and what’s going on with her internally. It’s a perfect example of what the show does with all of its characters, softly subverting the archetypes they ostensibly fit as.

Each episode works as a slight, intimate experience, and at this stage, they work best as standalone half-hours. There’s less of an overriding intent here than in a Transparent; Togetherness is more about a feeling, and an ongoing exploration of people at a certain place at a certain time in their lives. Like Duplass films, this series is not especially thick. But it retains their rich, innate realism and specificity, and the episodic format is rendering their work more streamlined, effectual and resonant. B+

Looking

In the second season premiere of Looking, Patrick (Jonathan Groff) and friends attend a massive gay party in the woods of Northern California. The episode up to that point had been pleasantly unremarkable, but in comes director Andrew Haigh’s Steadicam shot: against the music, he pans around the scene, inviting into his frame an impenetrable sense of joy as an incredibly diverse community comes together. The camera captures it all, and the sensation is irresistible.

Looking may be the most visually-adventurous (and imaginative) half-hour on the air, as beyond the mastery with the camera, Haigh and his team make fascinating choices: I haven’t seen sex scenes filmed with such a combination of naturalism and eroticism as they are here, and as touched on with that moment at the party, Looking’s framing choices are blessedly inventive. Haigh is a filmmaker turning to television, and so you can understand where his strengths and weaknesses stem from. Looking just doesn’t have the bones of a television show. Surrounding Groff’s likeably dorky Patrick are a collection of thin characters doing mostly uninteresting things (though Lauren Weedman’s Doris can do just about anything and we’ll smile, I’ll concede). I’ve put aside my confusion as to how Patrick, Augustin (Frankie J. Alvarez) and Dom (Murray Bartlett) became best friends, but there’s an ongoing problem: these actors just don’t have the chemistry with each other that you see within the cast of Togetherness or even Girls.

But the show is making strides. In particular, its fluency has come through more in Patrick’s affair with his boss, Kevin, as there’s a weight behind both their banal conversations and their more intimate encounters. And the show is skirting around, with a bit more deliberateness, the sexual tension between Dom and Patrick – you’re finally getting a sense of something there. But Looking is sorely lacking in a strong foundation; it still can’t confidently or successfully weave between characters and relationships, even in its second season. It’s a bit stoic, and is yet to delve deep. But if Haigh’s narrative work is still defined by a collection of unintegrated parts, he holds you with profound image-based communications. Looking possesses a unique vivacity in that way: it’s pretty darn masterful when, you know, nobody’s talking. B

Review: MOMMY

Roadside

Mommy is Xavier Dolan’s fifth feature, about a single mother, Diane (Anne Dorval), struggling to take care of her over-active and mentally-challenged son, Steve (Antoine Olivier Pilon). Add into the mix neighbor Kyla (Suzanne Clement), a stay-at-home mother who tutors Steve. She becomes attracted to this boisterous and messy relationship and embroiled in the heated triad. Meanwhile, Diane must contend with a choice she must make: will she commit her son into an institution? With her son, she cannot work because taking care of him is a full-time job, a constant responsibility.

This movie centers on its characters’ delusions and fantasies: the Oedipal attraction Steve harbors towards his mother, Diane’s belief that she can live in peace with her son, and Kyla’s desire and secret wish to live a life as thrilling as the one that unfolds before her throughout the film.

The film’s comedy is its drama, its sadness is its joy, its abuse is its love. Steve is a dominating presence, a character capable of extreme empathy and intolerable cruelty. The beauty of the mother/son relationship is its cynicism, where the harshest insults are quotidian realities, a relationship as strong and durable as it is tempestuous and poisonous. Dolan cleverly and humanely shows us Diane’s emotional limits; when she’s happiest with Steve, she ignores the lawsuit altogether and pretends it’s all right. Only then, do we realize that she isn’t going to be able to sustain this relationship for very long.

The film alternates its narrative perspective between Diane and Steve. Dolan doesn’t have a primary protagonist, preferring the vague atmospheric tensions both characters provide equally. Steve seems blissfully unaware his mother can commit him at any time; Diane, meanwhile, represses the foreboding knowledge. They are characters that complement each other well. But the idea mainly works on paper – there’s just too much that distracts from the central relationship.

Kyla doesn’t feel necessary to what Dolan is trying to say with Mommy – Clement is a great actress, and the character doesn’t necessarily detract. Her presence adds an off-kilter energy with welcome doses of humor. Nevertheless, stuff with her doesn’t entirely gel into the movie’s central story. By the end of the film, when Kyla is telling Diane she is leaving for Toronto, it’s not an emotionally-compelling moment. These are great actresses, yet Dolan is unable to offer us the focused structure to make a moment like that land.

The best tableaux the film provides is the dancing scene, in which all three characters are in the kitchen swaying to the melody. If there weren’t three other montages, I would call it something truly special. But that scene comes off like reincarnations of other montages, and thus its effectiveness is substantially limited.

Dolan shoots the movie in a 1:1 ratio, which creates an appropriately claustrophobic mood. It's an interesting choice, one that works in the beginning but is inconsistently applied. Dolan’s free-wheeling instinct to occasionally expand the screen is not thought-out enough, detracting from story at hand. Why complicate when you can illuminate?

Mommy never registers a false note, but it has a lack of focus, inexhaustible emotions, an inconsistent style and an overly-long running-time. Dolan’s fifth film is a missed opportunity that remains a bold and admirable effort. Here is a filmmaker steadily improving with immense skill and empathy, an ability to elicit powerful performances, write dynamic dialogue and create a strong visual palette. This was a frustrating viewing experience because Dolan is supremely talented – he just needs to get out of his own head.

Grade: B (and an A- for the performances)

Film review: MOMMY

(Roadside Attractions)

There’s a fervent spirit to Xavier Dolan’s wildly-uneven Mommy, exuding passion and helping to maintain an emotional resonance throughout even as the movie itself never completely works. Dolan, a filmmaker in his 20s, demonstrates extraordinary raw talent as well as some age-related limitations; the director achieves a depth of feeling many twice his age would be glad to reach, but his approach is also overwrought and lacking in a particular kind of confidence.

Mommy, predominantly and unusually shot in a 1:1 aspect ratio, is coarsely authentic and specific. Dolan’s words and phrasing spill out of actors like perverse poetry, a playful “fuck” here, a profanity-laden tirade there. This film – in which Diane (Anne Dorval) struggles to hold it together after her severely-ADHD-plagued adolescent son Steve (Antoine-Olivier Pilon) returns home – understands that words convey everything: familiarity, resentment, pain, uncertainty, fear. Dolan is immensely skillful with such elicitations: Steve’s psychotic episodes get under your skin less because they intimidate, and more because they radiate a harrowing vulnerability. Instances like this remind that Steve and Diane, with such distinct dialects and senses of humor and expressions of intimacy, are uncommon to the cinematic landscape. Their gritty, make-ends-meet lifestyle feels fresh simply for its presence – even a class-conscious film like Two Days, One Night surveys pristine suburban streets and pricey little coffee shops – but the level of detail is marvelous. The boxed wine masking as something more, the cigarette smoke seeping into roasting vegetables, the booming laughter overpowering a dinner party – you feel the affectionate touch with which Dolan textures these moments, catch his soft infusions of humor, and ultimately, understand that these are his heroes. Mommy works as a messy, operatic tribute to them.

More specifically, this is Diane’s movie. I wasn’t always clued into the purpose behind the film’s visual trick – which, upon review, was a fine stylistic choice that Dolan tried to fashion as something more intellectual – but whenever Dorval graced the screen, I got it. In this tight frame, Diane might as well be posing for a portrait: Dolan’s lighting here is always luminous, and Dorval, smacking on gum or stretching out her short blouse or gulping another cup of boxed wine, goes into ultra-character mode. Diane can be nasty and abrasive, and she does have a breaking point, but for Dolan, this is a figure of tremendous valor and tenacity, one that deserves to be seen, heard, honored, and contemplated over. Mommy takes Diane to a very dark and complicated place, and Dorval’s remarkable embodiment of the character throws any forced sympathy out the window: we’re permitted to really grapple with this heroine and her choices. In a stunning sequence late into the film, Diane imagines a life in which things stay okay – in which her son’s self-destructive nature is quelled, and he goes to college, and gets married, and lives his life – before realizing that fantasy’s impossibility. In a bold and affecting climax, Diane makes a decisive, controversial choice. And her final scene – she lays it all out, taking responsibility and owning her decision – is simply spellbinding for its emotional rigor.

If this all sounds extremely complimentary, it’s meant to. Dolan is comfortable with a Top 40 soundtrack and screaming matches that verge on monotony, but he’s able to transcend cliché and tonal simplicity with startling consistency. His musical sequences, most notably to Oasis’ “Wonderwall,” manage an impressive effectiveness and visual intrigue; everything gets thrown into a sensory melting pot, and what emerges is something curiously, enormously moving. A lot of this has to do with Dolan’s actors. Jubilantly expressive and visibly fragile, Pilon is revelatory as Steve. He’s commanding and shows considerable range. As for the actress in the titular role: my God is Dorval brilliant here. Every movement in every part of her body, every delivery of every word, every tear and laugh and scream – like Marion Cotillard in the aforementioned Two Days, this performance is a top-to-bottom tour-de-force, a character creation of stunning complexity and limitless passion.

Mommy is a film of many virtues, but it’s profoundly flawed and jarringly undisciplined. A third character is thrown into the mix, Kaya (Suzanne Clement), a housewife battling a stutter who finds meaning by spending time with Diane and Steve. It doesn’t make much of an impact. The movie has a fascinating, strong core in the depiction of protectionism between mother and son; Kaya’s presence magnifies in the film and mostly distracts from that main conceit. She tutors Steve and joins the two on their various adventures. Dolan brings misfits together and finds them bringing joy into each other’s lives; though intriguing, this secondary element is too distant from the movie’s center. And Kaya’s character doesn’t work. She has a husband and daughter who exist in the periphery, and things seem fine enough; we don’t know enough about her, and aren’t given much of a reason to care about her. Dolan brings things around solidly in a final, devastating scene between Diane and Kaya – but it still doesn’t merit the substantially uninvolving material that leads to it.

I don’t usually like making these kinds of declarations, but: Dolan’s age is clearly related to the film’s problems. He’s too in his own head, and Mommy as a whole is overlong and in need of a serious edit. About midway through – when Diane and Steve (and Kaya) are building themselves up – Steve literally pulls the screen outward, and suddenly Mommy is in widescreen. The movie goes from “Things are difficult” to “Things are good,” and with an interesting if obvious hand, Dolan uses the width of the lens to communicate this. But he’s only halfway through – you know things won’t be so sunny for long – and so he recycles the idea. He narrows the lens again, and expands it, and then narrows it once more: the approach becomes unbearably heavy-handed, an indication of when Dolan’s ignorance of subtlety becomes insufficient. Aside from being excessively obvious, this visual trickery undercuts some really powerful stuff happening onscreen. Here, Dolan is his own worst enemy. He has about four good endings within the film’s final forty-five minutes, but he presses on, still managing to land beautiful moments but with diminishing returns, and finishes at a merely decent place. Watching Mommy, a film of great distinction and passion, you desperately want Dolan to get out of his own head and let the movie rest. But, in too many senses of the word, his work emerges as overstuffed.

Dolan’s style is just that, though: heightened, uneven, expressive. And Mommy is, considering its flaws, unusually moving and affecting. There’s a great movie within Dolan’s final product, one that doesn’t undermine substance with a flat visual device or an unnecessary extra character. What we get is a decent film that exhibits greatness, and is always deeply-felt. There’s an intense power to Mommy – an inescapably resonant story and a pair of haunting performances – and this film inches Dolan away from mere idiosyncrasy and towards genuine vitality. Presently, he’s awkwardly in-between, and his audience can only wait for an inevitable leap forward.

Grade: B