Best of 2011, so far:

Here we are. It's August, and as the summer season winds to a close we find ourselves headed towards festival season as the New York Film Festival announced their lineup this week. Last year I was able to see greats there like Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, Another Year, Poetry and Certified Copy with a few duds thrown in like Of Gods and Men and Aurora. More or less, however, that's when my figures by which to evaluate the "best of the year" begin to take shape. I'm still ruminating on what to catch there, although I do expect A Separation, The Artist and This Is Not a Film to all at least be the definites. I do think, though, that 2011 has been a fairly solid year so far already, and I want to use this post as a place to provide some of what I feel are the highlights thus far.



I'll start with Beginners by Mike Mills which, though well responded to, was a charming little surprise for me. Christopher Plummer may well take home an Oscar this year for playing an elderly man who comes out as gay immediately upon the death of his long-time wife and spends the short remainder of his own life trying to live the gay lifestyle deprived of him for so long. Ewan McGregor plays his son who narrates this story, who steals the show as an artist living with the pressures of his commercial work getting in the way of his desire for further expression, the sympathetic memories of his mother absent of a true husband all her adult life and keeping a girlfriend as lonely and pained as he is. His performance grounds the film in a no-nonsense realism and simplicity that balls up all these humane layers and throws it at you straight. It's fine work from all the actors involved with the help of a substantive, relatable, mature and honest script.



This summer has largely been dubbed the summer of R-rated comedies. I'm not really sure why but I guess there's been a lot of fairly successful ones released, but none quite reach the level of towering achievement as the Kristen Wiig vehicle Bridesmaids. Parts of it are equally as funny as they are painfully sad as they are harmless fun as they are simply compelling. Co-writer Kristen Wiig seemed to write herself a character that brilliantly displays her versatility in shining form, necessary for her to get past her reputation of little more than successful caricature-artist on Saturday Night Live. Her character is someone suffering through a hole of bad economic times, crushed dreams and romantic loneliness that there seems to be no foreseeable way out of. It drowns her with a deflated sense of self that's easily irritated with any further fear, envy, heartbreak or inadequacy that becomes all but guaranteed when her childhood friend asks her to be her maid of honor at her wedding. It's a tour de force of comedic performing with a better acted ensemble than, say, last year's The Fighter, more timely and resonant with the economic atmosphere than Up in the Air, more successful gross-out humor than either Hangover and funnier than any film since the last SNL star-penned script of Mean Girls by Tina Fey. It's brazenly fearless in how much emotionality Wiig throws into the story, utterly ruthless in how long she'll subject the audience to long awkward moments that are funny but leave you feeling as hopeless as necessary to connect with her central character's woes throughout the film — central to both its hilarity and its sadness.



I did a review of Paddy Considine's directorial debut Tyrannosaur a little while ago, but what's especially worth mentioning with the film now is it as a performance vehicle. To me, there seems to be no films on the horizon for the rest of the year that will be as jam packed with such a plethora of mindblowing performances. Considine in his directing and both Marsan and Mullan in their performances bring an uncanny ability to bring horrifying empathy to monsters and other monstrosities. Mullan, in particular, does wonders with so little; never falling into traps of going over the top to cheaply capitalize on melodramatic emotion nor does he underplay with an illusion of depth. What sums up how impressive his performance is can be pointed to the fact that his showiest and shoutiest moments are still shaded with many nuanced layers of subtlety and complexities that very few other actors — even those as well seasoned and as advanced in ability as Mullan — are capable of pulling off. Olivia Colman plays antithetical to the entire film and ultimately reveals a profound darkness in her purity and grace. In my opinion, she has less to do overall than Mullan but still matches him in plenty of scenes — including her "big scene," which I would bet money will remain to be the single most well acted scene of this year when everything else is all said and done.



I've already talked earlier this year on this blog about how beautiful I felt Bal is, and it remains to this day strong enough in my mind to be a worthy runner-up to talk about the best of this year, and I at least don't see it leaving a top 3 by the end of it. The cinematography is truthfully as beautiful as any film I believe that you'll ever see and encompasses everything great cinematography should be; it's beautiful but unobtrusive, it adds a layer of perspective to the storytelling and isn't just there to look pretty (looking at you, Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford!). And the child performance by Bora Altas at the center of it remains, in my mind, the best child performance period since Mohammad Ramezani in The Color of Paradise.



I don't think I've gotten the opportunity yet this Summer to muse on Terrence Malick's long awaited Tree of Life on this blog. To be honest, I was kind of dreading it. And I do find it very difficult to discuss, or to write about, or just to verbalize in any other way. Partly because the film is hardly wordy. It's not too rooted or concerned with plot. To its credit, it is ultimately cinematic. It is ultimately a story that could have only been told through Malick's imagery. It's themes and messages and "meanings" could only be told through the emotional interaction one has with the images on screen. It's not inherently a better form of cinema, but to me an undoubtedly purer one that's of the utmost difficulty. It's life and love and dreams and loss and sadness and greatness and family and grace and coming of age and coming to terms. It is as humane a film as you'll ever see, and Robert De Niro's jury at Cannes assured it status in the larger realm of film history, as well as the FIPRESCI group of critics naming it the best film of the past year, that it is the most important movie you'll see this year. Whether it's the best movie you'll see this year? Obviously that's up for you to decide. It's not a matter of "getting it" or "not getting it" or being purposefully pompous and pretentious versus intellectual vapidity, it's simply a matter of whether you emotionally connect with it or not. For me, I did. I let the images wash over me in what seemed to me as one of the grandest sensory visual experiences I've ever had in a cinema; and whether or not you'd like the film I would recommend the theatrical experience to anyone who possibly can make their way there. To me, it's the finest film of the year so far and will be tough to knock off the top spot.