This was the best film of 2005, and perhaps the best film of the decade so far. I saw two different versions, and while I preferred the dreamy abstraction of the longer cut, the shorter one has its virtues as well. Malick, more than any other working filmmaker, uses film language for amazingly expressive and intelligent ends which never sacrifice emotional weight. I guess some find his films distant and academic, but I've never been able to see that. For me, Malick's films are so emotionally wrought and felt that this is almost a flaw. What's the point of his films? Perhaps it's just the film itself, and I mean this in a sense that gets to the very basic wonder inherent in art. Our world is reflected back and made new to us, made strange or beautiful. A great film can pull us out of our world, out of ourselves, and hint at a greater whole. This is not a strictly happy or sentimental observation. Evil demonstrates it as much as good. But at the very basest level this film is a testament to the beauty of a life, and as such all life, all Being itself. It's all reaching skyward...
Life has no memory. That which proceeds in succession might be remembered, but that which is coexistent, or ejaculated from a deeper cause, as yet far from being conscious, knows not its own tendency. So is it with us, now skeptical, or without unity, because immersed in forms and effects all seeming to be of equal yet hostile value, and now religious, whilst in the reception of spiritual law. Bear with these distractions, with this coetaneous growth of the parts: they will one day be members, and obey one will. On that one will, on that secret cause, they nail our attention and hope. Life is hereby melted into an expectation or a religion. Underneath the inharmonious and trivial particulars, is a musical perfection, the Ideal journeying always with us, the heaven without rent or seam.Malick finds the filmic language to express Emerson's words. When John Smith and Pocahontas fall in love, we see the world itself beginning to swell and bloom, and when he betrays her we see that it has begun to rot. The point, however, is not that the world is reflecting the feelings of the lovers, but that the lovers are part of the world, that their love itself is a creation of the world. The moving final minutes of this film show us our transformation, our connection with the Universe and the Ideal and even Heaven, like the sun peaking through a crowded canopy of trees, light which graces us only momentarily before succumbing to darkness. "All things shining...." as the final words of The Thin Red Line remind us.
--Emerson, Experience
2. Brokeback Mountain
Another love story on a slightly different register from The New World. I have the suspicion that this film is admired and disliked for similarly bad reasons, namely political ones. Yet the film itself is apolitical, more concerned with human interaction on a personal level than the fundamental political structures which dictate those interactions. I guess that's my fancy way of saying that this movie is not really a Liberal movie, not to say Leftist. In fact you could make an argument that the very fact that the film concentrates so much on the personal at the expense of the political, it includes narratives of redemption and damnation, that it's closer to a conservative film than a liberal one. If those labels really mean anything.
With that out of the way I can say that this film is one of the best depictions of the sheer silence and loneliness of the American west of any film I've seen. Or to use more up to date terms, "fly-over country." It remains true to its characters in a way that refuses political utilty. Ennis is not gonna move to San Francisco with Jack. He does not consider it an option, it's just not done. He accepts his thwarted desire, stuffs it down and silences it, in a way that Jack can't. This film is more about the problem of masculinity than being "gay" as such (and it's clear to me anyway that Ennis is not really gay, though Jack is): the codes of silence and work that slowly erode a person's spirit to the point where they can't talk anymore, and the pain is, as it were, stuffed in the closet. When men take on the part of being "masculine" we give up a part of ourselves, force it to be silent and hidden. Because the work has to be done, it's not as if one can evade responsibilities, as we so often casually do these days. This film is the tragedy of being gendered as "male," and as such it's movie about something a lot more important and fundamental than being gay. Ennis' one moment of anguish is so very subtle but it carries enormous emotional force. If you can feel the isolation present in every frame of this movie from the opening shot on, the terrible distance and beauty of nature which infuses everything, then your human, and you can certainly empathize with these characters.
3. The Weather Man
As a friend told me, this movie hits pretty close to home sometimes. Essentially about growing up and becoming and adult, which simply means accepting that life is limited and imperfect, but you've got to focus anyway. It's darkly funny, and the running subtext about fast food is a pretty profound critique of the way most of us lead our lives in a sort of shallow distraction. The final scene between father and son is filled with much unsaid pathos, and Nicholas Cage plays it perfectly. The father's advice to his son, one curt sentence, is brutal but also emancipating.
4. Munich
Sort of sickeningly terrifying and yet compelling. The film charts the journey through the moral wasteland of the 20th Century as a endless search for Home. The ethical deadlock strikes me as despair rather than hope, but it's equally powerful nonetheless.
5. Grizzly Man
Funny and weird, and sad of course. It strikes me as being about how we often refuse to see what's in front of us, for the sake of continuing a fiction which we need to survive, even, ironically, to the point of dying for it.
6. The 40-Year-Old-Virgin
Nasty and funny, but it's also on here for the no-so-subtle suggestion that the title character is only one who can have a normal, healthy, happy relationship because he doesn't care about sex as an end in itself.
7. War of the Worlds
Spielberg's other tour of 20th Century horror, this time on the ground, away form the decision makers.
8. 2046
Hollow and fruitless where as the first one, In the Mood for Love, held out an expected promise. Desire is flawed here, too real, too accessible.
9. Wedding Crashers
This just cracked me up. Subtext is pretty clear though: they are too in love with each other to really commit to a woman. It's at least as gay as Brokeback!
10. Kung Fu Hustle
Hey, I needed 10 and this will do! Funny, inventive, a bit too cartoony for my taste, but I was never bored.