[The Cinema We Needed In 2018]
A Top 10 List
WHAT KIND OF CINEMA DO WE NEED NOW? It’s a question that seems to arise almost automatically in periods of crisis. It was repeatedly posed after 9/11, and again when Trump was elected. The consensus in 2001, at least among studio executives, was that, in the wake of such unimaginable horror, we needed fantasy, comedy, and heroism. The movies we evidently needed were ones that offered us the possibility, however temporary, of escape. In response to the crisis of the world in 2018, I see at least four distinct cinematic movements emerging—some escapist, some not. I explain each below.
THE NOSTALGIA BUTTON
There’s always a compulsion to bury pain through escapism. The very chemical mechanisms by which cannabis causes memory loss are released naturally when we experience trauma. Today’s pain erases yesterday’s. This is important at a physiological level, but forgetting is exacerbated with greater trauma, so in traumatic times it’s easier to see a glistening past. Nostalgia, as a cinematic movement, is currently peaking for this very reason: The '80s and '90s are re-surging in fashion, music, and Netflix remakes. Hoodies look like gum-balls again. It's everywhere. But while I’m enjoying the '60s Judeo-Yankee Nostalgia feast that is The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel and, admittedly, the renewed fashionability of turtle necks and New Deal economics, Nostalgia doesn’t really advance conversations of cinema. Stranger Things isn’t really saying anything to or about humanity. The appeal of Nostalgia is a warm sunbeam, a dreamy placation. I am myself happy to indulge, but I know the enjoyment is inherently fleeting because with Nostalgia there’s always that inevitable sobering moment I wake up in the present. Tony Soprano said it best: That there’s no sadder game than that of "Remember when…"
TOM HANKSIAN HUMANISM
In a recent column, Film Crit Hulk ties together a selection of 2018 works: Won’t You Be My Neighbor, Paddington 2, and Hannah Gadsby’s stand-up special, Nanette. Each emerges from a place of darkness, but instead of nihilistically exploiting our psychology, these works are putting us in touch with ourselves and challenging us to be better. I won’t rephrase what Hulk so effectively writes:
In a world where humanity itself walks along the edge of a knife, what makes people like Mr. Rogers, Paddington Bear and Hannah Gadsby all the more remarkable is not the innate belief that kindness always wins, nor love in spite of hate, nor the commitment to self-integrity. It is the crushing expression of human frailty in the center of ourselves. And they all go about it differently. The bravery of Mr. Rogers comes not in his stoicism, but that the way he finds solace in a timid and bashful lion. Hannah’s righteous fury is so deserved, and something we must sit in, but her ultimate bravery is in dwelling on the fears of what actually changes people. And what sets Paddington apart is not his bravery, but the simplest feeling of shame that after all he’s been through, he failed because all he ever wanted in the world was for his aunt to have a birthday present, so that she would know how much her love was appreciated. It’s heartbreaking, but none more so that when Mr. Rogers wondered on his deathbed, 'Am I a sheep?' he asked his wife, but the real question he was asking was whether he had done enough good to get into heaven. It’s the question we all ask in away: 'Am I enough?'
This is the cinema that’s keeping us honest and good. No one watches one of these works and doesn’t feel softer after, though perhaps just perfunctorily. This is why Barry and The Good Place literally follow bad characters becoming good (the anti-Breaking Bad). It's why Paddington 2 so easily cracked my Top 5 of 2018. Hulk again:
At the center of the story is a sweet bear named Paddington who always seems to make the world better just by being in it. He makes people’s days better just by hitching a ride to work. He makes his family feel loved just by listening to them. He even manages to help fix the prison system through the power of marmalade sandwiches (okay it takes a little more than that, but that’s the crux of it). Part of the charm is that Paddington does most of these things by hysterical accident, and, through sheer osmosis of his good-nature, it all rubs off on people. Still, at the center of Paddington’s lovely effect on those around him is a mantra from his old Aunt Lucy, 'If we’re kind and polite, the world will be right.'
If we’re kind and polite, the world will be right.
SOCIAL ABSURDISM
Absurdism reigned in 2018. You’ll see this when Yorgos Lanthimos’ masterpiece, The Favourite, sweeps the awards circuit. I personally loved seeing the particular bloom of Black Absurdism, which finds stalwart Spike Lee (BlacKkKlansman) joined by Donald Glover (Atlanta), Terence Nance (Random Acts Of Flyness), Boots Riley (Sorry To Bother You), and Jordan Peele (nothing in 2018, but damn the trailer for Us looks A+) delivering some of today's most original content. Absurdism, like Humanism, challenges us to be better; however, it does so by targeting our perception more than our sympathy. These creators’ mediums and messages vary: Riley's is a gonzo morality play, Lee’s is an achingly emphatic study of true American racism, Glover’s is everything from a counter-appropriation of Greek drama to a David Simon David Lynch mashup. Ultimately, however, these creators are part of a similar conversation. Each reminds us just how our distorted society has become by taking social thinking to its extreme, absurd ends.
REALISM EVERYWHERE
Here's subjectivity for you: My four favorite films of 2018 are all foreign films that drew heavily on classical Realism. If Humanism and Absurdism ask us what we can do for our future, and Nostalgia rejects the future, Realism asks us to observe and understand the present.
Realism has always been around, but it's finding wider audiences than ever before. Why? One of the most famous Realist movements was Italian Neorealism (beautifully explained in a Kogonada video here), which was a reaction to the studio-bound, Hollywood-influenced Italian productions of the Mussolini years. Scorsese called it "the most precious moment in film history." Its proponents—Rossellini, De Sica, Visconti, De Santis and early Fellini—were determined to take their cameras to the streets, to reflect the 'real Italy,' which for years had been absent from Italian cinema screens. In Japan and Russia, Yasujiro Ozu and Andrei Tarkovsky respectively led a similar movement toward Realism, while France gave us Poetic Realism with Renoir and cinéma vérité with Jean Rouch.
Realism emerges from the welter of human experience without smoothing away the raw edges, or losing what most movies lose—the sense of confusion and accident in human affairs. This is the cinema I think we're realizing we need: cinema that acknowledges our humanness in all its beauty and ugliness. Realism is a way of looking at the world without preconceptions or prejudices. Realism can actually change who we are. We know this because reality changes who we are.
Maybe it shouldn't be unsurprising that the re-emergence of Rightist politics has brought Realism back so forcefully. With Realism, it's as if our empathy for the world is reasserting itself as an aesthetic strategy.
Realism has always been around, but it's finding wider audiences than ever before. Why? One of the most famous Realist movements was Italian Neorealism (beautifully explained in a Kogonada video here), which was a reaction to the studio-bound, Hollywood-influenced Italian productions of the Mussolini years. Scorsese called it "the most precious moment in film history." Its proponents—Rossellini, De Sica, Visconti, De Santis and early Fellini—were determined to take their cameras to the streets, to reflect the 'real Italy,' which for years had been absent from Italian cinema screens. In Japan and Russia, Yasujiro Ozu and Andrei Tarkovsky respectively led a similar movement toward Realism, while France gave us Poetic Realism with Renoir and cinéma vérité with Jean Rouch.
Realism emerges from the welter of human experience without smoothing away the raw edges, or losing what most movies lose—the sense of confusion and accident in human affairs. This is the cinema I think we're realizing we need: cinema that acknowledges our humanness in all its beauty and ugliness. Realism is a way of looking at the world without preconceptions or prejudices. Realism can actually change who we are. We know this because reality changes who we are.
Maybe it shouldn't be unsurprising that the re-emergence of Rightist politics has brought Realism back so forcefully. With Realism, it's as if our empathy for the world is reasserting itself as an aesthetic strategy.
There was, for example, Korean filmmaker Lee Chang-dong’s Burning, adapted from a Murakami short story about a wannabe writer (portrayed by a superb, understated Ah-in Too) who thinks he's found escape from his loneliness when he encounters Haimi, a lively young woman from his past. That is until the arrival of the rich and aloof Ben (played by Steven Yeun, who’s career has really kicked ass since The Walking Dead), who's appearance is as welcome as it is scary. Both a parable of social class and an earnestly effective mystery, Burning builds wondrously into a Realist allegory about the false projection of ideas in storytelling and intimacy.
As with his 2013 film Ida, Polish director Pawel Pawlikowski’s Cold War is shot in black-and-white in 4:3 aspect ratio and with such grace that every shot feels worthy of being printed and framed. I can’t think of any contemporary director who uses black-and-white as intentionally as Pawlilowski does. The film is a 'musical' love story—loosely based on the lives of Pawliloski’s parents—between a young Polish folk singer with a haunting voice and her anti-state music teacher. The ideological divisions in Iron Curtained Poland sends the couple yoyo-ing fatefully, and tragically—tearing them apart and bringing them back together. In a period when such divisions are reappearing, Eastern Bloc films like Pawlikowsi's remind us what's at stake.
If Ozu has any disciple in Japan, it’s Hirokazu Kore-eda. Kore-eda’s family dramas are a direct answer to Tolstoy’s most famous sentence: No, they say, every happy family is NOT the same. Indeed, too often films try to oversell the sanctity or pathology of the family, sliding over the messiness of what household love is. Kore-eda’s Shoplifters, which won the Palm D’Or at Cannes, gives us a more honest and unusual domestic portrait: a family of ragged misfits making illicit choices—stealing, kidnapping, cheating, lying—and yet still so full of love—love for each other, love of a greater good. Kore-eda has Ozu’s sensitive, calibrated touch and a way of bringing you into a world that feels lived in. The objects look used up. The outfits look worn out. The family’s toughness, thieving, secrets, and desperation work like ballast on Kore-eda's sweeter sensibilities. And sure enough, through his character's grubby imperfections, Kore-eda finds a perfect story about being human.
In 2001, Alfonso Cuarón’s Y Tu Mamá También became the highest-grossing Mexican film to-date. When I saw it a decade later at the age of 19, it became one of my most beloved and re-watched films. In fact, when in Oaxaca this summer, I even (unsuccessfully) sought out the elusive beach from the film's penultimate scene. Cuarón followed Y Tu Mama También with an eclectic slate of solid Hollywood pics: Harry Potter And The Prisoner Of Azkaban, Children of Men, Gravity. But a decade and a half later, Cuarón has returned to Mexico and his personal stories with Roma, which feels like a spiritual counterpart to Y Tu Mamá También.
With intricate production design and breathtaking cinematography, Cuarón slowly advances a plot, taking in Mexican politics, changing family dynamics and, above all, the dreams and disappointments of the young housekeeper named Cleo, played with heart-stopping candor by Yalitza Aparicio. In an era of border walls, Central American unrest, and leftist re-emergence under AMLO, Roma presents one of the most honest portraits of Mexico through some of the most sublime cinematic moments of 2018: an earthquake viewed from a hospital nursery, where the rubble lands atop a baby’s bin; a man shot in a furniture store during the Corpus Christie Massacre; Cleo’s life-saving rescue of two of the children from the churning surf of a beach weekend.
OTHER WORKS I LOVED
There was a lot. Loved Support The Girls and The Death Of Stalin. Toni Collette and Ethan Hawke put up some huge performances in Hereditary and First Reformed. I don’t think Middle School has ever been as effectively (and embarrassingly) captured as it was in both Eighth Grade and Big Mouth. And there were at least two documentaries deserving of a superlative: The Work--about a four-day group therapy retreat in Folsom State Prison; and Minding The Gap--about skateboarding and domestic abuse in Illinois. Each forces you to suspend judgment, and to rethink what you thought you knew—about race, about masculinity, about poverty. And like Humanist, Absurdist, and Realist works they are acts of witness—reminders that the artistic job is to get us to do one thing above all: pay attention.
The 10 Cinematic Works I Needed Most In 2018
1. Roma
2. Shoplifters
3. Cold War
4. Burning
5. Paddington 2
6. BlacKkKlansman
7. The Work
8. Hannah Gadsby's Nanette
9. Minding The Gap
10. Atlanta, Season 2
*I still haven't seen: Into The Spider-Verse, Mission Impossible: Fallout, Capernaum, Leave No Trace, The Tale, Vox Lux, We The Animals, Amazing Grace, The Incredibles 2, Mandy, Widows, The Ballad Of Buster Scruggs, A Star Is Born, or Free Solo.