I can’t say what’s best: I can only tell you my favorites. Several of these titles came and went quickly in Milwaukee theaters; most were not blockbusters, and while I don’t begrudge a movie for being a box office hit (most of my all time favorites were hits in their day), many of 2014’s biggest moneymakers stunk in cinematic terms—at least as I define them.
Was 2014 a good year for film? Not especially. Only the top four titles on this list are candidates for four stars, with the remainder coming in at three and a half or even a mere three (three and a quarter?). One frustration shared by most Milwaukee film critics: inevitably, some of 2014’s most interesting films will arrive in Milwaukee theaters weeks or months after their calendar year release—and in some cases they will never arrive in Milwaukee theaters at all. Consider this list a reflection on what was available in town during the past year.
1. Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance)
Perfectly cast for a film focused on the porous line between reality and fantasy, Michael Keaton (who played Batman decades ago for Tim Burton) stars as Riggan Thomson, a faded superhero trying for a comeback through the side door of high culture. Director Alejandro González Iñárritu shatters barriers between drama and comedy, realism and fantasy, personal and social. Much of Birdman is filmed in long unbroken takes through the dark winding labyrinth of backstage Broadway and into the bright stage lights.
2. Only Lovers Left Alive
Director Jim Jarmusch has a bit of fun with the vampire genre, even running the opening credits in Gothic typeface. However, the humor plays in an entirely different key than spoof. With Tom Hiddleston and Tilda Swinton, Jarmusch assembled the most elegant undead couple since David Bowie and Catherine Deneuve in a love story with a subtext of social decay. The vampires are smarter, maybe even more ethical, than most of the living. A literate hipster’s delight, Only Lovers Left Alive is replete with references to vintage Gibson guitars, the Faust legend and ’60s soul music.
3. The Lunchbox
A Mumbai housewife tries to stimulate the unresponsive appetites of her husband by cooking a splendid set of dishes and sending them by bicycle courier to his office for lunch. When the courier delivers her delicious meal to the wrong man, the prospect of a new life gradually opens. The Lunchbox may sound like a recipe for a mildly amusing Hollywood “chick flick,” yet the film by Indian director Ritesh Batra is a smart, funny and bittersweet story, a perfectly constructed jewel box of a film.
4. Love is Strange
With gay marriage in the news, Love is Strange could have been a ripped-from-the-headlines melodrama. Instead, writer-director Ira Sachs finds universal significance in the plight of newlyweds Ben and George (John Lithgow and Alfred Molina). When George is fired from the Roman Catholic school where he taught, the couple (long-time companions before marriage) is forced from their condo and into other people’s homes, grappling with loss of health insurance and income. Beautiful without a speck of saccharine, Love is Strange looks at commitment, fraying family ties, personal space, parenthood, aging, coming of age and middle-class anxiety without missing a beat.
5. Whiplash
Doors fling open violently at the conservatory and in strides Fletcher (J.K. Simmons), a music teacher whose pedagogy is more drill camp than Suzuki. Nineteen-year-old drummer Andrew (Miles Teller) endures torrents of Fletcher’s verbal and physical abuse, not to mention bleeding fingers, to reach the teacher’s standards of excellence. Director Damien Chazelle’s dramatization of peak performance risks going over the top, but finely calibrated performances and tense editing keep it believable. Fletcher is maniacal, but Whiplash seems to say that in a society where mediocrity is encouraged, driving to push students beyond endurance has an upside.
6. Locke
Locke plays out in a moving vehicle through one man’s cell phone conversations with coworkers, family and companions. Director Steven Knight makes the idea work. With Tom Hardy in the driver seat (and on speaker phone), Locke shows life unraveling in real time as the protagonist races to the hospital where a woman from a one-night encounter is having his baby. Abandoned as a child, he is determined to be at his child’s birth, even if it jeopardizes his marriage, family and career. Hardy’s performance holds the drama in tight focus.
7. Into the Woods
Rob Marshall, who directed the last musical to win a Best Picture Oscar, Chicago, successfully brings the Stephen Sondheim hit to the screen with an all-star cast (Meryl Streep as the Witch, Johnny Depp as the Big Bad Wolf) and sensitivity for the thorny folklore of the Brothers Grimm. The film version of Into the Woods is released by the Disney studio, but without being stereotypically Disney. Into the Woods is often funny and always entertaining, but people die. Not everyone gets to live happily ever after.
8. A Man Most Wanted
Philip Seymour Hoffman was among his generation’s greatest actors, and was especially at home when suffering no fools. In his final starring role before his death, Hoffman lives inside the skin of a German intelligence officer who bristles at the lack of intelligence among his superiors. And don’t get him started on the CIA. As with most John le Carré film adaptations, the twisting plot is less important than the characters inhabiting a world of betrayal. Director Anton Corbijn translates the moral twilight into a visual twilight of bars fitfully lit by jukebox lights and claustrophobic, curtained interiors.
9. Belle
Drawn from a true story, Belle is Pride and Prejudice with the accent on prejudice. Gugu Mbatha-Raw stars as the 18th-century daughter of a British aristocrat and an African slave living in the nobleman’s country manor. Belle has been compared to a Merchant-Ivory film, and while director Amma Asante lavishes similar attention on period furnishings, the tone is closer to golden age Hollywood. Feelings are as orchestrated as a symphony in a screenplay with foreshadowing that allows the audience to know where the plot is headed despite the obstacles on the way. Tom Wilkinson and Emily Watson play the tolerant aristocrats.
10. Gone Girl
Gone Girl is the latest journey into malicious madness from director David Fincher, who established an interest in the twisted, unlit paths of the psyche with Se7en and Zodiac. Gone Girl was written for the screen by novelist Gillian Flynn from her bestselling mystery thriller. The story has more turns than the interstate system; some of them can be spotted, but since many, especially in the first two-thirds of this long, two-and-a-half-hour film emerge from blind spots, plot description becomes one expansive spoiler. Gone Girl held my interest throughout, but I must confess: I doubt if I’d ever want to see it a second time.
Documentaries
With the proliferation of cable and Internet outlets, documentaries are more common than ever, albeit some documentary filmmakers are content to point a camera at an interesting topic and hope for the best, while others like to play around with bad dramatic reenactments and post-Matrix CGI clichés. Please, no more musket balls in slo-mo!
Here are three from 2014 that caught my eye:
1. Life Itself
Like many documentarians nowadays, director Steve James insists on injecting himself into the proceedings as a walk-on character, but the story is focused where it should be—on the man who brought film criticism to the masses, Roger Ebert. Life Itself sympathetically examines Ebert’s Illinois upbringing, love of newspaper culture and eventual abstinence from alcohol through AA where he met his wife and soul mate, Chaz. For Ebert, “Movies are like a machine that generates empathy.” Thumbs up!
2. Jodorowsky’s Dune
The coolest movie never made, and probably the most inspiring, is the subject of Frank Pavich’s documentary, Jodorowsky’s Dune. A decade before David Lynch’s widely derided rendition of the Frank Herbert novel, Latin-American cult director Alejandro Jodorowsky began work on his adaptation. He enlisted Mick Jagger, David Carradine, Orson Welles and Salvador Dali as actors, Pink Floyd for the soundtrack and H.R. Giger to design extra-terrestrial gothic worlds. Millions were spent in pre-production but the cameras never rolled. All that remains are memories and sketches for a grand idea.
3. 1971
Director Johanna Hamilton’s documentary tells the largely forgotten story of a break-in at an FBI office by anti-Vietnam war activists. The burglars found a trove of documents revealing the pervasive extent of FBI surveillance. J. Edgar Hoover’s bureau kept tabs on everyone and was intent on destroying the personal lives of dissidents. When the Washington Post ran the story, the invulnerability of the FBI was punctured. Mixing interviews, archival TV footage and deft recreations, 1971 is a compelling history lesson with the tension of a political thriller. It was the Milwaukee Film Festival’s opening night feature.
