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

To read more from City Arts click here.

The title of The Skinny refers to gossip–the low-down between friends–but read another way (in the credit sequence’s colorful graphics) it also refers to sexual opportunities in New York City. Writer-director Patrik-Ian Polk is interested in the erotic possibilities found by five young black gays, recent Brown University graduates, who reunite during New York’s Pride Week celebrations. Gorgeous, young, educated black gays like these don’t appear in movies by Gus Van Sant, Todd Haynes nor in mainstream Hollywood films. They hail from a society that only Polk puts on screen–a world recognizably his own vision like Wes Anderson’s and equally as affecting.

Moonrise Kingdom is titled for the idyll shared by two New England preteens in love, Suzy (Kara Hayward) and Sam (Jared Gilman). It’s the name they give an unchristened cove previously known by its map coordinates, or the technical “Mile 3.25 Tidal Inlet.”

Suzy and Sam are both 12 years old, but Anderson’s personalized vision makes their identities emerge affectionately; Suzy’s detached from her parents and three brothers, Sam’s an orphan isolated from the delinquents in his foster home and his scout troop. They are typical Anderson protagonists—which means nothing about them is typical.

Both Suzy and Sam’s intelligence arises from their self-conscious loneliness as part of their survival tactics; she reads books about girls in danger, he becomes an exemplary boy scout. Their shared paradise might not last into adulthood, but instead of Stand By Me’s sappy view of adolescence, Anderson offers fine insight into their specific emotional qualities.

Leaning toward fantasy, Anderson studies the depths of personality. Suzy and Sam are not sexualized, like the Peter and Wendy in P.J. Hogan’s extraordinary 2003 Peter Pan. This is also a runaway’s story, like François Ozon’s Criminal Lovers, a Hansel and Gretel tale mixing Night of the Hunter and They Lived By Night, but Anderson favors a chaste view of sexual precocity.

This delicate, eccentric sensibility of Anderson’s films (The Darjeeling Limited, The Royal Tenenbaums) confuses some people, but his meticulous visualization of feeling and adolescent experience is what distinguishes his cinema. Childhood isn’t coddled in an excessive or nostalgic way, it provides a key to Anderson’s sense of basic human nature.

The adults in Moonrise Kingdom—Suzy’s parents (Bill Murray, Frances McDormand), Sam’s Scout master, Ward (Edward Norton), and the local police captain, Sharp (Bruce Willis)—display an older but similar weariness and dissatisfaction. Despite the farcical tone, no one is infantilized; all are seen compassionately. Norton’s weak chin and slight lisp personify the dweeb that is Anderson’s specialty. He’s not brilliant like the nerds Jason Schwartzman plays for Anderson, rather, he’s one of Moonrise Kingdom’s mundane, unjudged innocents.

Starting with Suzy’s brothers listening to Benjamin Britten’s 1946 recording The Young Person‘s Guide to the Orchestra, Op. 34 (Themes A-F), Anderson diagrams the basic social unit of family in a remarkable series of lateral pans through the Bishop family frame house, then through the campsite of Sam’s Kahaki Scouts unit at Camp Ivanhoe. The idea of musical variations serves Anderson’s method of describing social groups and human relations. Each character is introduced in their private rooms, personal worlds—individuals as part of a whole.

To read the full review at CityArts click here.

After mainstream media snubbed the
excellent The Darjeeling Limited, it was clear that Anderson’s personal vision didn’t fit the norm. The Darjeeling Limited resolved cultural and spiritual alienation but was rejected by fickle hipsters for 2007’s trendy There Will Be Blood-ism.

Now, with Fantastic Mr. Fox, Anderson bounces back with heroic arrogance. This
animated film ventures into the sure-fire territory of the babysitter-movie, yet it is willfully conceived and executed on Anderson’s own terms. Parents who dutifully bring their children may find themselves challenged. Without Rushmore’s neat trick of flattering indie viewers (those who mistook Max Fischer for a Clintonian Ferris Bueller), Fantastic Mr. Fox tweaks the elitism it seems to extol. Mr. Fox’s schemes to rob the human conglomerate-farmers Boggis, Bunce and Bean for their chickens, ducks and cider seem vaguely altruistic, while asserting reckless vanity. This typical Anderson story, combining male hubris and communal unity, answers the emotional bankruptcy of current genre filmmaking.

Every sequence is meticulously, ardently stylized. Layered with graphic surprises and nostalgic pop-culture promptings (an Art Tatum reference, a caper sequence putting four different forms of animation on surveillance monitors), Fantastic Mr. Fox renews one’s sense of animation’s possibilities. Your childlike wonder at the big-screen display of imagination isn’t suckered into techno awe as with those formulaic Pixar flicks that lull parents and children into consumerist stooges. Instead, Fantastic Mr. Fox affords a refined, witty, recognition of the processes that convert fantasy into art. This was Subtext in Where the Wild Things Are, Theme in Coraline and given Real World Context in Jared Hess’s brave, though misunderstood, Gentlemen Broncos.

Fantastic Mr. Fox keeps such peculiar distance from babysitter-movie conventions that its self-consciousness (including anachronistic pop tunes) becomes a virtue. It was always disappointing when Spielberg claimed he wanted to make the kind of movies he went to see as a child. Only fools believed that. Truffaut had
already advised that once you’re able to make those kinds of movies, you no longer can.
Maturity and conscience get in the way—
unless an artist is corrupt. That’s the meaning
I see in the revelation of where Mr. Fox and his friends’ climactic adventures occur. It symbolizes Anderson’s recognition of the circumstances defining his work. Like Steve Zissou in The Life Aquatic, Anderson has no fairytale illusions about his personal schemes, sponsorship or expense. Not trying to regain his innocence, he redefines—animates—his ambitions.

Frequently knocked for being “quirky,” Anderson turns his vision of the world into stop-motion animation. It could make his sensibility acceptable for some—especially those who routinely resist his humane sentiments. Giving menagerie-like characteristics and visages to his usual alter-ego protagonist (voiced by George Clooney), nobly suffering spouse (Meryl Streep) and competitive but loyal friends (Willem Dafoe, Bill Murray and Owen Wilson) evokes the safe world of Kenneth Graham’s Wind in the Willows as much as the genuinely quirky Dahl. It’s also rather insular.

After Darjeeling broke through egoism, family dysfunction and ethnic isolation, Anderson seemed ready to soar into new realms of complex sociology, cultural awareness and pure emotional power. This isn’t quite it, but understand: He’s still photographing his sensibility. Intellectually, this is not a cartoon.

Yet, Fantastic Mr. Fox is so not childish,
so not self-parody. Its elaborate, imaginative details (from the root-vegetable décor of the Fox family’s home as they move from warren to trees and back underground to Lescaux-like cave drawings in their new abode) are full of wonderment. It illustrates Anderson’s ingenuity, the acceptance of his youthful self. Anderson’s complex of familiar motifs is redolent of childhood advancing to adulthood. The dance and action scenes aren’t Broadway fodder, rather they match The Prince of Egypt’s radically multi-dimensional hieroglyphics sequence—a highpoint for both dexterous animation and cultural reinvention.

Splendid as Fantastic Mr. Fox looks (and the animals’ faces are spirited), it’s inherently less satisfying than The Darjeeling Limited. No animation can match human transparency—although Ash’s stupefied expression when he gets rescued is totally endearing. Essentially, Mr. Fox’s misadventures replay The Life Aquatic, re-indulging narcissism (he confesses a priggish need to “intimidate” that is not charming, which sounds like smug co-screenwriter Noah Baumbach). Darjeeling surpassed such smugness, plus it was the most gorgeously designed movie of the decade. Flaunting Anderson’s trademark lateral pans and cross-sectional viewpoints, Fantastic Mr. Fox confirms cinema as a visual art. Its serious-delirious jest includes an artistic cliffhanger: Where will Anderson go from here?

–
Fantastic Mr. Fox
Directed by Wes Anderson
Runtime: 87 min.