Carole Bouquet and André Dussollier in Unforgivable.

2012’s best so far and Sarris remembered

This year, I want to do the Mid-Year Reckoning differently, as a tribute to film critic Andrew Sarris’ recent passing. It was Sarris, during my grad school years at Columbia, who wisely advised that the percentage of good movies has not changed from the old days; now that the output is larger, the significance of sifting out the trash is more important than ever. Sarris’ indispensable work The American Cinema, first published in 1968, used the Nouvelle Vague’s notion of auteurism (cinema authorship) to categorize all Hollywood film history up to that point.

Sarris’ commentary on over 200 directors was an awesome feat, combining scholarship with sharp perception. His extraordinary assessments should still structure anyone’s thinking about movies, American or global.

Because The American Cinema emerged from cinema’s first half-century, it preserves aesthetics and values (pillars from Griffith to Sternberg) that have been lost in the recent years of criticism’s decline, in which media and box-office presence is given importance over the individual visions that Sarris knew were what made cinema an art form. He articulated that belief with idiosyncratic precision that to this day—when both Hollywood and the critical “community” have lost self-respect—is still awesome to read.

Each summer, my mid-year assessment has been a way to keep track of the movie year’s deluge, which, given the dozen or more films that open every week, is more than can be reviewed. Perhaps the reckoning might this time benefit from following Sarris’ model, as a reminder of the standards a film-lover has every right to uphold.

I take great exception to the TV pundit whose memorial to Sarris cited that he “loved movies.” Sarris’ work was greater than any fanboy obsession—everybody “loves” movies, but Sarris turned his interest into teaching, study and personal expression, the things that make criticism valuable, an art in its own right.

With continued respect for Sarris, one of the two critics who have meant the most to me, professionally and personally, I repeat The American Cinema’s first nine top-tobottom categories, citing the work of individual directors. It could help to understand how 2012’s best films so far might ultimately rank in film history or, as Sarris crucially demonstrated, in a personal pantheon rigorous enough to share with the world.

Pantheon Directors
Unforgivable (André Téchiné)—a tumultuous view of private lives as society and society as family.
The Deep Blue Sea (Terence Davies)—examines the linkage of desire and despair to find the value of personal resurrection.

The Far Side of Paradise
Damsels in Distress (Whit Stillman)—the rare campus comedy genre visits private worlds that reflect the eccentricities we recognize deep down.
Moonrise Kingdom (Wes Anderson)— compares the innocence of youth and maturity.
Dark Horse (Todd Solondz)—tragedy found in the comedy of hopes squandered by misguided fashions. The Skinny (Patrik-Ian Polk)—clarifies the blur of sex and friendship that gay life faces straight-on.
A Thousand Words (Brian Robbins)—a Hollywood satire so casually profound it scared off the industry and its fans.

Expressive Esoterica
Americano (Mathieu Demy)—an Oedipal odyssey that finds cultural heritage in family legacy.
Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance (Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor)—addresses action movie tropes to satirize the deficiencies of contemporary genre excess.
The Lady (Luc Besson)—eloquently acted political biopic, refined non-comic-book heroism.
The Flowers of War (Zhang Yimou)—common tragedy and possibility, rapturously envisioned.

Fringe Benefits
Detention (Joseph Kahn)—traces moral chaos throughout recent pop history. Chronicle (Jonathan Trank)—youth’s visionary search for meaning.
Wanderlust (David Wain)—audacious mockery of Occupy sentimentality and its outdated hippie heritage.
That’s My Boy (Sean Anders)—empathy, heredity and its discontents.

Joyful Noise (Todd Graff)—the anodyne effects of music and the movie musical.

Less Than Meets the Eye
Roadie (Michael Cuesta)—great performance by Ron Eldard.
The Kid with a Bike (Dardennes brothers)— modern neuroses given fairytale attention.
Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter (Timur Bekmambetov)—trash made uncommonly spectacular.

Lightly Likable: Being Flynn, Darling Companion, Man on a Ledge, Where Do We Go Now?

Strained Seriousness: The Turin Horse, Safe, Neil Young Journeys, Magic Mike

Make Way for the Clowns: Ted, The Dictator, Casa de mi Padre

Oddities, One-Shots and Newcomers: Seeking a Friend for the End of the World, Beasts of the Southern Wild, Gerhard Richter Painting, Locked Out, John Carter

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Abe’s not a frontrunner, the sports metaphor used by his father (Christopher Walken). His dim prospects reflect Everyman pessimism through a lower middle-class experience that’s more authentic than Death of a Salesman, yet rarely acknowledged. Solondz, almost alone among Jewish-American filmmakers, presents ethnic uniqueness frankly, with unsmiling mockery. His tough, deadpan compassion is more humane than fashionable cynicism.

Solondz abhors irony, the sarcastic cultural disposition that oppresses all of his characters. When Abe proposes to suicidal, withdrawn Miranda (Selma Blair), she asks, “You’re not being ironic—like performance art or something?”

Dark Horse continues the narrative experiment of Solondz’s previous film, the almost masterly Life During Wartime, where depressed characters phase in and out of psychic dream/nightmare states. Abe’s visions about his father’s sympathetic secretary, Marie (Donna Murphy), suggest a yearning so deep and unwittingly compassionate it is almost, Solondz suggests, telepathic.

These episodes play out in a nearly theatrical flatness, as if Solondz were indeed rewriting Death of a Salesman—but from the inside, as a confession of ethnic commonplaces and familial discontent that have become his specialty. Abe is as much an archetype as Gopnik in the Coen Brothers’ A Serious Man, only Abe’s unhappiness leads to loathing of self, not of his circumstances.

Abe’s first line, “I don’t dance,” is such a self-abnegating thesis statement that if Dark Horse was indeed produced on stage rather than as an independent film, it would probably receive enormous acclaim, like Mike Nichols’ current rehash of Death of a Salesman or shows like Other Desert Cities and The Lyons. But Solondz’s film does what  those plays don’t; he dramatizes the spectacle of Abe’s lack of self-consciousness, the moral perspective that contemporary culture drowns out.

Solondz’s subtext elevates Abe’s private condition into a larger social matter. His suffering tribe (Walken overstresses the father’s misery, while Mia Farrow’s supplicating mother does not—or maybe it’s just their bad wigs) is contrasted with the empty cheer of American Idol-type pop music that has become our national, anesthetizing soundtrack

Gelber’s Abe is an uncanny figure of pampered Jewish miserabilism, and Murphy’s Marie is one of those definitive Solondz performances: a phantom life ranging from repression to sexual spite (her sullen strut sympathetically corrects the predatory Mrs. Robinson). Their obvious contrast recalls stage drama raher than cinema, but it’s still piercing.

Solondz uses an even better, ultra-cinematic device when Abe sits alone in a movie theater, waiting for a film to begin, and idly mouths the answers to an on-screen puzzle: “George Clooney, Nicole Kidman, Brad Pitt.” This zombie mantra is a daring, brilliant summation, calling out the stars of our culture’s contemporary anomie. And it casually lays waste to Woody Allen’s The Purple Rose of Cairo.

Follow Armond White on Twitter at 3xchair