Moments often more memorable than movies
Individual scenes can linger in the mind long after film fades
This is the season when movie critics look back on the year — seeking the diamonds that glittered briefly in the vast landscape of car chases, computergenerated monsters, marathon fantasies, Adam Sandler films and all the other dross.
Often, though, it isn’t the movies you remember — it’s the moments. The scene in the overly dark James Bond film Skyfall, for instance, when Silva, the villain played by Javier Bardem, ties Daniel Craig’s Bond to a chair and purrs seductively, or the surprise in the closing credits of Sarah Polley’s documentary Stories We Tell, a movie that doesn’t quite deliver on its promise of invented histories but does a marvellous job of evoking the past using the sleight-of-hand of film making.
Even special effects can be used to further the art, rather than just bury it. A great moment from 2012 was the first appearance of the tiger in Life of Pi, for instance, a marvellous concoction that elevates what had been a ponderous meditation on religion and faith into the breathtaking imagery of magic itself. The tiger on the boat, floating in the moonlight, is what I’ll remember from Ang Lee’s movie long after the symbolism has faded away (actually, it faded away before the closing credits).
There were also computers involved in the re-creation of the lethal South Asian tsunami, as depicted in The Impossible, but they were invisible. The movie itself is one of those true-life tear-jerkers that has you wondering about the disasters it doesn’t show — we follow one family’s tragedy while thousands of dead and homeless walk past in the background — but director Juan Antonio Bayona creates unforgettable images of monstrous waves, floating debris and chaos.
And then there were things the computers wiped out, such as Marion Cotillard’s legs in Rust and Bone, a film about a whale trainer who loses her limbs. A scene where Matthias Schoenaerts, playing a brutal street fighter, carries her into the sea for a swim was an astounding moment of emotional pull, mixing pity, envy and surprise into an unforgettable tableau.
Silver Linings Playbook became a romantic comedy that swung on a dance contest, but for a while it was a beautifully skewed portrait of dysfunction. The scene where Bradley Cooper, as an obsessed and estranged husband with bipolar issues, and Jennifer Lawrence, as a grieving widow, meet at a dinner party was a high-wire act of sexual chemistry and mental illness.
The crime drama Killing Them Softly was overly explicit in its connection between ordinary street toughs and the Wall Street kind, but it had some of the best dialogue. The scene in an airport hotel between Brad Pitt’s efficient assassin and James Gandolfini’s old hit man was a talky encounter that packed more punch than all the monsters descending on The Avengers.