Rust and Bone (2012, France/Belgium)

Jacques Audiard is my favorite contemporary French filmmaker (if you haven’t seen any of his movies, I recommend starting with Read My Lips before moving on to A Prophet, which is probably his best film to date), but Rust and Bone felt off-balance. Marion Cotillard is superb, giving a fantastic performance as Stephanie, an orca trainer whose legs are bitten off by one of her animals. The accident (it’s not quite an attack) happens early in the film, but instead of focusing on her adjustment and healing process, Audiard hones in on the dour Ali (Matthias Schoenaerts), a bouncer and former fighter whose damage is almost entirely emotional. Unfortunately, Ali’s character is too much a cypher, lacking the intensity of Audiard antiheroes like the hotheaded Thomas (Romain Duris) in The Beat That My Heart Skipped or the bewildered but canny Malik (Tahar Rahim) in A Prophet. Schoenaerts doesn’t have the chops to make me care about what’s happening in Ali’s head, especially when what’s inside Stephanie’s is written all over her face. Likewise, the ending is weak, relying too much on a plot contrivance to sew everything up. Still, it’s worth a watch for excellent cinematography from Audiard collaborator Stephane Fontaine, the mostly-amazing effects to make Cotillard legless, and a few transcendent moments in her character’s healing process.

Zero Dark Thirty (2012, USA)

The part of Zero Dark Thirty that rings truest for me is how much one water cooler conversation spy Maya (Jessica Chastain) has with her colleague Jessica (Jennifer Ehle) ends up illuminating her character. The two are talking about finding sources, getting intel on Al Qaeda. Jessica wonders why they just can’t promise rewards like so many agencies did during the Cold War. Maya counters that this conflict is not about making a better life, escaping the madness of war for peace and stability—these people are true believers, fanatics, and no amount of cash is ever going to sway them. It’s this comment that informs the final shot of the film, and shows Maya’s struggle as maybe not being too far off from that of the men she hunts. Zero Dark Thirty works best for me as this kind of character study, though it spends a lot more time on plot. It’s not that the plot is uninteresting, or even underdeveloped—it just seems so hysterically factual, if that makes any sense. It’s as if Kathryn Bigelow struck out to make the definitive war film for our era, one grounded by a film language so stripped-down that it makes Argo, with its somewhat-similar plot, look like a cartoon. I found The Hurt Locker to be a much more human film, possibly because it tempered its punishing realism with a fictional plot, rather than by a seemingly obsessive need to show things how they happened. And as much as I enjoy a good procedural drama, whatever its base, I am almost never as impressed as I am by a film that invents a new world in order to reflect back my own (see my Beasts of the Southern Wild review, a movie I saw the day before Zero Dark Thirty).

Beasts of the Southern Wild (2012, USA)

I’ve got to be honest—I HATE the word “lyrical” applied to film. It’s become such a reviewer’s crutch in the past decade, one that I have succumbed to using on more than one occasion. But I’ll hang up my issues for once, because despite mulling it over for several days now, I just can’t think of a better word to describe Beasts of the Southern Wild. If Beasts had been adapted for the screen, it wouldn’t surprise me if the original work were a long-form poem or loose performance piece, something akin to Ntozake Shange’s for colored girls who have considered suicide when the rainbow is enuf (I refuse to be like Tyler Perry and take the guts out of that title). Beasts may not always make sense, but that could be said of a lot of poems, too, and despite the amount of science fiction/fantasy I read and watch, I haven’t encountered a fictional world that feels this real in some time.