The Best Movies of 2013, #4: Blue Is the Warmest Color

Falling in love is magical, but what happens when the fall ends? Do you land gently and continue through life in a state of perpetual bliss? Or do you crash and suddenly find yourself helpless, paralyzed with numbness and confusion? Blue Is the Warmest Color, Abdellatif Kechiche’s soaring, searing story of love won and lost, examines the trajectory of a fairly typical relationship with atypical tenderness and honesty. In so doing, it runs the emotional gamut, depicting fully realized characters at their best and worst: joyous and disconsolate, hopeful and afraid, empathetic and hurtful. But even as it buffets its two lovers through emotional crosswinds, one thing remains constant: It always feels true. It is not an especially happy film, and viewers who demand that their protagonists prevail may leave disappointed. Yet Blue Is the Warmest Color is also deeply compassionate, one of the most swooningly romantic movies in recent memory. It lifts you up and intoxicates you, even as it shatters your heart.

Not that it is in any rush to advertise its greatness. It opens on Adèle (Adèle Exarchopoulos, stunning), exiting her modest home and loping to catch the bus to school, one of many mundane moments grounding a movie that otherwise spends a great deal of time up in the clouds. With an expressive, open face and wisps of brown hair that frequently whip across her brow, Adèle is a fairly normal 15-year-old. She works hard in school, gossips with her gaggle of friends, tentatively approaches boys, and—imagine this—has a healthy relationship with her supportive parents. But one day, Adèle strolls past Emma (Léa Seydoux), and the two catch each other’s eye. It’s an innocuous enough encounter (though it apparently took over 100 takes before Kechiche was satisfied), but Adèle soon finds herself besotted, dreaming of this blue-haired figure to the point that her sexual encounters with men feel hollow. She initially channels her fantasies by pursuing a relationship with an adventurous female friend, but that quickly backfires, at which point she seems truly lost. Read More

The Best Movies of 2013, #5: Captain Phillips

Tom Hanks in Captain Phillips

Paul Greengrass can’t sit still. From his two hyperactive entries in the Bourne franchise, to his nervy September 11 dramatization United 93, to his unappreciated Iraq War docudrama Green Zone, the filmmaker’s work is characterized most of all by a roving impatience, with frantic cutting and jittery handheld camerawork. It’s a kinetic approach that sacrifices cleanliness for liveliness, but if it often gets your blood pumping, it can occasionally feel jumbled and chaotic, as though the ravenous director is struggling to sate his appetite to cover as much spatial territory as possible. Yet Greengrass’ restlessness makes him ideally suited to make Captain Phillips, his gripping fact-based account of the war of wills and wits between an American merchantman and the Somali pirates who hijack his ship. Because the film transpires in a bare minimum of cramped locations—first Phillips’ lone freighter stranded in the vast ocean, then a tiny lifeboat floating even more helplessly amid the waves—it is necessarily claustrophobic. But rather than being hamstrung by such a constrained space, Greengrass finds himself liberated. Unable to overextend himself in terms of breadth, he opts instead for depth, continuously amping up the energy even though there is nowhere for his camera to go. Watching the movie, you won’t be able to escape either.

In one of the least showy and most powerful performances of his career, Tom Hanks plays the titular sailor as a brusque, inherently competent commander, a man who instinctively knows every nook and cranny of his vessel, the Maersk Alabama, even if he’s less adept at ingratiating himself with his crew. His assignment is to shepherd the Maersk and its unspecified cargo around the Horn of Africa. It’s a routine job, and Phillips’ terse professionalism—immediately upon stepping aboard, he instructs his first mate to tighten some of the ship’s security mechanisms without offering so much as a greeting—creates the impression that he’s prepared for anything. He’s not.

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The Best Movies of 2013, #6: 12 Years a Slave

Slavery was horrible. This is not up for debate; it’s a fact. Yet our discussion of this wretched time in our civilization tends to feel removed and academic. How, we wonder, could society have countenanced the suppression of an entire race? What forces could have conspired to treat people as nothing more than property? Was nineteenth-century America motivated by economic gain, rationalizing that the ends justified the means, or did slave owners honestly believe in racial superiority? These are questions worth asking, lest such horrid history repeat itself, but they approach slavery more as an intellectual concept than as the actual, systemic brutalization of humans. 12 Years a Slave—Steve McQueen’s gripping, unapologetically savage account of one servant’s struggles—bucks that trend and instead takes a hauntingly intimate approach. It is not about slavery’s politics. It is about its mechanics.

After opening with a brief series of ragged scenes that bluntly depict the daily rigors of plantation workers, the movie flashes back to Upstate New York, where its hero, Solomon Northup (Chiwetel Ejiofor), lives comfortably with his family. One night, he goes out drinking with his white colleagues, oblivious of their plans to sell him into slavery. (As Solomon passes out, one of his companions murmurs, “More’s the pity,” with a tone of scalding indifference that will pollute the remainder of the film.) He wakes to find himself in chains, and his protestations of freedom are met with the lash. Then, he’s shipped downriver, and his dozen-year nightmare begins. Read More

The Best Movies of 2013, #7: American Hustle

As wonderful as it is to watch, American Hustle was assuredly a difficult film to make. It has a labyrinthine plot, replete with double crosses, false identities, fake accents, and cons nested inside other cons. Its structure is ungainly, with cascading flashbacks, multiple voiceovers, and repeated shifts in point of view. And its based-in-truth narrative, about the FBI’s ABSCAM sting in the 1970s, is laden with insider minutiae, ranging from the mechanics of organized crime to the breadth of political corruption to the egotism of law enforcement. You would think, given the need to balance all of these plates spinning on screen, that American Hustle would require a workmanlike and disciplined director, someone capable of streamlining the screenplay’s disparate elements and synthesizing its busy plot. Instead, it got David O. Russell.

As a filmmaker, Russell possesses many qualities, but discipline is not one of them. Yet American Hustle, which pops off the screen like a brightly colored carnival ride, proves that chaos can be a virtue rather than a vice, and that a movie can transcend its surface limitations through sheer force of personality. It is messy, frenetic, and occasionally just absurd. But it is also consistently delightful, and it seems so happy just to exist, with a glimmer of genuine emotion mingling with its self-evident joy. It’s a movie made by a guy who loves movies, and it shows. Read More

The Best Movies of 2013, #8: Before Midnight

Julie Delpy and Ethan Hawke in "Before Midnight"Before Sunrise was never supposed to start a franchise. A touching, wondrous glimpse of two people meeting and immediately falling in love, Richard Linklater’s 1995 romance worked perfectly well as a standalone story of a single night, even if the tantalizing ambiguity of its ending—in which nascent lovers Jesse (Ethan Hawke) and Celine (Julie Delpy) agreed to meet again in Vienna in six months’ time—left viewers speculating as to what happened next. But to our surprise, Linklater resumed their story in 2004 with Before Sunset, which reunited Jesse and Celine for a few fateful hours in Paris. As it turned out, logistical issues prevented the lovers from reconnecting in Vienna, but even after nine years, their chemistry still crackled, and Before Sunset concluded with the winsome suggestion that they might in fact live happily ever after. Did they? To answer that question, Linklater and his two leads (who, for this film and the last, are also his writing partners) have returned with Before Midnight, which shatters our fairytale expectations with stark realism and painful honesty. Jesse and Celine may yet find bliss, but as this movie makes ruthlessly clear, it won’t be easy.

When it opens, however, all seems to be well. We quickly learn that Jesse stayed in Paris with Celine all that time ago, and they’re now married with a pair of adorable twin daughters, vacationing together in Greece. More importantly, they’re still well-suited to engage in the one activity common to all three films: talk. In the movie’s first major set piece—a lengthy static two-shot of the parents driving in their car while their children doze fitfully in the backseat—our loquacious lovers yammer back and forth, trading verbal volleys with a naturalistic patter that instantly reinforces their unique intimacy and reminds us of why they fell for each other in the first place. Linklater has always been fascinated by characters doing nothing in particular (see: Dazed and Confused; don’t see: Waking Life), but Jesse and Celine remain his finest creation because of their specificity. They make quite the match, precisely because their temperaments are so disparate. Jesse, a writer by trade, is thoughtful and bookishly romantic but can also be maddeningly passive-aggressive, whereas Celine is passionate but frequently hotheaded and occasionally downright hostile. They are perfect for one another, which is also why they drive each other nuts. Read More