SOCIAL THEMES DOMINATE YEAR IN FILM

This year at the movies was about the way we live now.

Monrovia, Indiana (Frederick Wiseman); Bisbee ‘17 (Robert Greene); Hale County This Morning, This Evening (Ramell Ross); Minding the Gap (Bing Liu)

A four-way tie for first place may look like wanton indecisiveness, but to me these lyrical, visionary documentaries add up to an indelible composite portrait of America right now. At a time when we tend to see ourselves and our fellow citizens as sociological stereotypes and ideological clichés, these highly personal films suggest that a different way of telling the American story — the crazy multiplicity of American stories — may still be possible.

Not because the filmmakers offer visions of consensus, but precisely because each one digs deep into the conflicts and contradictions that run through every neighbourhood, household and individual heart. Monrovia, filmed in a tiny, mostly white heartland town, is the latest work from an 88-year-old master. Hale County, set in a rural mostly black part of Alabama, and Minding the Gap, set in a mixed Illinois industrial city, are first features by skilled and intuitive young directors. Bisbee ‘17, named for a mining town in Arizona, is a powerful midcareer foray into historical memory and political strife. These movies touch on issues that often come up in journalistic hot takes or political broadsides, including race, masculinity, inequality and the changing nature of work. Each one forces you to suspend judgment, and to rethink what you thought you knew. They are acts of witness but also, as great documentaries must be, works of art, reminders that the job of the artist and the duty of the citizen are fundamentally the same: to pay attention.

Happy as Lazzaro (Alice Rohrwacher) Rohrwacher’s third feature starts out as a simple fable of rural Italian life, centred on a simple young man living among fellow sharecroppers in an isolated hamlet. By the time he reaches the big city, about halfway in, the film has already infused neo-realism with an old, strange magic. By the end it has transcended all categories and conventions and revealed something about the tragedy of modern life that seems almost unspeakably ancient.

First Reformed (Paul Schrader) Ethan Hawke, as a Protestant minister staring into the abyss of his own soul and the gathering darkness of climate-change catastrophe, gives a performance that is at once unassuming and overpowering. Schrader distils the spiritual and cinematic preoccupations that have defined his career as a writer (Taxi Driver) and director (American Gigolo) into an austere and elegant study in metaphysical and political anguish. Yes, the movie is topical. Among the topics under discussion are the meaning of human existence and the survival of the planet.

Private Life (Tamara Jenkins)

A movie about liberalminded, literary-bohemian heterosexual New Yorkers that finds something new to say surely counts as a minor miracle. A comedy that is sharp but not cruel, a drama that is poignant but not sentimental, an informative and unflinching look at fertility treatments — Private Life is all those things. And, maybe most of all, it is a wonder cabinet of incisive, un-showy performances, from Molly Shannon, John Carroll Lynch, Kayli Carter, Paul Giamatti and above all the splendid and fearless Kathryn Hahn.

Roma (Alfonso Cuarón)

You could almost live inside Cuarón’s intricate, pulsing widescreen compositions, borne along on the movements of his sweeping, swooping camera. A lot of people do live here, in a world conjured from the director’s own memories of growing up in the wealthy Mexico City neighbourhood that gives the film its name. In no great hurry to make a point or advance a plot, he takes in Mexican politics, changing family dynamics and, above all, the dreams and disappointments of a young housekeeper named Cleo, played with heartstopping candour and sly elegance by Yalitza Aparicio.

Let the Sunshine In (Claire Denis) The first time I saw this piquant, episodic chronicle of a middle-aged artist’s bad romances, I was puzzled and a little irritated. Juliette Binoche’s character was so abrasive! The men she was with were so awful! But I still couldn’t look away. A second viewing knocked me out, and I kept coming back with new questions. How can something so true to the rhythms of real life and the zigzags of an individual temperament still hold together as a movie? How can a movie be so artful and seem so artless? How can a film about such thoroughly tiresome people be one that I can’t imagine ever getting tired of watching?

Can You Ever Forgive Me? (Marielle Heller) Casting Melissa Mccarthy and Richard E. Grant as witty, cynical partners in crime in early 1990s Manhattan is pretty much foolproof. They would be fun to watch if all they did was insult each other over drinks. They do a lot of that, and this movie — based on the real-life escapades of literary forger Lee Israel and her accomplice, Jack Hock — is admirably modest and specific in scale. It doesn’t preach or pose, but in the fine grain of its characters and the skill of its performers (including Dolly Wells as a sweet and credulous bookseller), it achieves a kind of perfection.

Blackkklansman (Spike Lee) Ebullient and indignant, Lee’s best non-documentary feature in quite some time delves into some ugly American history — including film history — to remind us that it’s still being written. Based on the true story of Ron Stallworth, an African-american detective who infiltrated the Ku Klux Klan in the 1970s, the film is a wild mash-up of genres and styles. It’s an interracial buddy picture (with John David Washington and Adam Driver), a blaxploitation action-romance (with Washington and Laura Harrier) and a real-life horror movie. The last scenes, which trace the continuity of racism from The Birth of a Nation in 1915 to Charlottesville to 2017 is a tour de force of political filmmaking and blunt, brilliant Spike Lee dialectics.

Capernaum (Nadine Labaki) Naturalism meets melodrama in this harrowing, hectic tale of a lost boy’s adventures in the slums and shantytowns of Beirut. Twelve-year-old Zain witnesses and undergoes horrors that don’t seem exaggerated, but Zain al-rafeea, the young actor who plays him, endures the worst with Keatonesque stoicism and Chaplinesque empathy. Labaki refuses to lose sight of the exuberance, grit and humour that people hold onto even in moments of the greatest desperation.

The Favourite (Yorgos Lanthimos) The twisty mischief of the plot — court intrigue in the palace of Queen Anne overlaid with sexual treachery among her courtiers — is crisply handled, but what lands this movie on the list are its many moments of scenic and thespian audacity. Emma Stone makes rape jokes. Rachel Weisz dispatches pigeons with a front-loaded rifle. Olivia Colman complains of gout. There are bunnies, duck races and a human menagerie of fops, fools and femmes fatales. The moral is that power corrupts, and corruption is fun.

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