This was a terrific year for movies. I don't know that I have more to say about it as a whole than that, because 2012 was such a varied year in cinema, too. We saw procedurals, Zero Dark Thirty and Lincoln, that dug into the immense work behind known moments in history; movies about the movies, like Holy Motors and The Cabin in the Woods, and sensory creations like Beasts of the Southern Wild and The Master, with their very different protagonists who each seem, at times, tuned into a clearer sense of the universe.
This year also saw the continued fade-out of celluloid and the push for new cinematic experiences with the 48fps of The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, the 3D wizardry of Life of Pi and the prosthetic and make-up-aided gender and ethnicity crossing-casting of Cloud Atlas. But my biggest pleasures in the theater this year tended to be the old-fashioned type: from a luscious 70mm screening of The Master at the Ziegfeld Theater in New York to the throwback sensibility at the center of Rust and Bone. Then again, it's contemporary technology that allowed my number-one pick to be shot and smuggled to its Cannes premiere inside a cake. Film is changing, sure, but there's no arguing its vividly alive.
"I know that life has been unfair to you because it has given you every possible advantage," man-child Abe (Jordan Gelber) is told in a dream sequence, a perfect encapsulation of an existence spent in paralyzing, frustrated inadequacy. Both he and his eventual reluctant fiancée Miranda (Selma Blair) are in their thirties and living with their parents in New Jersey, crushed by their inability to prove themselves to be as special in adulthood as they'd always been as children. Todd Solondz doesn't mock his ridiculous, defensive and unhappy protagonist with the same mercilessness that he used to skewer his back catalog of memorable losers, but he doesn't allow Abe to be lovable or cuddly either. He's inherited a dissatisfaction that has kept him caught between entitlement and self-loathing, and stands alone as a marvelously drawn and tragic figure of toxic ingrained American aspirations.
It's an ingeniously geeky and loving deconstruction of the horror genre. It's a meta-critique of what we want from slasher flicks and why we enjoy them. It's a reworking of and an explanation for the silliest recurring habits of scary movie victims, and it's also, somehow, a workplace comedy. Mostly, though, Drew Goddard and Joss Whedon's clever, clever film was maybe the best time you could have had in cineplexes this year. It was rewarding both as a reference-laden (bloody) valentine to hardcore film fans and a rollicking standalone feature that offered up far-from-disposable characters and an elaborate high-tech system to explain why they ended up running from baddies in the woods.
An unruly fable, a tale of mourning and an intense child's-eye view of the world as a place alive with magic light and dark, Benh Zeitlin's debut is a thrilling, sui generis work of art. Shadowed by the spectre of Katrina and rising sea levels that threaten the southern coast, Beasts of the Southern Wild turns the promise of approaching destruction, both natural and mortal, into something to be refused and relished in equal measure. Six-year old Hushpuppy (the wonderful Quvenzhané Wallis) is facing life without her father and a future in which her home in The Bathtub — the Louisiana community in which she lives — may be washed away. But like the horned aurochs that figure in the story, she's a fierce creature braced to face an enchanting, frightening world with no fear in her heart.
Kathryn Bigelow doesn't politicize her depiction of the decade-long search for Osama bin Laden. She does something much bolder, giving us a steady-eyed, rigorous procedural about how Maya (Jessica Chastain), a young CIA analyst with no apparent interests outside of her job, takes in the dead ends, the passing years, the torture techniques euphemistically passed off as "enhanced interrogation," and the sacrifices required to get the job done. And when it is finally done, Zero Dark Thirty does not offer clear catharsis or empty jingoism. From a start in which terrified voices from 9/11 play out over a black screen to an ending that finds the film's protagonist very much alone, it's a stark, gritty portrayal of modern war that's free of the illusion of certainty.
Every time Denis Lavant exits the limo in which he spends his day, it's to play a part in a new, buoyant, strange and funny scenario: He puts on a body stocking and takes part in two green-screen sequences. He dresses up as a hunchback who lives in the sewer and kidnaps a model played by Eva Mendes. He sings with Kylie Minogue atop a hotel and dips into family dramas and gangster tussles. It's a phantasmagoric tribute to the movies, but also a melancholy one. Lavant's character is revealed to be a permanent role player who's only himself when he's between gigs in his vehicle, taking part in a metaphor for an art form whose time may be ending.
It's the story of a love affair between a killer-whale trainer who lost her legs in an accident and a part-time underground kickboxer who recently inherited a five-year-old son he barely knows. But beneath the wacky-sounding premise, Jacques Audiard's film is a marvel of a melodrama. It's a tender and raw film with a big, old-fashioned heart beneath its contemporary trappings, but it's also in touch with physicality in a way that's rare on screen. Marion Cotillard's character has to learn how to live in a reshaped body, while Matthias Schoenaerts' can seem part animal anyway. Their courtship brings out better aspects in both of these broken people, who, together, might be able to form an imperfect whole.
The pleasant surprise of the year for this critic was that Steven Spielberg's film about the 16th President was no sepia-toned hagiography but a film about the actual blood, sweat and tear-soaked process of getting an amendment passed. Lincoln turns the passing of the Thirteenth Amendment outlawing slavery into something suspenseful and tricky: votes are won with patronage jobs, ideals are bent and dozens of individual agendas are navigated for the greater good. It's a powerful argument for the messiness of democracy and for its greatness, brought to life by Tony Kushner's well-wrought dialog and a performance of subtle strength by Daniel Day-Lewis, who shows Lincoln's incredible political mind and moral compass as well as his humble, folksy charm.
Stunning, mysterious and haunting, Paul Thomas Anderson's film about an alcoholic, half-feral WWII veteran and the leader of a Scientology-like movement who takes him up as a protege resists easy reads. Is it a story about the American-born belief system, is it about the war? I'd like to think it's about exerting power over others. Freddie Quell (Joaquin Phoenix, in the performance of the year) is a man unable to control his own impulses, but one who's alluring because of this earthy, unbound quality. Freddie draws the attention of Lancaster Dodd (Philip Seymour Hoffman) because he represents a chance for the would-be guru wants to prove his powers, to shape this quicksilver being into something new. But conforming is not for Freddie, not even to please his aspiring master. And though it seems he escapes something repressive and false, a path of isolation is all that's left for him — set to the tune of Hoffman's spooky and sad rendition of "(I'd Like to Get You on a) Slow Boat to China."
A couple, played by Gael García Bernal and Hani Furstenberg, go on a hike in the mountains of Georgia with a local guide. Halfway through, they have a brief brush with danger that messes with their relationship and their heads. Julia Loktev's film is minimalist in its cast and dialog, but no film this year feels as rich and nuanced in its depictions of the subtle ways in which people's actions broadcast their emotions.
Like The Cabin in the Woods and Holy Motors, Mojtaba Mirtahmasb and Jafar Panahis' semi-documentary is about filmmaking, but it cuts deeper still, because it's about being silenced. Panahi, awaiting to appeal a six-year prison sentence and 20-year ban on filmmaking, wanders his Tehran flat, talking on the phone and outlining for the visiting Mirtahmasb the feature he would have made next: a film about a girl who, fittingly, has been locked in her house by her disapproving conservative family. This is Not a Film begins as a self-referential exercise about how describing a film is a miserable substitute for making one, but, as it progresses, it becomes the story of Panahi himself, shut away from the world. If this is not a film, there's no denying that it's something great — the personal and the political tied up in one, partially shot on a iPhone, all within the confines of a Tehran apartment building.
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