Take Shelter (2011, USA)

While watching Take Shelter, I couldn’t help but feel that 2011 was the year of the highbrow apocalypse movie – though in truth, perhaps it was only this film and Melancholia that really made it seem so. Here, what begins as a portrait of Curtis, a man spinning into madness (played by none other than Michael Shannon, who could probably teach a master class in crazy at the ripe old age of 36), becomes a film of surprising depth, one that not only captures the uncertainty and unpredictability just under the surface of daily life, but that also asks how we might react to a modern-day prophet.

Much of Take Shelter is devoted to playing the tension of Shannon’s character’s increasing instability against his desire to be an average family man. As he descends into a mania of visions and nightmares about an apocalyptic storm, he is anchored by his love for his wife (a great Jessica Chastain) and young daughter, as well as by his need to push against family history. He is a doting husband, a kind father, a good employee and a loyal friend. What could make a man like this fall apart in such a dramatic way?

One of the smartest things writer-director Jeff Nichols does in questioning the source of Curtis’s visions is to remove god from the equation. With the divine in no way the source of his troubles, an all the more convincing diagnosis of mental illness can be made. But between Nichols’s script and Shannon’s deft work, there remains a thread of lucidity within his growing mania. And as the inevitable climax comes to pass, you find yourself – in the strangest way – hoping that Curtis may not be mad after all, despite the obvious alternative.

On another level, Take Shelter is a metaphor for the tenuous grasp many of us have on what we’re sold as the American dream. The family, while in no way poor, is still not much more than a paycheck away from dire straits, and Curtis’s method to manage his madness complicates this in both subtle and overt ways. Some of this gets a bit heavy-handed, but Nichols has great talent as a director for creating tension onscreen, even in the segments not directly related to Curtis’s visions. It’s a real nail-biter, as Nichols and Shannon make it clear that Curtis may be capable of anything – ruination and salvation alike.

2011 in Review

For the second year running, I failed to keep track of new films watched, which makes it difficult to write a comprehensive year-end post – I find that whenever I’m asked to come up with lists, my mind draws a blank if I don’t have a cheat sheet handy. But I’ve been asked to think on this, so I will – and maybe next year I’ll actually keep my list up to date.

I’ll be honest – Netflix streaming is a total disaster for me as far as serious movie watching is concerned. It’s so easy to re-watch something or to pile crap on crap. It’s one of the reasons that filmsnack posting dropped off so severely and why my list went to the birds. So I’ve got to give credit where it’s due and thank Lars von Trier for pulling me out of the instant-watch funk. Going to see Melancholia in November really made me question where my love of film had disappeared to. Von Trier’s latest is, as usual, something of a mess, but it’s a glorious one, filled with humor, pathos, big questions, and Udo Kier. And it’s without question one of my favorite films of 2011.

Other favorites? I loved Drive. I finally saw Carpenter’s The Thing, which deserves the hype. Fast Five and Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol were exactly what popcorn flicks should be, and Rise of the Planet of the Apes was a popcorn flick plus. I got into Andrea Arnold, and thought Red Road in particular was quite an accomplishment (and damn, somebody get Tony Curran more work). Miike’s 13 Assassins was among the best of his career. Cary Fukunaga edged a bit too close to the sexy Rochester trap by casting the ubiquitous Michael Fassbender (who was also fantastic in Andrea Arnold’s Fish Tank), but still made a stark and affecting Jane Eyre. Joe Cornish’s Attack the Block was a delight (and in a similar vein, Super 8 a real letdown), as was Michael Hanzanavicius’s The Artist (check out his OSS 117 movies if you’re a Bond fan).

Bad films? Don’t get me started. Not only did Netflix provide instant-watch trash in spades, but at some point in the year, my boyfriend and I decided to take on the A.V. Club’s best bad films of the ‘00s. Which is how he finally saw The Room (we own a copy now) and we both watched Dreamcatcher (ditto). We still can’t bring ourselves to watch Boat Trip, and we fell asleep both times we've tried Basic Instinct 2, but otherwise we’re nearly done with the list. A dubious accomplishment, but a pretty entertaining one.

Hopes for 2012? I need to catch up on some gems from last year (watching the wonderful Bill Cunningham New York on New Year’s Day was a good start), and get out to foreign films more. I need to turn off the streaming and walk a couple of blocks to the rental place when I find myself without something to watch. And I need to finally grab the boyfriend and sit down with The Ballad of Narayama, which I’m pretty sure we’ve had sitting atop the console in its red envelope for at least two months now.

The Tree of Life (2011, USA)

I’ll be honest – I’m not a huge Terrence Malick fan. I respect his artistry as a filmmaker, but I’ve never seen Badlands or The Thin Red Line, and The New World was a sour disappointment. The Tree of Life is not such a disappointment – in fact, I liked aspects of it quite a lot – but it left me wondering if Malick has a sense of humor of any sort. It’s hard to watch a movie that questions the nature of human life but contains not a single joke.

During and after viewing, when I thought on Tree of Life, I couldn’t help but compare it with Lars von Trier’s Melancholia, one of my favorite films of 2011. Von Trier uses his own experience with clinical depression to spin out a story of the world’s demise, inspecting how different people deal with the certainty of impending doom, and asking whether human beings really deserve to survive. This is weighty stuff, for sure, and there are some tough moments in Melancholia, but the entire film is underpinned by von Trier’s sense of humor, something that really connected me to its story and its characters. Tree of Life, on the other hand, kept me at arm’s length (the effect all of Malick’s films seem to have), asking me to admire and contemplate in an intellectual manner alone. And there’s a lot to admire and contemplate, for sure, but not a lot to love.

Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (2011, UK)

I had the same issue with Tomas Alfredson’s new film version of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy that I did with John Le Carre’s novel – it’s a meticulously plotted, densely realistic world without a single character I care a bit about. The movie may suffer more from this malady than the book does, as with a running time of just over two hours, some of the tertiary characters – even some of the secondary characters – get short shrift. If you can’t tell the prospective culprits apart, how invested can you get in the hunt for the mole?

That said, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy has a lot going for it – it’s beautifully shot in a mix of ‘70s earth tones and Cold War grays, and the cast is top-notch, particularly Gary Oldman in what has to be one of the quietest roles of his career. I think late middle age will agree with Oldman, if he continues to find work like this that allows him to dig deep. Tom Hardy is perfect as outcast spy Ricki Tarr, a kinetic fuckup one could imagine as a realistic James Bond, taking all of the myth and the fantasy out of being an international spy. Truly, the cast doesn’t have a weak link (I also quite liked Mark Strong and Toby Jones), though it’s a shame to basically waste someone like Colin Firth on what could have been a meaty role had the film had more time to expand the world of Tinker Tailor. I’ve been hearing raves about the Alec Guinness-led miniseries from the ‘70s, which is of the length to do the plot of the book justice, but to be frank, I can’t imagine spending more time with these characters than I alredy have.