#11 -- Rachel Getting Married (Jonathan Demme, 2008)
This is what a family looks like. This is what a family feels like. Though Rachel Getting Married takes place over the course of just a couple of days, the momentous weekend of a wedding, whole histories are splayed out before us, not in the form of burdensome exposition or clumsily shared backstory, but interwoven into every exchange between the different family members. Jenny Lumet's boldly abrasive script demonstrates a keen understanding of how people who know each other deeply can use that knowledge as verbal weaponry, instinctively building double-meaning into a sentence, causing praise to come with a sword slicing mercilessly at inner frailties, embedded insecurities that have been learned in a lifetime of imposed togetherness. Families learn one another, meaning they know how to hurt just as surely as they are the ones that have the best chance at accelerating the healing process. The film begins with the blackest sheep of the family making a temporary return from a rehab center for the nuptials, and it is immediately clear that coming home is like walking into an angry hug. The squeeze is just a bit too tight, to knock out her breath and remind her that she is not impervious to them. She returns the hug in kind.

It is a movie of raw emotions, but there is also a warmth to it. When damaged families are at the center of a film, there's often a veneer of judgment imposed by the director and the other cinematic collaborators. It's a form of distancing from the pain onscreen, a throat-clearing insistence that the poorest examples of human behavior being depicted couldn't possibly represent a personal truth, a shared compulsion for treating loved ones with scalding unkindness. They are just adhering to Leo Tolstoy's durable adage, gravitating to the unhappy family because the uniqueness of their dismay makes them better suited for the rigors of dramatic storytelling. That common approach leads to a distance not only between the creator and the characters, but, in turn, between the audience and the work of art. Characters are held up for exhibition, not understanding. A resolutely inquisitive humanist by artistic nature, Jonathan Demme takes a different approach. He is far more intimate, working from a empathetical standpoint. There's a clear desire to figure out these people onscreen, what makes them wince, what makes them beam, what gives them some respite, however brief, from the emotional aches that dog them. Drama is built around conflict, but there's something deeper that can be achieved through examining the underlying feelings that lead to the conflicts in the first place.

Demme achieves this through an incredible patient technique that has some of the quality of Direct Cinema, the documentary style of eternally rolling cameras favored by the Maysles brothers and others. At times, Demme seems inclined to be as thorough in his depiction of the weekend wedding as a devoted uncle with a fully-charged camcorder. He takes in as much as he reasonably can, sticking with scenes for extended stretches of time, often lingering after the drama has peaked, all the better to catch the revealing after effects. Among the many benefits, this is a gift for the actors. Anne Hathaway is absolutely revelatory as the wild child barely trying to contain herself as she stands next to her sister who is by default the current center of attention. She nearly quivers with anxiety, wracked by equal doses of worry and guilt, her need for constant and dutiful verification of her worth usually undermined by revulsion over her own neediness, which in turn leads to more awful behavior. Hathaway approaches this character without hesitation, playing the most unlikable facets with conviction and never backing away to plead for greater sympathy than she deserves. She's backed by a grand team: Rosemarie DeWitt as the titular bride, armed through years of preparation to undercut her sister's dark energy; Debra Winger as the imperious mother of the bride, pulled back to the family she's effectively abandoned, doing so with brittle reluctance that leaves it own bruises; and Bill Irwin as the patriarch, barely holding on as the worst moments of the family's recent history threaten to swamp his soul entirely, leaving him to try and generate happiness out of thin air. Given extra time to work with, they add wrinkles and dimensions to their roles. It's hard to conceive of any of these characters developed more fully than they are here.

There is something uniquely truthful about the film. It captures the way that painful moments can knock the oxygen out of a room, but also implicitly notes that life progresses after the moment has passed. A toast delivered at an overpopulated rehearsal dinner table may be intensely uncomfortable, but that doesn't mean someone else won't pick up a glass when its done and offer up their own words. Demme appreciates many things about how people operate, including the fact that no matter what chasms are created, someone will always find a way to cross them. Especially if that someone is family, a person who knows better than anyone the value of traversing that span.

(Posted simultaneously to "Drilling Holes in the Wall.")

#12 -- About Schmidt (Alexander Payne, 2002)
One of the cinematic stands that I've taken with some regularity is that Jack Nicholson is the finest actor who made film his primary medium. This argument carries more weight with those who hear his name and have automatic associations with his nineteen-seventies heyday of The Last Detail and Chinatown than it does with the movie fans whose mental reference volumes immediately flip open to the nineteen-nineties section, sullied by fare like Man Trouble and Wolf. While there may be ample evidence for those holding a contrary opinion, I maintain the view, bolstered by the knowledge that, at a time when many of his peers have settled into a procession of paycheck performances in lowest common denominator studio dross, Nicholson can still step up and deliver a piece of acting that demonstrates fearless invention and borderline genius. That's exactly what he does in Alexander Payne's About Schmidt.

So many of Nicholson's career high points have involved devilish portrayals of untamed souls, wild men enraptured by their own freedom, that it can be easy to forget that he has an impressive range, particularly for someone who doesn't tend to bury himself in identity-obscuring make-up or other tricks. Still, while I've seen Nicholson give interesting performances in a wide variety of roles, I'm not sure he's ever played another character as weak as Warren Schmidt. This isn't to say that Schmidt is a weakly drawn character. On the contrary, Payne and his regular screenplay collaborator Jim Taylor imbue the role with contradictions and self-deluding views. There's an involving psychological nuance built into the character. Instead, Schmidt himself is a weak man, a man who's lived a small life, and lived it in unremarkable fashion. The greatest act of rebellion he can muster is stopping at the Dairy Queen for a illicit treat, and even then he can be no bolder than the medium size. He is at loose ends when he retires from his bland insurance industry job, and is further stranded when he suddenly finds himself a widower. With no support from the patterns and safety nets he's constructed for himself, Schmidt is largely inept at connecting with the world, finding solace only in gently self-aggrandizing letters he writes to the destitute African child he's agreed to support through an international aid organization. He's facing down his own mortality and the wrenching disappointment of an uninspired existence. And he's doing so from the starting point of utter defeat. Nicholson plays all this with tenderness and insight. He may be charged with winning laughs as Schmidt, but he never pushes for them with mugging or other desperate techniques. Instead, he just plays the role honestly.

Of course, it takes more than one great performance to make a great film. About Schmidt has more than one great performance. Using a novel by Louis Begley as a starting point, Payne and Taylor construct a screenplay that merges forlorn poignancy and bleak satire like interlocking fingers. It's the same scathing comedy that they brought to their previous features, 1996's Citizen Ruth and 1999's Election, but tempered by a deeper interest in the characters they put through the wringer. There's not an affection for them, particularly, but there is a greater willingness to let them grow and breathe and develop as real, recognizable people. They are humbled and hurt by their problems, but they are also facing them, taking them on to the best of their shaky abilities.

That's a boon to all of the actors. Like Nicholson, they make the most of the meaty material they're given. As Schmidt's daughter, Hope Davis finds wellsprings of feeling. She knows she's settling in life, just the way her father did, and she seethes in frustration, as if she wants to hurry along the compromises just to get them over with. As her unfortunately-coiffed husband-to-be, Dermot Mulroney initially seems to be skewing too close to caricature, a sensation that's quickly dispelled as it becomes clear that he's not condescending to his character. Indeed, he's playing him as arguably the film's only truly sympathetic person, the kind of guy who emanates almost uncomfortable levels of sweet sincerity as he tries to share the material he used to deal with his aunt's demise, hopefully asserting that it'll probably still be helpful even though much of the workbook is already filled in. He's the only one who's not jaded, who still views life with any degree of hopefulness. He may appear ridiculous, but the openness of his soul makes him endearing. Adding a cymbal crash to the proceedings is Kathy Bates, playing the sort of brash, pushy character that had become her strongest suit by this point. It's the epitome of a performance free from vanity, presenting comically hateful behavior as inherent as motherly instinct.

The film is hysterically funny even as the laughs stick in the throat a bit, stifled by the story's shadows of unhappiness. Payne's command of tone is the film's not-so-secret weapon, pulling the humor out of moments large and small, conflicts of high embarrassment and the simple image of Warren Schmidt sipping on his convenience store soda as a conversation with a Native American clerk brings him to the late-in-life, and largely unmoving, revelation that the man's ancestors got "a raw deal." Tone is perhaps the most difficult aspect of filmmaking to master, one that eludes many skilled directors. It's also an aspect that Payne gets precisely right, all the way the film's perfectly pitched, plainly devastating closing shot.

(Posted simultaneously to "Drilling Holes in the Wall.")

#13 -- Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (Ang Lee, 2000)
It is perhaps a marker of the diminished expectations of any film that is dominated and driven by action sequences that Ang Lee's involvement in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon initially seemed perplexing. Lee had made his mark with films that were about conversations rather than fisticuffs, films that were deeply invested in character. Even the battle sequences and other violent skirmishes in the film he'd made immediately prior, the flawed but underrated Civil War drama Ride with the Devil, were entirely secondary to small focused scenes that examined how the characters interacted with one another. This martial arts epic seemed drastically removed from the sort of film that previously attracted his interest and drew out his knowing depictions of humanity. And then Lee, who'd already demonstrated an admirable range, proved that doubting him wasn't a sound instinct. Like the lithe warriors he tracked across the screen, it seemed he could do anything.

It's to his great credit that he accomplished this by resolutely sticking with his well-established greatest strength as a filmmaker. Specifically, he focused on the characters. There's much to admire in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon on a purely technical level. The crystalline elegance of Peter Pau's cinematography, the perfectly calibrated editing of Tim Squyres, the propulsive score by Tan Dun, and unquestionably the roundly celebrated action choreography by Wo Ping Yuen all contribute mightily to the film's impact. Yet, consistently wondrous as all these elements are, there are plenty of lesser films out there with individual components that are worthy of equal praise. It is Lee's inspiration that draws them together to a cohesive, compelling whole, and the unifying thread is the attention paid to the story, the script, and, perhaps most importantly, the people that populate the film. We may marvel at their feat of athleticism, but that wouldn't matter much if they weren't just as fascinating when sitting somberly around a table contemplating the heartaches of the past.

Based on a novel by Wang Du Lu, and adapted for the screen by Hui-Ling Wang, Kuo Jung Tsai and Lee's regular collaborator James Schamus, the film is ultimately quite simple. Set in 18th century China, the film revolves around a fabled sword called Green Destiny, the warrior who gives it up in part as gesture of his retirement, and the fiery young woman who steals it away. From these threads a great cinematic tapestry is woven, getting at matters of nobility, integrity, how glory can be earned and stolen, and how duty can defer personal desire. All these different tugs and shoves of human emotion are conveying beautifully by the cast assembled by Lee. Chow Yun-Fat quietly conveys the ways in which a lifetime lived in honor and service can leave a man considering all he has given up just as assuredly as he can look back with pride at his accomplishments. Similarly, Michelle Yeoh invests the woman who has been his longtime friend and ally, a formidable fighter in her own right, with a regal self-assurance that is as appealing as it is formidable. Then there's Zhang Ziyi, a thrilling whirldwind as the young woman whose predetermined place in the world doesn't match well with her fervent desire for boundless adventure.

These roles are so well-developed and then acted with appropriate skill, that the action sequences become a expression of character. Watching Michelle Yeoh and Zhang Ziyi face off in hand-to-hand combat typified by lightning-fast movement, exquisite grace, and agility that pays the laws of gravity no mind is incredibly exciting, but it also draws us in further to them, gives us a greater understanding of the people they're playing. Furthermore, Lee strives to find the beauty in these sequences, as well, using lovely wire-work to send his combatants up the the shifting luxury of the treetops or skipping gently across moonlit roofs. There's visual splendor there, but there's also a sense of the way these individuals connect to the world around them. It is breathtaking, but avoids the pitfall of a wavering focus. The film doesn't stop for the action sequences. Instead, it demands that the action sequences contribute to everything else the film is trying to convey. These moments get the blood pumping, but they also stir the soul.

Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon is assembled with evident care. It is inspirational and surprisingly moving, an unrelenting feast for the eyes and a film that is unafraid to scratch at deeper ideas, to get at the way we are shaped by the expectations we build for ourselves. The athletic feats it puts on display may flirt with the delightfully impossible, but it is the most grounded elements, the fully identifiable glimpses of love, envy, bravery and regret, that truly send it soaring.

(Posted simultaneously to "Drilling Holes in the Wall.")

#14 -- Brokeback Mountain (Ang Lee, 2005)
It is a love story, like a thousand movies than came before, and a thousand that will follow. It adheres to that most familiar of trajectories: two people meet, gradually fall into in one another's arms, and face impediments to being together. There are two potential paths to the closing credits, one ending in bliss, the other in tragedy. Despite the familiarity, Brokeback Mountain is uniquely special. It's not just that this romance is between two men, cowboys drawn to each other while charged with looking over a herd of sheep together on an isolated mountainside. Instead, it's that, under the sensitive direction of Ang Lee, the shared gender of the two lovers almost becomes immaterial. While it is a major part of what holds them apart--arguably, it's even the sole reason that they can't be together openly and happily, why they need to keep trekking out to remote corners of nature to experience their shared ardor--it doesn't hang over the film like a thrumming issue or a political stance reshaped into drama. Instead, we focus on these characters, and who they are to one another. It stops being about two men in love, and starts being about two people in love. Maybe the film's not special despite the familiarity. Maybe the familiarity is what makes it special.

Starting with a short story written by Annie Proulx, and utilizing a screenplay adaptation by Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana, Ang Lee builds his film with a surfeit of tender dignity. Lee largely sets aside any sort of agenda in favor of focusing on the relationship, trying to understand everything about his two lead characters, their connections and the reasons why they can't help but run away from part of their own selves, perhaps the part that makes them happiest. The movie is frank and unashamed of the physical romance between them. Indeed, the camera presses in close as they kiss and caress. It's not meant to be titillating or sensationalistic. It is straightforward, simply capturing the intensity of their passion. It's all part of the compulsion to really know these people, deeply and with great empathy.

After an opening that focuses at length on the way the men found each other, got to know each other, fell in love with each other, the film shifts to carefully hopscotching through their lives largely lived apart. Their small accomplishments and more common echoes of heartbreak are parsed out with diligent attention to the most telling moments. There's a shrewd economy to the storytelling. It doesn't get mired in overly extended scenes or burdensome explanations. It lets people talk to each with honesty and authenticity, feeling more like captured reality than staged fiction. The movie lingers on these people as they all, in one way or another, struggle to open their hearts. The intimacy of it all enhances the emotional power, makes the sorrow almost too much to bear.

With so much ground to cover, and so much depth to dive into, the film is a tremendous challenge for the actors involved, and, as they excel in the parts, an equally powerful showcase. As one of the men enmeshed in love affair kept secret, Jake Gyllenhaal has to both show the glee and bravado of his character, but also how it keeps it under wraps. He gets at the ways in which the constant hiding of himself weakens every bit of his resolve, and how he starts to cautiously edge out of the shadow he's built his life within. Gyllenhaal is especially strong in the later scenes, properly playing his character as a man who's lived with undue burdens, signaling a growing impatience with his own compromises through a building ferocity and every bit of his demeanor. Michelle Williams operates with a different sort of mounting desperation as the wife of one of the men, living with a different sort of loneliness as she senses more than understand the fragility of her marriage and family. Watching her strain to comprehend how the promises she believed in got upended is one of the film's most moving elements.

To a degree, both these actors reach the high emotions of their roles because they're playing against an actor who's achieving something stunning with the riveting internalization of everything his character feels. Heath Ledger plays Ennis del Mar, the half of the relationship who's most fearful of the implications of his attraction, with a compelling restraint. Ennis is laconic, practically a closed circuit. His very physicality is locked up with his inability to let himself out, to confront the world openly in any meaningful way. He takes such cautious steps with his wife and daughter that the meaning, the vitality, of his relationship with Gyllenhaal's character has an added weight. He is the only person that inspired Ennis to shed his crippling reticence. He gave Ennis life. He gave Ennis himself. Ledger locks into the character with a commitment that is startling. Just think of the drastic difference between this and his Oscar-winning role, released just three years later, as the malevolent, make-up coated Joker in The Dark Knight. The contrast demonstrates just how deeply Ledger gets into his character, how much Ennis is embodied rather than played.

The beauty of Brokeback Mountain is that it feels like anyone's story. It has a universal quality, relatable for anyone who's ever been lonely, anyone who's ever been in love, and had that love, for any reason whatsoever, go unrequited. It is, in the end, just another love story. Like a thousand movies that came before. Like a thousand movies that will follow. And yet few of those others will reach the heights of Ang Lee's masterful film. It is about two men, but it belongs to anyone willing to open their heart to it.

(Posted simultaneously to "Drilling Holes in the Wall.")

#15 -- American Splendor (Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini, 2003)
The past decade was a good time for deconstructed narrative in film. Beginning with the mad flush of creativity of the cinematic year 1999, when the likes of Being John Malkovich, Run Lola Run, Fight Club, and even marginally more conventional fare like The Matrix and The Sixth Sense, were as much about the structure of storytelling as they were the travails of their respective characters, there was a newfound willingness (newfound outside of experimental film anyway) to bend the track of traditional film narrative into a sort of cinematic Mobius strip. That fresh freedom, and the vitally important audience awareness of the rules of narrative that came with it, allowed filmmakers of all persuasions to push boundaries in different ways across the past ten years. Creators such as Charlie Kaufman and Michel Gondry were especially keen to comment on their own work as it unspooled, but it was a pervasive enough trend that markers of meta could be found in any number of films. Sometimes it was a signal of self-importance. More often, it represented abundant creativity. That quality is present in American Splendor, couple with a charged playfulness that may not entirely suit its central figure. It does, however, elevate the whole project to the rare air of deviously clever entertainment.

American Splendor is also the title of the underground comic book series written by Harvey Pekar since the mid-seventies. Autobiographical by design, the series was renowned for its immersion in the mundane, serving as a direct refutation of the sort of spandex-clad supermen that usually populated publications structured around sequential art laid out in square panels. Pekar was known for relating simple stories of his life as a file clerk in Cleveland. The film doesn't strictly adapt those stories as much as it tries to capture the spirit of them. It is about Harvey's perpetually strained relationships and minor obsessions, but it is also about the process of him shaping it into his own sort of art, how that are shapes his life and how he shapes his life to accommodate that art. It is equally about the creator and the creation.

This makes it especially fitting that Springer Berman and Pulcini approach the material with a willingness to stretch it out, fully testing its parameters. They cast Paul Giamatti to play Harvey Pekar in the film, but also recruited Pekar to appear in it. He narrates the film and also sits before the camera to get interviewed by the filmmakers, answering questions about the situations that have just been dramatized, leveling the deadened skepticism of his gaze at the camera and he waxes with a battered incredulous amusement about the film itself, the very premise that anyone is interested in him, that anyone is proffering his story with the sort of phoniness that is necessary for a fictionalized film version. At their most daring, Springer Berman and Pulcini let their different world intermingle. Paul Giammati finishes a scene as Pekar, "Cut!" is audibly yelled, and he walks onto another, different styled set to watch the man he's just played engage in a discussion about jelly beans, utterly unaffected by the cameras rolling a few feet in front of him. And when Harvey reaches his highest peak of notoriety (at least before the movie) by appearing on David Letterman's old Late Night show on NBC, Springer Berman and Pulcini structure a scene around Pekar stalking unhappily around the green room with Giamatti playing Pekar, only to have him walk out for his segment, getting replaced by his real life counterpart in actual footage from the show. It never feels manipulative, never feels pointlessly showy. Instead, it's just taking advantage of every possible avenue to get at truthfulness, a strategy entirely in keeping with Pekar's agitated pronouncements against human fakery. Over the years, Pekar's printed representation was rendered by several different artists. In its alternating methods of depicting Pekar, the film version of American Splendor manages to achieve its own sort of variety.

That sort of approach could easily undermine the performances, putting the actors next to those they're depicting, potentially inviting unfavorable comparisons. Instead, it enhances them. Giamatti doesn't deliver a perfect impersonation of Pekar, but the actual man's demeanor is a compelling testimony as to how effectively the actor has captured his personality and his acerbic defeatism. Similarly, Hope Davis captures something more important that vocal cadences or physical resemblance about Pekar's wife and collaborator Joyce Brabner. She finds a morose intelligence and inherent empathy that goes a long way towards explaining her attraction to and endurance with Pekar. Judah Friedlander, on the other hand, is an uncanny mimic of self-proclaimed "ultimate nerd" Toby Radloff, absolutely vanishing into the part, a magic trick illuminated by the one moment in which he's allowed to briefly break character. In every instance, the inclusion of the real figures serves as proof of the high quality of the acting.

American Splendor is as unlikely of a film as Pekar's original stories were as comic book adventures. There's no real hook, a resolutely dour protagonist and a storyline that wanders with something close to aimlessness. There's also a rewarding tendency to find inspiration in the smallest, most unlikely things, and, finally, a tinge of hopefulness, or at least dented grace, lurking within the pessimism. It's the sort of movie that Harvey Pekar deserves. And that's high praise.

(Posted simultaneously to "Drilling Holes in the Wall.")

#16 -- Shattered Glass (Billy Ray, 2003)
There's a pleasing irony at the heart of Billy Ray's Shattered Glass. In making a film based on real events, Ray has a certain amount of leeway to embellish and rearrange, shifting the details of the story to enhance the drama. Indeed, there's even an expectation that he'll do so, jettisoning those elements that don't work, and potentially inventing others that will clarify his points and smooth the messiness of lives and situations that have no obligation to adhere to the cleanliness of a three-act structure. And yet the film clearly strives to convey its scenarios with a laudatory commitment to accuracy in depicting the downfall of journalist Stephen Glass. The fiction filmmaker is an assiduously honest reporter. The reporter is a weaver of pure fiction.

Stephen Glass was a writer and associate editor for The New Republic, a magazine held in such high regard and wielding such influence that it was regularly referred to as "the in flight magazine of Air Force One." His career started to unravel when reporters from the fledgling online offshoot of Forbes looked into a article entitled "Hack Heaven," which related the tale of executives from a company called Jukt Micronics negotiating with a juvenile expert in digital malfeasance. They discovered that the story was a complete fabrication. It was an exercise in creative writing in the guise of a news piece.

Ray's film is daring in its simplicity. This is a film about intelligent people figuring things out as one crafty individual tries to keep the damaging truth obscured. There are no car crashes or chase scenes, no displays of last minute bravado that lead to an improbably rescue. The most dangerous moment involves accidentally running a stop sign. In the absence of quick, easy ways to goose the audience to attention, Ray manages to make it gripping when two people try to puzzle out a strange detail in the story by simultaneously calling the same phone number. A mounting pile of recently read magazines makes for a more memorable image than any number of computer enhanced spectacles that flooded multiplexes in recent years. Billy Ray makes magic with the intellectual certainty of his approach, one that values thoughtfulness over aggression, patience over frenetic energy, and intelligence over empty dazzle. Other filmmakers would have taken this material and goosed it up with frivolous material that could be cut into an appealing trailer. Ray has confidence that the story as it stands is worth telling. After all, that's why he wanted to tell it.

He couldn't have a better collaborator for a film rendered in this style than Peter Sarsgaard. Cast as Charles Lane, the editor of the publication when the story of Glass's breach of journalistic ethics breaks, Sarsgaard is a master of understatement. He doesn't play Lane as some sort of noble crusader, honing in instead on the idea that he's a man of plainspoken integrity simply doing his job. He reacts to the growing controversy that threatens to swamp the reputation of the magazine, a reputation that stands as its greatest asset, with a mix of deliberate consideration and contained frustration, all informed by a mounting sense that he should have realized the problem far earlier had he not be hampered by his own caution over challenging the professionalism of a popular member of the staff. Like everyone else at the magazine, he was fooled by Glass's in-house showmanship, the way he pitched his stories with a gawky disbelief at stumbling onto something so sensational. Sarsgaard subtly, artfully gets at Lane's sense of responsibility and betrayal--betrayed by Glass, but also betrayed by his own failure to trust his instincts--and plays it all with such calm that the moments in which he explodes with anger are purely riveting.

The rest of the cast tackles their corners of the film with similar dedication. Steve Zahn and Rosario Dawson have only a few scenes as the reporters who expose Glass, but they still manage to suggest the entirety of their professional dynamic. As fellow members of the New Republic staff, Melanie Lynskey and Chloe Sevigny take different approaches to showing the sorts of protective emotions that Glass inspired in his fellow workers (and Sevigny deserves special celebration for the scenes in which she flashes a hair-trigger fury that is strangely entertaining). Then there's Hayden Christensen as Glass, worming into the insinuating neediness of the man, the constant quest for validation that causes him to practical beg his friends to verify that they enjoy his company. It's a clear line from this anxious behavior to cooking up fanciful stories to please his friends, his editors, his distant readers. Christensen taps into this unappealing--yet paradoxically endearing--qualities with a refreshing lack of vanity.

It's a fascinating story well told, but it also represents something greater, more troubling. Shattered Glass gets at the vicious erosion of standards in the field of journalism, a process that continues unabated to this day. Serious, measured reporting on important topics is quickly sacrificed to shiny carnival acts more likely to inspire laughter than thought. And it's all greeted, even by those who should know better, those who should be protecting the sanctity of their once noble profession, with delighted applause. It was never a slippery slope, it was a treacherous cliff. And Billy Ray's film shows just how easy it is to charge right off of it.

(Posted simultaneously to "Drilling Holes in the Wall.")

#17 -- Gosford Park (Robert Altman, 2001)
Of course, there's no shortage of admirable traits in Robert Altman's finest films, but one of the clearest is the way they are rooted in the eras in which they were made. M*A*S*H takes place during the Korean War, but it is clearly about Vietnam, the conflict raging at the time of its release. Both The Player and Short Cuts get much of their potency from exposing the festering wounds left over from the selfishness of the trademark superficiality of the eighties. Prescient as it is, Nashville belongs to the disillusionment of a country still reeling from Watergate, and being a period piece doesn't prevent McCabe and Mrs. Miller from seeming like one of many thesis statements about the revolutionary, paradoxically freeing cynicism of seventies cinema. Gosford Park belongs on the shelf next to those masterworks. Unlike those other films, grounded in and reflective of their eras, Gosford Park feels uniquely timeless.

That's not to imply that the film doesn't seem like something he made. From the moment that characters begin arriving like a torrent of bounding pebbles in advance of a landslide, the film is unmistakably Altmanesque. Set in the early nineteen-thirties, Gosford Park finds its characters converging on a country estate in England, loaded down with steamer trunks and complicated backstories. There are intricate relationships to be sorted out between the upper crust ladies and gentlemen coming together for a weekend of hunting, feasting, dancing and drinking, not to mention the small battalion of servants that accompany them. As usual, Altman feels no obligation to spell it out clearly. The chatter accumulates like a dissonant symphony, each member of the orchestra playing their part, sometimes in sync with others, sometimes oblivious to the way their solo is obscuring another player's vital sequence of notes. Julian Fellowes wrote the droll screenplay (based on an idea concocted by Altman and Bob Balaban), but it's clearly Altman who shaped it into his own form of music.

If it's confusing at times, that's all right. I suspect it's meant to be confusing. Even if it's not, that quality works for the film. One of Altman's points seems to be gently mocking the lunacy of this social miasma, where callousness and loaded emotional betrayals are the standard approach taken amongst these particularly privileged friends and associates. Suspicion, selfishness and indifference rule the day among the wealthy upstairs, and it's all witnessed by the servants crushed into close quarters downstairs, their constant, compliant presence making them seem no more human or threatening than the wallpaper to their employers. Largely, it's unnecessary to have every strand of the spiderweb sorted out. You just need to marvel at its astonishingly complex construction. Altman has created a munificently beneficial situation in which the inability to keep the players clear without a scorecard actually enhances his vision.

And what a grand collection of players he has at his disposal. At right around the time the Harry Potter film series asserted itself as a primer on great modern British character actors for kids, Altman's movie effectively did the same for adults. Michael Gambon, Alan Bates, Derek Jacobi, Helen Mirren, Kristin Scott Thomas, Kelly Macdonald, Richard E. Grant, Clive Owen all race through the movie like thoroughbreds untethered, digging into the rich, witty dialogue and clearly reveling in the opportunity to work with a director with an uncommon respect for the work of actors, and a commensurate knack for drawing out the best in them. Besides those noted above, there's especially strong work from Eileen Atkins as the caustic, observant cook at the titular estate, Maggie Smith deploying the sort of aghast suffering of slights that she has mastered like no other as a visiting doyenne, and Emily Watson, wryly intelligent as a housekeeper who has her own illicit connection with one of the wealthy denizens harrumphing above. Just when the cast already seems to have an abundance of jewels, in strides Stephen Fry, the embodiment of gentle befuddlement and accidental wit as a police inspector seeking to discern the identity of a murderer on premises.

That murder serves as the main plot of the movie, but not necessarily its story or, more accurately, its reason for being. Instead, the movie is really about the divide between the classes coexisting in this house, the intimate knowledge the lower class holds about the upper, and the upper's blindness to this potentially dangerous fact. The system perpetuates this situation, as the police inspector quickly strikes the servants from suspicion in the wealthy man's death because they, in his estimation, have no real connection to man. Despite the demeaning nature of this turn, the uniformed toilers are pleased to claim the absolution and keep going about their business. For a moment, injustice is better than the alternative. The comfort and familiarity of this sort of drawing room murder mystery provides Fellowes and Altman the pathway to make their acid-tinged arguments. The movie is terrifically entertaining, a true pleasure to watch, but it's the deeper layers that make it rewarding. As he did throughout his properly revered career, Altman sought to make a movie with something to say. As he did throughout his career, he succeeded.

(Posted simultaneously to "Drilling Holes in the Wall.")

#18 -- You Can Count on Me (Kenneth Lonergan, 2000)
I feel like I owe Laura Linney an apology. If you reattach ten years of torn-off calendar pages to the wall and find me back in the fall of 1999, I'll undoubtedly be fully prepared to promptly answer any question about the weakest actors getting regular prominent employment in films with Linney's name. Largely on the basis of her work in admittedly subpar films like Frank Marshall's Congo and Clint Eastwood's Absolute Power, I disparaged Linney's abilities with authoritative indignation. Even when she delivered a strong performance in Peter Weir's The Truman Show, I rationalized it away with the dismissive praise that portraying a bad actress wasn't much of a stretch. I was wrong. Linney has proved that many times over in the past years, and her winning counter-argument began with Kenneth Lonergan's film directing debut.

Linney plays Sammy, a woman raising her young son alone and working an unremarkable job at a bank in her modest hometown. Though the return of her wayward brother and an illicit relationship she enters into both bring about some conflict, it is a role largely devoid of flashiness or moments of operatic intensity. Linney is playing that true rarity in film: a normal person living a largely normal life. The things she experiences are not dramatic by the barometer of typical movie plots, but they are dramatic in the context of her own life. It is a movie, then, shaped by reality rather than fantastical imaginings. It exists in a place where changing the colors of a computer display can amount to the grandest of insurrections. Within that framework, Linney is quietly phenomenal. It is the kind of performance that is inevitably described as "lived-in" because equating it with the plain process of simply existing is the only way to properly convey its authenticity. Every line spoken is like a confession of self.

Her primary acting partner onscreen in Mark Ruffalo, playing the troubled brother who seeks a bit of stability by coming home. All the praise parceled out to Linney above applies equally to Ruffalo. His role allows for some more conspicuous acting choices. His character, Terry, is someone who has been wounded by life, continuously and harshly since the night of his childhood when police officers showed up at the door to tell he and Sammy that their parents just died in a car accident. He is a tight coil of nerves, always bracing himself against some new disappointment that must be rushing headlong towards him. He's preemptively indignant about expected slights and generally moving through life as someone who feels the world has pegged him as an enemy to be worn down. There's opportunity for big moments here, but Ruffalo, like Linney, keeps it small, trading on subtlety over broad emoting.

Overall understatement is the winning formula that Lonergan brings to the film. He writes dialogue that is often very funny and happily charming. More crucially, it always feels like real conversation instead of movie lines. He strips the artifice away. It's not the dazzling displays of wit that cause us to connect with the characters onscreen, it's their believability, their honesty, the fact that they're all grounded in something that plays true. We recognize choices that are motivated by emotion emotions, often human frailties. When Terry takes Sammy's son on an ill-conceived mission to meet his father, it's because Terry is impetuous and has an ingrained need to create justice for others because its been withheld from him. In other films, this sort of scene can easily feel like a set piece, bearing the burden of being a turning point in the narrative. Here it feels like a step Terry took because of who he is, not because of who a screenwriter (or, worse, a studio executive or a test audience) thinks he should be. This sequence is typical of the film because it effortlessly, elegant carries the whole history of the characters with it as it unfolds, even the pieces of their history that we know by inference rather than actual depiction. Thanks to the perfect synchronicity of the actors and the other filmmakers, these people feel like they've known each other well before the cameras started the process of documenting their story.

It's the sort of movie that invites repeated viewings, not to find hidden messages, but to simple experience the thoroughness of the experience, the sense of knowing people onscreen as well as you know anyone. More than that, it's inspired enough that it inspires immediate fandom for everyone involved. You want to again see these actors inhabit roles, and soak in the smart storytelling of Lonergan, including his smooth, assured visual sense as a director. Ongoing devotion seems the only suitable response.

(Posted simultaneously at "Drilling Holes in the Wall.")

#19 -- Born Into Brothels (Zana Briski and Ross Kauffman, 2004)
When evaluating documentaries, it's easy to the conflate the worthiness of the subject with the quality of the filmmaking, which is why, for many years, Oscar pools could be won by determining which of the Best Documentary Feature nominees focused most sternly and seriously on the Holocaust. As with any other type of film, making a judgment on a documentary should be as much about how it tells its story as it is about what its story is. Born Into Brothels is about the children of prostitutes in Calcutta, India, particularly focusing on one small group that get an outlet for self-expression, and perhaps a grain of hope for a better future than the one practically carved out for them due to their station in life, through a photography class. In dealing head-on with the socioeconomic problems faced by these kids and their families, the filmmakers can claim they're examining an important topic, but it's their overall skill and thoughtfulness that makes their finished product memorable, moving and vital.

Besides co-directing, Zana Briski is one of the central figures within the documentary. Briski is a photographer who specializes in meshing journalistic instincts with visual artistry. She went to India specifically to shoot a series focusing on sex workers in Calcutta's red-light district. Eventually, she befriending the offspring of these women, offering to teach them the art of photography, partially motivated by a sense that it was an appropriate response to her incursion into their lives. Cameras were handed out, film distributed, and the children were dispatched into their busy city to capture images that spoke to their experience, their lives. There's no sense that the exercise is initially intended as path to rescue for the children. While Briski eventually works to help their art illuminate their plight to others, and collaborates to have their photos auctioned off or reprinted in calendars as a means to raise money for possible schooling, she is also grimly pragmatic, voicing a poignant awareness that, no matter what she does or what doors these photos may help to open, many of the children, perhaps most of the children, will be unable to escape from the cycle of poverty they were born into. Lives can change, but wishing doesn't make it so, and sometimes concerted, devoted, heartfelt doesn't either. This isn't depicted as hopelessness or manipulative tugs at the heart. It simply is. It won't stop Briski from trying, but she's prepared to face setbacks with a sigh of acceptance.

That view, grounded in a consistently realistic appraisal of the way the world works, inform the entire film. It helps that Born Into Brothels doesn't follow the increasingly common genesis of modern documentaries, starting with a filmmaker's agenda and building an argument for a predetermined point. Instead, it is a story found that deserves telling. Zana Briski and Ross Kaufmann approach the material with restraint. We get glimpses of the hardscrabble life the kids endure, but the movie isn't mired in it. It is presented plainly, assured that the troubles need not be callously dwelt upon to make them potent.

Potentially reflecting Briski's experience as a documentary photographer, the film operates with a confidence in the resonance of a simple image. When the photographs of the children are exhibited in a gallery show, the clear concision of a shot that includes a privileged woman standing seemingly unaffected next to a snapshot that depicts the poverty that is the young artist's subject and existence provides a more resonant underscoring of the divide between the haves and have-nots than any amount of emphatic pontificating ever could. It's even more poignant because the youthful photographers are watching it back home in India, happily staring at the streaming video on a basic laptop in the middle of the darkened squalor, a world apart in every sense of the phrase. Similarly, the camera rapaciously takes in the vibrant colors of Calcutta, a city where beauty and dismay existence so closely together that they're effectively indiscernible from one another. Briski and Kaufmann aren't making a travelogue. They make no attempt to make Calcutta bolder or brighter, employing camera tricks to make the city burst across the screen. It's just there on the other side of the lens, its contradictory charms readily apparent.

The filmmakers also take great care to bring the children to the screen as fully as possible. We're seeing just a fragment of their lives, but we feel like we know them. We empathize with their troubles and take comfort, however briefly, in the satisfaction of their artistic escape. When one of the children, the soulfully gifted Avijit, proves to be not just an creative photographer, but a keen, insightful evaluator of others' photos, his pleasure in sharing ideas is quietly thrilling. For perhaps the first time in his young life, possibilities are not just for others, but are maybe for him, too. Briski and Kaufmann make no promises in the way they structure their film. There is no warm nod given to the audience, telling us that these kids will be okay, rescued by their mastery of shutter speed. Life will proceed after the closing credits roll, and it will be good for some, less so for others. In this understatement is the film's most gratifying quality: its unyielding commitment to truthfulness. That, maybe more than anything, is what the kids in the movie deserve.

(Posted simultaneously to "Drilling Holes in the Wall.")

#20 -- Cache (Michael Haneke, 2005)
Michael Haneke pulls no punches. The German-born and Austrian-raised director believe that films should have missions, usually to challenge and provoke. Watching his films gives the strong sense that he'd much rather leave an audience rattled than entertained. He favors stories structured around the was human misery can mount. Haneke doesn;t cave in, offering the audience a catharsis or some other form of emotional release. He sees his premise through to the bitter end, an ending shaped by a dim view of the capacity for generosity, forgiveness or grace, whether that ending is a thunderclap of misery or an ambiguity that is potentially even more wounding.

There are tremendous risks to this approach, most notably that the filmmaker can lapse into off-putting sadism, a kind of maliciousness towards the characters and, by extension, the audience that dares to care about them. The films become the equivalent of straw man arguments, with characters set up for the sole purpose of being knocked down. It's not important who they are, what the believe. They're only there to make points about roiling inhumanity, a practice that entirely undercuts the point because there's not emotional investment. In my limited experience with his work, I'll concede that this is a pitfall that Haneke himself doesn't always avoid. He absolutely manages to in Cache, for a very simple, straightforward reason. No matter how rough the material, no matter how much Haneke pushes the audience towards discomfort, he always keeps the film deeply grounded in well-drawn, nuanced characters.

Daniel Auteuil, possessor of the saddest face in international cinema (even when he's happy, he looks on the verge of solemnity or outright sorrow), plays a television talk show host who begins receiving vaguely menacing videotapes and drawings at his home. While he initial feels and expresses pure bafflement at these items, he comes to realize that they represent an intentional reminder of past transgressions, particularly one well buried secret from his youth. The film depicts the way outside forces can push people, harm them in entirely unexpected ways at entirely unexpected times. But it's also about the way we do that to ourselves, the way in which small prompts can unleash torrents of our own inner guilt, the way our own psyches can conduct the greatest betrayals, dragging us under, convincing us of the worst, with a thoroughness that no separate person could ever accomplish. Haneke brings all of this to the screen with brutal authority. The tension that builds between Auteuil's character and his wife, played expertly by Juliette Binoche, is nearly unbearable, as the film essentially asks how authentically we present ourselves to anyone. When does personal reinvention and moving on from past shame transform into dishonesty.

In the process, Haneke employs filmmaking techniques in fascinating ways, led by the image on that videotape that first arrives, setting the plot in motion. It is an extended shot of the home that will receive the tape, a shot not dramatically different than the sort of establishing shot that might be used in any number of films. By using something so familiar and instilling it with dread, Haneke immediately upends the expectations of how films work, what sort of shots stand for the fundamentals of narrative storytelling and what sort of shots cue us that something more dangerous is afoot. What's more, by filling the screen with that shot--there is no hint in the frame of the television is is being watched on, no distancing reminder by showing the borders of the screen around the image--Haneke adds layers onto the image and heightens its effect. We in the audience become both complicit and intimidated. In that moment, looking at that image, we are both the perpetrator and the victim, staring at the home with the same unwavering intensity as the person who set up that camera, while also feeling the confused sensation of sorting out the tape's inscrutable meaning that would be the inevitable response of someone who received it. Other directors might let us off the hook somehow. Not Haneke. He wants this to be troubling, haunting, as assuredly as if it were a held shot of our own home, carrying the implicit threat that if it can be surreptitiously watched it can also be entered, assaulted, defiled. It's a single shot, but it's genius is that it carries, without straining from the burden, a mile of meaning.

Haneke lets uncertainty reign. While many elements of the film are completely clear, especially the psychologies of the characters involved and the details of devastating past incident, Haneke offers no simple solutions. Even as the plot marches down the dark path it must follow, there are many questions that aren't answered definitively. Ambiguity abounds. Some plot points may have logical inferences, but they may not be confirmed, just as closure is sometimes reached in real life not because of unassailable proof, but because we simply decide to believe in the veracity of our own suspicions. These are the sort of gray areas that Michael Haneke bravely traffics in. He may not let his audience wriggle free safely, but he is no less relentless with himself. He gives himself extremely difficult challenges and proceeds to face them. He'll best them, or crash spectacularly trying to. In the case of Cache, he emerges the victor, with a fierce piece of art as the spoils.

(Posted simultaneously to "Drilling Holes in the Wall.")