American Cinema: Our Best Diplomat in 2007?

Wherever my travels have taken me this year, whether as close as the screening room down the street or as far afield as the Cannes Film Festival in France, the sentiment has been the same: What a banner year it has been for American movies. And at a time when there isn’t much about our country that everyone the world over can agree on, these words of praise have been spoken by critics, filmmakers and just plain moviegoers of myriad tongues and nationalities. Far be it from me to argue: Of the 17 titles I’ve managed to shoehorn into the 10 slots below (with an eye toward potential double and triple features), all but four are American or American co-productions. Even more notable than this surfeit may be the fact that some of the most venturesome work in this annus mirabilis for homegrown cinema came in movies produced and/or released by the major Hollywood studios or their subsidiary “specialty” divisions. Not that the news was always good: Two of those films, Zodiac and The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, were expensive commercial failures, while the box-office fate of the riskiest venture of them all, Paul Thomas Anderson’s There Will Be Blood, remains to be seen. All of which makes one wonder how willing, with its purse strings already tightened by an ongoing writers strike, Hollywood will be to take such risks in the future.

For the list that follows, a few ground rules: For no reason other than thinning a very thick herd, I have excluded any mention of deserving films (like the extraordinary Chinese documentary West of the Tracks) that opened only in New York and not in L.A., as well as those movies (like Charles Burnett’s Killer of Sheep and My Brother’s Wedding) made long ago but only distributed this year. And yet, through no fault of their own, I have failed to find room for Black Book, Death Proof, Exiled, The Host, I’m Not There, Into the Wild, The Last Winter, Private Fears in Public Places, The Savages and Rescue Dawn.

1. There Will Be Blood. See review, page 70.

Eastern Promises (Photo by Peter Mountain)

Knocked Up (Photo by Suzanne Hanover)

Related Stories

• Brian de Palma Explains How His Erotic Remake Passion Is Better Than the Original
  August 29, 2013
• Brian De Palma’s Sexy Melodrama Passion, Starring Rachel McAdams
  August 29, 2013
• L.A. Guard Dog Trainer Accused of Starving Canines
  August 22, 2013
• Frances Ha: Not Yet a Person, But a Damn Good Film
  May 16, 2013
• Cannes Diary: What Are the Women in their Dresses Hoping For?
  May 16, 2013

More About

• Hollywood
• Noah Baumbach
• Cristian Mungiu
• Movie Dramas
• Movie Westerns

2. Colossal Youth and Regular Lovers. In what has become a distressing trend for foreign films in Los Angeles, the year’s two greatest imports registered barely a blip on most moviegoers’ radar. The first, Portuguese director Pedro Costa’s heroic, intransigent movie about the displaced residents of a Lisbon housing slum, was limited to a single, sold-out showing at REDCAT (despite receiving a full week’s berth in New York); the second, French filmmaker Philippe Garrel’s fever-dream remembrance of Paris in May of 1968, got all of two screenings at LACMA during the very first weekend of 2007. “But I can rent them from Netflix” is the popular refrain I hear when I complain to people about this sorry state of affairs. Well, in the case of Colossal Youth, you can’t; and the lustrous black-and-white photography of Regular Lovers cameraman William Lubtchansky is something I wouldn’t wish to be relegated to even the greatest home-theater system.

3. 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days and Lake of Fire. “The Romanian abortion movie” is the somewhat dubious shorthand that has been bestowed upon director Cristian Mungiu’s searing portrait of life in his home country before the fall of communism (which played a one-week Oscar-qualifying run in L.A. earlier this month and will return to local theaters in January). In reality, Mungiu is less interested in the life-vs.-choice debate than in the way people living in a socially repressive society adapt to circumstance — how a pack of cigarettes becomes a form of currency, a hot shower a luxury item. For a more direct (if equally nonpartisan) confrontation of the abortion issue, there was British director Tony Kaye’s kaleidoscopic, years-in-the-making documentary about left-wing pro-lifers, history-making abortion patients turned anti-abortion advocates, militant soldiers in the army of God, and every shade of the spectrum in between.

4. Zodiac. After There Will Be Blood, the year’s other masterpiece of American narrative cinema was David Fincher’s storage-locker-claustrophobic drama about the collateral victims of the eponymous San Francisco serial killer: the cops and reporters who allowed the case to consume (and in some cases destroy) their lives. Dumped into release by Paramount during the chill of spring and all but ignored in the year-end awards-whoring hubbub, Zodiac will endure long after most of 2007’s supposed “best” pictures have been consigned to the historical dustbin.

5. Ratatouille. Not just — maybe not even — for kids, Brad Bird’s zesty comedy of talent at odds with mediocrity and art at odds with ego represented the full creative flowering of one of the most inspired and imaginative storytellers at work in American movies. A slow-food movie for a fast-food nation, Ratatouille offers as apéritif a dreamlike evocation of the City of Lights, for postre an episode of involuntary memory borrowed from Proust, and in between some slapstick madness worthy of Jacques Tati. Bon appetit indeed.

6. No Country for Old Men and The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford. Two inspired evocations of outlaw life in the American West, one set in the 1980s ?and the other a hundred years before. In adapting Cormac McCarthy’s circumspect, mordantly funny best-seller about a weary sheriff and an assortment of modern-day bandits on the blood-soaked trail of $2 million in drug money, the brothers Joel and Ethan Coen seemed to rediscover their moviemaking mojo following a couple of dubiously arch comedies that one wishes could be stricken from their résumés. No less impressive a feat of adaptation was Australian writer-director Andrew Dominik’s film version of Ron Hansen’s densely detailed novel about the final days of a storied American outlaw, his upstart assassin, and the birth of American celebrity culture.