Children’s Hope Carries Film in 2006
Teenage queens, super spies, pedophiles, and fauns unite to form the year's best in movies
Criticism is a subjective business, but mediocrity affects us all equally. The smug production of adequacy has, over the course of our short lifetimes, become a livelihood for many (anyone involved with Night at the Museum) and an accepted burden for millions more (um, me). So as redundant and arbitrary as these annual lists are, anointing the bravest and most exciting works of a medium that is being driven into the ground is something of a public service. So without further ado, on with the superlatives and hyperbole!
13. BRICK – A bafflingly assured debut, Rian Johnson’s teen noir is a relentlessly intriguing technical marvel. Brick promises a bit more than it eventually delivers, but Johnson has plenty of time to make it up to us.
12. APOCALYPTO – A man from a family that questions the Holocaust makes one of cinema’s most poignant condemnations of widespread egocentricity—the irony tastes decidedly kosher. Fresh off his narratively-disastrous Christ porn, Mel Gibson is back with a fresh and visionary tale that is violent without being gratuitous and profound without stopping to catch its breath. Gibson translates genre clichés into fresh beats and ends his film on the perfect note. Besides, the man opened a film acted entirely in Mayan dialect atop the box office. I don’t care how much he hates my people—that’s brilliant.
11. BABEL – Alejandro González Iñárritu’s last and most overtly flawed realization of a Guillermo Arriaga screenplay, the cogs of Babel’s international contraption don’t grind as seamlessly as they should, but the Japan-set thread is—in its obvious way—the most immediately moving storytelling the now defunct duo have ever crafted (in large part due to the performances of Rinko Kikuchi and Koji Yakusho).
10. THE DEATH OF MR. LAZARESCU – The first installment of Romanian filmmaker Cristi Puiu’s planned series about suburban Bucharest, Lazarescu is a paradoxical real-time account of a dying man’s final minutes. A nightmarish yet strangely optimistic odyssey from the eponymous Lazarescu’s (the perfect Ion Fiscuteanu) bed to his final gurney and everywhere in between, Puiu’s unflinching camera unearths humanity in our darkest shared inevitability.
9. MISSION IMPOSSIBLE III / CASINO ROYALE – Big-budget action extravaganzas done right, these two delights bit their thumb at convention and united teenage boys and flaming men in giddy glee. Both were note-perfect and thoughtfully crafted adventures that had enough wit, fun, and heart for their entire franchises.
8. THE FOUNTAIN – The Fountain is a film as much for the pores as it is for the mind. Like Magnolia or Lost in Translation, it sinks into your skin and becomes part of you after innumerable viewings on Starz. It’s that movie that you contract in the theater and live with forever. As much as it sounds like cinematic herpes, Darren Aronofsky’s lucid and erroneously assailed fever-dream of a third film is a revelatory experience, and, with any luck, a film that could outlast film itself.
7. THE DEPARTED – Time your Oscar pee-break for the Best Director category.
6. CURSE OF THE GOLDEN FLOWER / MARIE ANTOINETTE – Two oddly similar films that shared narrative insularity and lazy critical reaction, both Zhang Yimou and Sofia Coppola broke new ground in 2006. The former did so by marrying his recent fetish for opulence and acrobatics with sublime dashes of Greek and Shakespearean tragedy and the young Coppola by allowing the third of her cautious wallflowers to bloom in an environment as specific as it was timeless. To dislike either of these films is personal prerogative, but to ignore their true intentions is irresponsible—Marie Antoinette, in particular, hides a delicate profundity beneath its candy shell and arresting anachronisms.
5. PAN’S LABYRINTH – Mexican fantasist Guillermo Del Toro has finally become a masterful storyteller rather than a merely impassioned one. Awash in the traditional tenets of fairytales (recognizable archetypes abound), but grimmer than Grimm and with a social conscience as big as its considerable heart, Del Toro has, with Pan’s Labyrinth, at last fashioned a worthy conduit for his fantastic imagination.
4. THE LIVES OF OTHERS – Germany’s candidate for the Best Foreign Picture Oscar is the best debut of the year. A quietly devastating peek through the Berlin Wall into 1984-era East Germany, the film centers around a writer, his actress wife, and a member of the Communist government’s secret police who listens to the couple’s every move from the attic of their apartment building. To say any more would be a crime, but if the last beat doesn’t leave you choked up, you should consider a future in Fascism. Look for it in February.
3. LITTLE CHILDREN – A master class in how to adapt an unruly novel for the screen, Todd Field’s treatment of Tom Perrota’s book makes full use of the cinematic medium to birth (gorgeous) flesh and blood from the author’s words. By turns lighter and darker than In The Bedroom but consistently more ambitious, Field’s sophomore effort flawlessly juggles various flavors of suburban depravity—from adultery to pederasty to truly committed forays into the wide world of Internet porn—in its quest to unearth the Hobbesian tenets our contemporary social networks still rest upon. It’s Blue Velvet for the PTA crowd, and though it features the year’s best performance in the unlikely form of one-time Bad News Bear Jackie Earle Haley, methinks the marginally deserving Eddie Murphy won’t be willing to share his Oscar.
2. LADY VENGEANCE – Another year, another ignored masterpiece from Park Chan-Wook. The conclusion to his informally titled “Vengeance Trilogy,” Lady Vengeance is both the series’ gentlest and most devastating installment. The deceptively sloppy tale of the beautiful Lee Geum-ja’s prison stint and her post-release agenda spends its first hour in a darkly comic chronological quagmire but makes a masterfully sly transition into an opera of immaculately calculated horror that has Kevin Spacey’s John Doe looking downright lazy. With all the gothic visuals, baroque strains, and moral predicaments that viewers have come to expect from the unofficial herald of the Korean New Wave, Lady Vengeance is not only the perfect compliment to Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance and Oldboy, it might be the best of the bunch.
1. CHILDREN OF MEN – Alfonso Cuarón achieves a Herzogian level of directorial eclecticism, doing for Vonnegut-tinged sci-fi what he has already done for Harry Potter, little princesses, and Mexican three-ways. Adapted from P.D. James’ less-than-wonderful novel about a dystopian near future in which all the world’s women are infertile, in Cuarón’s hands Children of Men blooms into an examination of humanity’s precarious relationship with hope. The perfect casting of Clive Owen and Michael Caine immediately stifles all potential pretension, and the film’s technical presentation (Emmanuel Lubezki’s cinematography is ground-breaking, his 2027 London made impossibly organic) is as much of a miracle as the pregnancy that drives the story. Beyond the wizardry and precision of it all is a brilliantly crafted tale that turns potentially laughable B-movie moments into the stuff of lifetime achievement montages. Children of Men doesn’t just find hope when all hope is lost, it also presents a hope that is our only means to any conceivable end.