Incendies (2010)
When Nawal Marwan dies, she leaves instructions for her twin children, Jeanne and Simon, to find their father and half-brother.
Retracing their mother’s steps, they discover their elder half-brother was born out-of-wedlock to their Christian mother and a Muslim. To minimize the family’s shame, he was hidden in a local orphanage, but Nawal and her grandmother branded the child’s heel so they could later identify him.
A casualty of the regions constant religious wars, the orphanage was attacked and the child taken by a radical Muslim sect.
Searching for her missing son, Nawal went to the refugee camp where he was allegedly held, but, unfortunately, a militant Christian group had already destroyed the village. Insane with grief, Nawal assassinated a prominent leader of the responsible group. As punishment, she was imprisoned and raped repeatedly. Her anonymous torturer is the father of Jeanne and Simon.
Somehow, Nawal escaped to Canada with her children who were unaware of her gruesome past. Over time, she had forgotten much of her own misery, until she saw a familiar brand on the heel of a swimmer at the pool. Elated to have found her presumed dead son, she ran towards him, but as he turned to her, joy transformed to horror as she recognized the face of her torturer.
The shock of this discovery caused a stroke from which she never fully recovered.
Part Oedipus Rex, part soap opera, part commentary on the futility of religious wars, this is a powerful film about loyalty, obsession, family, promises, and identity.
Denis Villeneuve reveals deep insight into family dynamics. We remember the good times, but the bad times shape and define us.
Oslo, August 31st (2011)
Recovering addict Anders receives a pass out of rehab for a job interview. Before the interview, he visits old friends and honestly discusses the hopeless pain of his life. He’s forthright with his potential employer about his struggles and when they don’t blanch and continue to show interest, a self-destructive Anders storms out and desperately tries to reconnect with an old girlfriend who refuses to see him.
After spending the night wandering aimlessly, he buys a large quantity of heroin and retires to a room and shoots up.
Inspired by the 1931 novel Will O’ the Wisp by Pierre Drieu La Rochelle, this is a painfully honest, poignant film about the struggle of addiction and reminds me of Naked Lunch by William S. Burroughs.
Why do some people relish failure, wallowing in self-pity and self-destruction? Why can’t they see the good relationships they have and the good in their own lives? Why is it not enough? Anders is aware of his problems and how relatively minor they are, but is incapable of altering his behavior.
Movies like this help us understand addiction is as much a spiritual problem as a psychological or physiological one. Without addressing the spiritual void, we’ll never be able to offer assistance.
Beasts of the Southern Wild (2012)
Six year old Hushpuppy (Quvenzhané Wallis) lives with her father, Wink, in the Bathtub, a remote area of Louisiana, cut off from the rest of the world by a levee.
While the ill Wink is hospitalized, Hushpuppy fends for herself, but when a storm approaches, Hushpuppy and a returning Wink ride out the storm together in their dilapidated shelter. Afterwards, their jubilation at surviving is dashed as they realize the storm deposited a large amount of salt water in The Bathtub. In order to drain the dangerous water, they have to destroy the levee, removing the barrier separating their community from the rest of the world and destroying the area’s unique cultural identity.
After the catastrophe has passed, Wink succumbs to his illness and dies as Hushpuppy bravely listens to his last breath, then leads the community in burning his funeral pyre.
The Bathtub, impoverished and isolated, should be a dark and dreary place, but it’s not. Because of the indomitable spirit of people like Hushpuppy, it’s a wonderful place, full of life and vitality.
Benh Zeitlin’s beautiful film reminds us our attitude and our spirit is more than capable of vanquishing our foes and triumphing over whatever hardships this world has to offer, but we have to embrace evil as a natural part of life. As Hushpuppy reminds us “everybody loses the thing that made them. It’s even how it’s supposed to be in nature. The brave men stay and watch it happen, they don’t run.” To embrace the occurrence of evil it is to demistfy it, to accept it, to defeat it.
This modern fairytale is a vibrant and original portrait of a world which may soon disappear. As the world gets flatter, we will lose the valleys and the mountains, but maybe we won’t forget them. Hopefully, Hushpuppy was right and “in a million years, when kids go to school, they gonna know: Once there was a Hushpuppy and she lived with her daddy in the Bathtub.”
The Lady in Number 6: Music Saved My Life (2013)
When Alice Herz-Sommer died in early 2014, she was, at 110, the oldest living Holocaust survivor. Her ability to play the piano led to preferential treatment in the concentration camps which saved her life. The Germans needed Jews who could play musical instruments, so when outside visitors came to the camps, the officers could point to their music as a sign of how humanely the prisoners were treated.
Few people live to be 110, but Alice didn’t rest in her old age. In the final year of her life, she practiced the piano three hours a day.
Despite her struggles, she was full of happiness, marveling at the extraordinary life she’d been given. As a child, Gustav Mahler and Franz Kafka were among her family’s friends and her son was a celebrated musician until his death in 2001 at the age of 61.
Nearing the end of her life, Alice remained optimistic, “I look at the good. When you are relaxed, your body is always relaxed. When you are pessimistic, your body behaves in an unnatural way. It is up to us whether we look at the good or the bad.”
Sadly a few days before this film won the Academy Award for Best Short Documentary, Alice passed away. Like all of us, she only lived once, but unlike too few of us, she made her once count.
Birdman: Or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance) (2014)
Riggan Thompson (Michael Keaton) made a lot of money starring in a series of super hero movies as the titular Birdman. Tired of playing the same character, and wanting to be taken seriously as an artist, he mounts a Broadway adaptation of Raymond Carver’s short story “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love.”
He surrounds his production with his friends and family. His best friend and lawyer Jake (Zack Galifianakis) produces the project, his recovering addict daughter, Sam (Emma Stone) works as his personal assistant, and his girlfriend, Laura (Andrea Riseborough) costars.
When rehearsals go poorly, Riggan (who may have telekinetic powers) manipulates a light can to fall, injuring his male costar then replaces him with Mike Shiner (Ed Norton), an acclaimed method actor. Shiner’s talent raises the artistic value of the production, but his ego and attitude create tension.
As the premiere approaches, Riggan’s personal and professional life fall further into shambles. On opening night, heeding Shiner’s earlier plea for greater realism, Riggan brings a real gun onstage for his final dramatic scene, and, at the play’s climax, shoots himself in the head.
Fortunately, he survives the incident, only damaging his nose. He wakes up in the hospital to learn the play is a critical hit and his performance is hailed as a theatrical triumph of “super-realism” by the harsh theater critic who had pledged to destroy him.
The performances were universally excellent. Amy Ryan is superb as Riggan’s frustrated ex-wife, Emma Stone is wonderful, and Ed Norton deliciously parodies his own image as an overly neurotic actor.
I left the film in awe of its artistry and vision. Alejandro Iñarritu’s film, the lovechild of Raymond Carver and Gabriel Garcia Marquez, is a daring gamble which paid off handsomely.
Filmed as one uninterrupted shot, it feels unscripted like a documentary or a reality show and it’s drum heavy, jazz infused soundtrack keeps it alive and spontaneous.
Keaton’s history as Batman lends a credibility to the work it’s difficult to ignore, and my deeply personal response to the film is wrapped up in my attachment to his previous work. I grew up watching Mr. Mom (1983) and The Dream Team (1989). I was ten years old when Burton’s Batman premiered and, like so many other fifth graders, wore a Batman T-shirt at least once a week. So, seeing Keaton touch into his past and explore it so openly made it a much more personal, self-reflexive film for me.
The Brand New Testament (2015)
God is a sadistic man living in Brussels with his wife and ten-year-old daughter, Ea. He doesn’t allow his family to leave their tiny apartment and created mankind so he could amuse himself by torturing them.
To thwart her father, Ea sends a message to everyone with a cell phone telling them the exact date and time of their death. This creates a fascinating thought experiment. How do people respond when they know the exact length of their remaining life? Would they shirk responsibilities? Would they abandon relationships? Would they interact differently with people they knew would die before them?
Yet the pre-knowldge of death is only a portion of the overall story in this film. Inspired by her brother Jesus, Ea escapes from the apartment and attempts to write a Brand New Testament to help humanity escape from the tyrannical rule of her father and recruits apostles to spread her message: a woman with one arm; a murderer; a man despondent over his impending death; a man who obsesses over a previous love; an elderly woman in a loveless relationship; a sickly, possible transgender boy. She encourages these people living in the shadows and gives them hope, happiness, and purpose. But is she really just manipulating them the way she complains God has done in the past? Is manipulating someone into a happy existence any different from manipulating them into a miserable one?
Van Dormael’s work is not for everyone. It’s disjointed, dense, and often uncomfortable. He doesn’t film narrative as much as ideas and his work asks important questions about God and faith, questions most organized religions would rather ignore by labeling them heretical. His approach to the question of evil and suffering is no less profound for taking a lighthearted approach.
In the end, I found it invigorating, challenging, and beautiful (even the bizarre scene of love between a forlorn wife and a gorilla).
Silence (2016)
In the 17th century, two Portugese Jesuit priests, Sebastião Rodrigues (Andrew Garfield) and Francisco Garupe (Adam Driver) travel to Japan to investigate rumors their mentor Father Cristóvão Ferreira (Liam Neeson) renounced his faith.
Upon arrival, they learn Christians in the country have been largely eradicated through torture and violence. After a long and difficult search, Rodrigues finds Ferreira and confirms he committed apostasy and works with the Japanese government to eliminate Christian resistance.
Rodrigues is given a choice: he can abandon his faith and join his former mentor or the former Christians he met earlier will be tortured until they die. As he looks at a fumi-e he asks his Savior for guidance and hears (or perhaps hallucinates) Christ tell him he’s done enough.
Rodridgues steps on the face of Jesus, turning his back on his church and his previous life. Years pass, and, after a life spent working to undo the work of the church he once loved, he dies. As his body is cremated, the camera zooms in and shows he’s holding fast to a small wooden cross, implying his faith remains steadfast.
Garfield, Driver, and Neeson are uniformly excellent and the cinematography of the Japanese landscape (which earned the film its only Academy Award nomination) is sublime.
The film functions as a companion piece to Ingmar Bergman’s religious trilogy (Through a Glass Darkly, Winter Light, and The Silence). As a questioning Catholic, Scorsese knows the pain his religion inflicts in the name of ideological purity and wonders which should have the greater primacy, adherence to dogma or concern for fellow human beings. He sees conflict between the two great commandments of Jesus: love the Lord and love your fellow man. Intellectually, I think Scorsese believes in the necessity of strict and unbending rules, but feels this may harm the cause of the Great Commission. This is what cinema should do, challenge us, force us to deal with uncomfortable issues, and leave us struggling with the implications.
Marjorie Prime (2017)
In the near future, a service provides grieving individuals with holographic images of their deceased loved ones.
Octogenarian Marjorie (Lois Smith) spends time with a younger version of her deceased husband, Walter (Jon Hamm), but Marjorie’s adult daughter Tess (Geena Davis) refuses to interact with the recreation of her father and vents her frustration to her husband Jon (Tim Robbins).
After Marjorie passes away, Tess uses a holograph of her mother to work through her grief and frustration and later, Jon uses one of Tess (after a despondent Tess commits suicide).
This plays like a Black Mirror episode, but it’s much slower and introspective. Whereas Black Mirror is inherently cynical about our encroaching reliance on technology, this movie has a more balanced view. Who hasn’t wanted to have one last conversation with their deceased loved ones? Who hasn’t wanted closure?
In addition to its themes of technology, it plays with the idea of how memories are created, how they survive, and how important fidelity to the truth is in our relationships.
As technology infiltrates our lives, it will change the way we interact with each other and the way we see ourselves. This film forces us to be honest about the positive and negative changes as they occur.
Ray & Liz (2018)
Photographer Richard Billingham recreates his chaotic, poverty infused childhood with his chain-smoking mother Liz and alcoholic father Ray. Billingham steadfastly refuses to lionize his parents nor cast them as the enemy, instead choosing only to present them as he remembers them.
Early in his childhood, he learned to look at things from a remove, to distance himself from the painful agony of the present. This skill led him to photography, which became a way for him to observe what was going on around him without succumbing to the anxiety, anger, and fear it might otherwise instill. He continues perfecting those skills here.
The film hits close to home for me because I know too many people who grew up in situations not dissimilar to the one depicted here. It’s rare a film depicts this kind of ugliness without making someone (one of the parents) or something (welfare state, big pharma, alcohol) responsible for the misery. Billingham is defiantly uninterested in responsibility.
He creates a cinematic version of Tolstoy’s famed observation: every family is unhappy in their own way. However idyllic our memories may be, we identify parts of our own childhood in the film, unearthing the parts we had long ago forgotten. In this way, Billingham teaches a valuable lesson, seeing the bad parts of our own lives does not negate the good, refusing to acknowledge them does not make them go away.
I love this film for its unfiltered, uncompromising honesty. Billingham is determined to show the truth, whether he or we like it or not.
63 Up (2019)
In 1964, the BBC commissioned a short documentary inspired by Ignatious Loyola’s maxim, “give me a child until he is seven, and I will give you the man.” Picking a cross section of British kids from the upper class to the lowest of working class neighborhoods, Seven Up! interviewed them about their dreams, aspirations, and thoughts on the world they inhabited. Every seven years since, Michael Apted has tracked down the fourteen participants and asked them to reflect on who they were and how different their lives diverged from their plans.
Most of them have willingly participated in this ritual examination of their lives (although they have all expressed some resentment of their association with the project).
Through the eyes of these random children, we’ve seen the devastating effects of mental illness, the snobbery of wealth and privilege, the struggles of being a single mom on disability. The participants have formed unlikely friendships. Their marriages have gone through struggles. They’ve experienced medical and financial hardships. and most of them are now grandparents. They’ve taught all over the world. They’ve survived cancer. One of them has died. It’s as close as we’re going to get to a documentary about the human experience, and each successive iteration is more poignant and touching than the last.