Year of mixed fortunes

Looking back at the Hollywood movies in 2012, pradeep sebastian finds it difficult to come up with a single favourite among the box-office heavies.

For the lushest, most enchanting first few minutes of a movie opening, see Life of Pi. The rest never lives up to that title sequence of technicolor animals in 3D unfolding to the utterly lovely Mychael Danna-Bombay Jayashree lullaby. The mysteries of why a Tamil family should be speaking in an exoticised, hybrid North Indian English accent, I’ll take up later — what interests me now is how Life of Pi is not the only heavyweight movie that misses being the very best of the year. I can’t come up with a single favourite among the box-office heavies this year — not Lincoln, not The Master, not Argo, and especially not the fascistic Zero Dark Thirty, which has drawn lashings of praise everywhere. The best films this year for me turned out to be two small movies that I saw at the beginning of the year and at the end: The Deep Blue Sea and A Late Quartet. And the most astonishing movie I saw this year was Holy Motors, the French film that feels like a cross between David Lynch and the Wachowski Brothers.

The year in movies is far from over, of course: several December-end releases could still be possible contenders for best of the year: Peter Jackson’s The Hobbit, Mira Nair’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist, Tom Cruise’s Jack Reacher, Deepa Mehta’s Midnight’s Children and Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained. One thing I do know is that I am sure to like Tarantino’s work. It will be a pleasure to see Leonardo De Caprio as a villain, especially as conceived by QT, and the return of Christoph Waltz in a QT movie is the best year-end gift a fan can get. But the best film of the year? I’d really doubt Django was meant to please a lot of people. 

I’ll begin with The Deep Blue Sea, end with A Late Quartet, and in-between make a note of other little movies that went under the radar and say something about what was best or remarkable even in the movies that failed to completely overwhelm me. But first, the movies that disappointed.

Sophisticated talk

Woody Allen’s To Rome With Love was just so limp — not a disgrace like Whatever Works, but just uninspiring and dull. How long can the charms of Europe make up for Allen’s underwhelming writing? I found Midnight in Paris to be overrated, and still think You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, set in London, is his most sparkling work in years. I had been waiting so long for a new movie from Whit Stillman, the director of Metropolitan, and had such high hopes for Damsels in Distress because it was once again a movie about young people, but it failed to engage me. A young, intelligent actress like Greta Gerwig was made for a filmmaker like Stillman whose main thing, like Woody Allen, is a movie that is all about sophisticated talk.

The result in Damsels in Distress, though, is bland; in Metropolitan, it fairly sparkled. 
Rachel Weisz has just won best actress at the recently announced New York Film Critic’s Circle Award for her role as a wife from 50s England involved in a self-destructive love affair in The Deep Blue Sea. She’s married to an older man, a kindly, wealthy judge, and falls in love with a poor young soldier. She walks out of the marriage to live with her lover in a small, squalid flat. The period, setting, and social circumstances could so easily describe a story from India; a doomed Indian love triangle. Somewhere, Hester knows that the man she loves does not love her back with the depth she does, but she still prefers it to the safety and comfort of her marriage. The further she goes in the affair, the more despair she experiences. Until the time she knows she is alone in how she feels, and begins thinking of suicide.

When I saw the trailer of this Richard Gere thriller, it looked like a dozen other movies with the same plot: rich, arrogant playboy-businessman accidentally kills his mistress and keeps it a dark secret from his family until the police investigation names him a suspect. And then Arbitrage got splendid reviews from the critics, all of them claiming that debut writer-director Nicholas Jarecki had made something truly interesting and suspenseful out of this tired plot. So I decided to chance it, and found myself fully absorbed in how it all unfolds, scene by scene, even though we’ve seen it all before. Somehow, Jarecki is able to use this old plot to surprise us again and again — not by thwarting our expectations, but by fulfilling them. The cast is superb, especially Richard Gere who reins in his permanent smirk for a believable, intelligent performance, and lovely Brit Marling, who plays his tough daughter.       

Returning to the puzzle of a very South Indian family with a North Indian accent in Life of Pi — well, there’s no way to explain it, except for the family surname: Patel. It’s just as strange, though, that this Patel family should call Pondicherry their home. In Ang Lee’s version, the mother, Gita (Tabu) is clearly Tamil (probably Brahmin, but maybe not); she speaks to her children in Tamil. The husband, Santosh (Adil Hussain), speaks like his children, and the adult Pi (Irfan Khan), in a Hollywood imagined thick Bollywood-English accent, but in a flash can lash out at Murugan, the zoo-keeper, in Tamil. Suraj Sharma lays his Delhi accent thick for the whole period of the raft on the sea, and it grates enormously, not to say terribly irritating. And then he’ll say a word in Tamil out of the blue, startling us once again into wondering why a boy born and grown up in Puducherry should be speaking Delhi Pubic School English. The digital Richard Parker and the luminous sea life sequences are what save the movie from drowning.     

Thrilling experience

I enjoyed and admired The Dark Knight Rises much more than any of the other so-called serious dramas this year. I hadn’t expected to not liking Christopher Nolan’s earlier Batman movies, but I was drawn fully into this one for the thrilling experience it offered. Some elements and actors that made this a rousing entertainment for me: that whole Ra’s al Ghul legend and the deliciously protracted sequence in that underground sand city, Tom Hardy as the villain and Marion Cotillard as the villainess, and most particularly, Hans Zimmer’s thunderous music score that comes at you again and again, nearly lifting you off your seat. 

A Late Quartet, a small, intimate film, is about four classical musicians played by Christopher Walken, Philip Seymour Hoffman, and Catherine Keener. As we know, these are all actors who we always see play weird characters in overwrought performances, and what’s refreshing about their roles here, and the way they perform them, is that they are just four ordinary people going about the business of working and living and making art. Especially Walken, who gets to play the older musician without the usual tics and overstylisation, and Hoffman, who is subdued but passionate. Equally noteworthy is the work of the young English actress, Imogen Poots. It’s a marvelous film, taking us deep into the life of serious, professional musicians, and one you shouldn’t miss.