| Genres: | Best of the Year |
Best of the year from Lee Shoquist
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The Ten Best Movies of 2004, and then the Rest |
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By LEE SHOQUIST |
1. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
Wunderscribe Charlie Kaufman and music video director Michele Gondry employ a high-concept device—memory erasure—to spin a post-modern, visually and emotionally resonant tale of lost love and how letting go of formative memories, even painful ones, is a tragedy that chips away at the fabric of who we are. Jim Carrey has never been better. Kate Winslet? Sublime. The off-center performances and fresh writing, combined with a truly innovative approach to production design and cinematography—which seems to disintegrate before our eyes as memory fades—create a wallop of a love story that’s all rough edges, stops and starts, regrets and renewals. It’s funny without a hint of the juvenile, madly romantic without being cliché, moving without being sentimental, transporting without a trace of gimmick.
Clint Eastwood’s sad, poetic meditation on life, death and the constitution of courage, performed with depth and grace by Hilary Swank, Morgan Freeman and Eastwood himself, who turns in possibly his best directed film and deepest performance. Set in the run down milieu of amateur boxing, Eastwood’s shut down—broken down—trainer reluctantly takes on too-old beginner Swank, a scrappy piece of white trash, too smart and driven for her own good. A heartrending left turn takes the film to dark and deep places we’re not used to going in American movies. Thank you, Mr. Eastwood, for your dark horse masterpiece.
3. Tarnation
Part memoir, part music video, part confessional performance art and all painful family deconstruction, Jonathan Caouette’s $216 dollar iMovie became an unexpected and piercing look into the rearing of a troubled child by a family chain of dysfunction that knew not how to raise him, and little how to love him. He becomes a young tornado of a performance artist, gay, oddly comfortable with himself and fully aware of his family darkness. The product of a sadly ruined mother with abuse and dependency issues (who appears at intervals throughout the film), Caouette’s experimental documentary uses color, music, clever editing and best of all, real feeling and triumph to tell its story, canvassed on the underbelly of lower income America.
4. Kinsey
In telling the story of Dr. Alfred Kinsey, the famous sex researcher who galvanized a nation while revolutionizing notions about human sexuality, writer/director Bill Condon employs a crusading intelligence and impeccable attention to period design. Kinsey, with a towering performance from Liam Neeson, is a slick, smart, enlightening film about something worth watching—the transformation of American mores and the enemies of progressive thinking. The film works marvelously, from its glossy cinematography to its deep glimpse into unconventional marriage. Neeson is matched scene for scene by an intense Laura Linney as his faithful wife, and a typically smart Peter Sarsgaard as his researcher and sometimes lover. Stirs the brain and the heart.
Director Marc Forster, who gave us the hard-won realism of Monster’s Ball, fashions a deeply affecting account of "Peter Pan" writer J.M. Barrie’s real-life association with an independent young mother and her tribe of fatherless sons. Barrie’s art imitates his life during the writing of his beloved tale of lost boys and transporting fairies. But make no mistake about Finding Neverland. In its too-brief, too sad union of artist and makeshift family, it tackles, with grace, a difficult subject—children adjusting to the loss of parents—with great sentiment, and little sentimentality. Both Johnny Depp and particularly Kate Winslet are superbly cast, conveying great wit and sorrow. The film is magical, and its climax contains the year’s most touching sequence.
A youthful and idealistic Che Guevara experiences a spiritual awakening that will forever change him in Walter Salles’ stirring The Motorcycle Diaries, a political and personal travelogue of exceptional sensitivity that may be one of the screen’s all-time great coming of age stories. Acted with equal doses enthusiasm and melancholy by Gael Garcia Bernal, The Motorcycle Diaries is a work of extraordinary insight into the end of innocence for one of the 20th century’s most fascinating political icons. More than an effective road movie or coming of age story, and more than an historical glimpse into the man who would become the Cuban revolutionary, The Motorcycle Diaries is an essential film about waking up to where and how you fit into the world. And why.
Joshua Marston’s compelling, full formed character study was the sleeper of the year, vaulting newcomer Catalina Sandino Moreno into the big leagues with her emotional performance as Maria, an independent-minded young, single, pregnant Colombian woman, with limited options. She dangerously opts to carry a heroin cartel across U.S. lines—hidden in her digestive track. It’s harrowing stuff, but Marston takes good time setting up Maria’s economic and family dilemma before backing her into an impossible corner then letting the brilliant Moreno use her intelligent performance to draw us in to a nightmare of illegal immigration, murder and finally, triumph. It’s a tough road she travels, and there are no less than four moving women caught up in her path, each well-written and one speaking a truly heartbreaking speech about what it means to be an immigrant—and feel proud. It’s a stunning film.
Bernardo Bertolucci’s love poem to the New Wave cinema, 1968 Paris and the idealistic politics of youth and sexuality. The Dreamers was the year’s best looking film, courtesy of ace cinematographer Fabio Cianchetti, who captures the close-up, unblinking sex as well as the tumultuous street riots that comprise the film’s final coda of lost innocence. It was also undeniably sexy, sexual and sensual, intoxicating the audience as well as its free spirited young ménage, drunk on political and personal revolution, acted with aggressive physicality and good humor by Eva Green, Louis Garrell and Michael Pitt.
Don Cheadle, among the best American actors, headlines Terry George’s suspenseful Hotel Rwanda, the true story of a hotel manager Paul Rusesabagina, caught in the crossfire of a 1994 civil conflict between the opposing factions of the Hutus and the Tutsis. He saved nearly 1300 Tutsis and many members of his own family, by harboring them perilously in his hotel through the duration of the conflict. The beauty of this film is that, like any effective epic, it expertly balances a powerful personal story and a large political backdrop, populated by no-nonsense performances from Djimon Hounsou, Nick Nolte, Cara Seymour, and particularly the note-perfect Sophie Okenedo as his terrified wife. It’s an inspirational film about an ordinary man caught in an awful situation who manufactures courage he never knew he had.
Lars Von Trier’s theatrical stunt was praised by some, reviled by many and left still others scratching their heads—three critical reactions to any piece of great artistic invention. In telling his artifice-driven opus over three hours on a deliberately minimal, chalk-drawn stage, all of Von Trier’s tells the same story he’s been telling for several films now: the persecution of a female outsider who ends up nearly martyred. Nicole Kidman is Grace, an East Coast refugee in a small Rocky Mountain town who initially welcomes her with open arms but gradually tighten their embrace into exploitation and condemnation. The all-star cast, including Lauren Bacall, Ben Gazarra, Paul Bettany and Chloe Sevigny, tighten the screws on her (literal) shackles with shocking apathy. James Caan arrives to sort things out and comeuppance is served, royally. Criticized as an anti-American polemic by a director who’s never been on American soil, Dogville is an audacious experiment, defiant, strange and memorable.
And the best of the rest, many of which could have easily placed in the year’s ten best:
Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban
A Home at the End of the World
Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events
Mean Creek
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Lee Shoquist © 2004 |
| lee@reelmoviecritic.com |