Erik Moe: Critic at Large

This year proved unusually difficult to distill down to a pure top two for my annual exercise in list minimalism. I saw a lot of good movies this year, but few fiction films that stood out as excellent. In the end, these are the two:

1. Synecdoche, New York - I’ve seen Charlie Kaufman’s epic on the ultra-examined life only once, but I desperately want to see it again. It’s the only film this year that left me feeling that way. The befuddling layers of the surreal and the mundane make Synecdoche an exhilarating experience (at least for those of us who are exhilarated dry humor, implausibility, and gradual bodily decay). Philip Seymour Hoffman is a twisted pleasure to watch, as usual.

2. Un conte de Noël (A Christmas Tale) - I saw quite a few French films in the last half of 2008, largely owing to AFI’s European Union festival, which occupied much of the post-election calendar at the Silver Theater here in DC. I considered awarding the collective experience of viewing several* in close proximity this slot. But no! I hate it when critics list seven films as “tied” for a single slot in their best-of lists. We’re in the business of comparing and contrasting, and some films are simply better than others. Arnaud Desplechin’s A Christmas Tale is a wonderfully complicated movie about a family gathering at Christmastime. The characters are well written. Their relationships are filled with palpable love and hate. The acting is superb. Until today I hadn’t bothered to look up Desplechin’s filmography. Upon doing so, I was pleasantly surprised to see that he was also behind Esther Kahn, which made a strong impression on me after plucking it from other critics’ year-end lists in 2002.

Also notable:
Sean Penn’s performance in Gus Van Sant’s remake of The Times of Harvey Milk is very good. I hesitate to give much praise to Milk as a whole – largely because I found it far less powerful than that now-classic documentary.

The other performance-driven film on many year-end lists is Darren Aronofsky’s The Wrestler. Micky Rourke’s turn as a veteran on the small-town wrestling circuit is at least as deserving of an Oscar nomination as Penn’s performance. However, the film overall often seemed like it wasn’t rising to the level of Rourke’s acting. I enjoyed the simplicity of the plot. I liked the parallels with his off-screen career and on-screen love interest. The film is certainly a must-see, but simply not in my top two.

I almost placed Vicky Christina Barcelona in my top two. I was extraordinarily entertained watching Woody Allen riff on François Truffaut’s Jules and Jim using the stunning trio of Scarlett Johansson, Javier Bardem, and Penélope Cruz.

*Fine. I’ll name two more French flicks here: Bertrand Bonello’s De la guerre (On War) and Idit Cebula’s Deux vies… plus une (Two Lives… Plus One).