2012 was not a great year for movies, but it was a fine year—a rare vintage, to be laid down and savored in the memory—for looking forward to movies, an activity almost on a par with watching the finished product. How many times, for example, did I view the trailer for “Prometheus”? How many man-hours did devotees of “Alien” and “Aliens” give to the scrutiny of each mini-scene and to every nook of the teaser’s frame, wondering what Ridley Scott might supply to feed our craving? And how could the eventual film, bursting from the chest cavity of that promise, do anything other than disappoint?
What happens, when illusions fracture, is that we console ourselves, rather too easily, with bits and pieces—the cinematic answer to people who stagger out of a failed relationship and mutter, “Well, there was that time in Mexico. Remember that Sunday? At least we were happy then.” And so it is that I hark back to the corn-blond perfection, both more and less than human, of Michael Fassbender in “Prometheus”; he played a robot, frequently alone on the spaceship, whose obsession with “Lawrence of Arabia” was so much more compelling than his contribution to the sagging plot. How longingly he gazed at clips of Peter O’Toole: a true act of stargazing. For one filmmaker to be enraptured by another is not uncommon, but it takes someone like Scott to dramatize that rapture, and thus pay tribute to David Lean, within the compass of a single character.
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Other jewelled fragments of note, all of them more glittering than their settings: Mark Ruffalo as the Hulk in “The Avengers,” shy and half-embarrassed by the knowledge that he would, despite himself, turn green; Anne Hathaway, red-lipped, black-clad, and perfectly content, for so much of “The Dark Knight Rises,” with the pleasures of straight theft, before even she was overwhelmed by the dreary moral errands of the plot; and, along similar curved lines, Eva Green in the otherwise lustreless “Dark Shadows,” emitting more witchy pheromones than either Johnny Depp or Tim Burton could possibly handle. No wonder she had to be cracked like a vase at the finale.
Then, we had the one-word titles: brisk, intelligent entertainments like “Argo,” “Looper,” and “Skyfall,” all of them refusing to be fogged up by special effects, though none of them, to be honest, demanding outright to be seen again. The last one I liked more than many friends and colleagues did. I thought it was a good movie, though maybe not a very good James Bond movie, which may be part of the problem. It was also one of the more beautiful Bond films, in a franchise that has seldom numbered beauty among its virtues, or its needs. Those who dislike “Skyfall” have argued that the director, Sam Mendes, in his eagerness to build a brooding character study, neglects the basic rule of 007: the fellow is a fantasy. I know what they mean, and yet, in the floating shots of Macau and the glow of Shanghai, photographed by Roger Deakins, I sensed a restoration of the old globe-girdling dream: pick a passport, pack a weapon, meet a girl. I reckon it would have made a great final film in the series: fifty years of James, neatly wrapped up, returning him to M and Q and Moneypenny, where he belongs. Could he not now be left to his own devices? Some hope.
“Moonrise Kingdom” and “The Master,” on the other hand, I shall be seeing again. The former, because I still can’t work out how Wes Anderson allows such force of feeling, alternately pained and impassioned, to blow through the grid of his exacting narrative constructions. (Music, I suspect—in this case, a spirited use of Benjamin Britten—has much to do with it.) And the latter, because I am ever more undecided as to where its focus lies. What, in short, is “The Master” about? Not Scientology; of that I’m fairly sure, though the broader appeal of a cult—any cult, spiritual or commercial—to a wounded or malleable mind is always worth exploring. I like the movie best as a portrait of a postwar land, shading from the Truman era toward that of Eisenhower, and for the attention that Paul Thomas Anderson pays to those souls, like the Joaquin Phoenix character, who are stunned and deafened, not enriched or aroused, by a general boom. Hence the wonderful scenes in the department store and the cabbage field; I can picture a different version of the film, in which the hero’s time among the credulous, led by Philip Seymour Hoffman, was itself just such an episode—a strange interlude, rather than one half of a broken-backed tale. Yet there remains so much to be grateful for, not least the grand bloom of the 70-mm images; a garden of earthly delights, seething with discontented beasts.
The real imprint of 2012, to my mind, lay with a trio of European films. First, from Belgium, was “The Kid with a Bike.” To say that it was typically, and unmistakably, the work of the Dardenne brothers sounds a trifle grudging, but fans will realize that it is meant as high praise. All the familiar tropes and tactics were in play: the unfolding of a crisis in the social margins, the fabular swiftness of the storytelling, a determined elision of frippery and fuss. The kid of the title, a feckless and all but parentless boy, was not indulged by the movie, still less sentimentalized, but regarded with patient charity—not just by the directors but also by the principal adult of the drama, a hairdresser who takes him in. Cécile de France played her as an ordinary, unsaintly woman who does a good thing and thereby saves a life. It was my favorite performance of 2012, and in a just world it would draw the attention of the Academy, but because it arrived early in the calendar, because it was in a foreign tongue, because it was delivered without agony or queenliness, and because it neither promoted itself nor rode on the back of a publicity machine, it is doomed to stay in the wings.
No one could accuse “Holy Motors,” on the other hand, of lacking swagger. Leos Carax’s movie revved its engines of invention in our faces, and our ears, from first to last. And yet if it had been merely showy, or, as some viewers appeared to think, provably insane, it could not have left so enduring an impact on the mind’s eye. Indeed, I found it dangerously cogent: the tale of a man who gets up in the morning, bids his family farewell, acts out one role, then another, then another, and so on, right through to the closing darkness of the day, when he heads home to another family—a family of chimps, as it happens. His emotions are solemnly invested, his makeup skills tested, and his life occasionally risked, in each episode in turn, and what Carax’s often outrageous project says to us, quite calmly, is this: the feelings we don and doff like wigs, with or without an audience in the stalls, are no less grave, all-consuming, and true than the ones we suffer and show in our usual life. The film is, it goes without saying, French.
Last comes “The Turin Horse.” Here, indeed, is one of the lastest movies ever made. The director, Béla Tarr, announced that this would be his final film, and, since he has done little to encourage comparisons with Frank Sinatra, the prospects of a comeback seem slim. The air of termination surrounding the film, however, goes far beyond the question of his career. Here is the work of a serious eschatologist, someone who is unafraid to dwell on the rubric of last things. Apocalypse, or its comical near-avoidance, is quite the fashion in Hollywood, and almost every villain, in every superhero flick, threatens to blow up, enslave, or otherwise paralyze the planet; even Lars Von Trier has made a contribution, with the thundering firestorm that rounds off “Melancholia.” Tarr considers a more prosaic extinction, one that will surprise no one who has followed his previous endeavors; life, through his sad eyes, is a lamp that gutters and goes out. All whimper, no bang.
Not that the film does anything so vulgar as to announce the end of the world; no clock ticks down in the corner of the frame. We could, in fact, be watching nothing worse than the butt-end of a lousy week, or the winding down of an agrarian culture in one Eastern European backwater. Yet the sense of some greater calamity, from which there will be no return, nags and tugs at the edges of the movie, like the extraordinary wind that seems to blow throughout, forcing the characters to walk along with heads bowed, through a storm of dead leaves and dirt. Most of the story unfolds within or just outside one house, with a stable, stuck in one desolate basin of dry ground; and most of the scenes feature nothing more than a father and daughter. Conceive of a lingering fate for Lear and Cordelia, and in many ways a worse one: not united in easeful death, but sent back to the blasted heath to eke out their days in bickering and silence, with the royal retinue shrunk to a single nag.
One unexpected shadow falls across the film. As the two main characters sit down to their daily meal (it really is the same, every day), they cannot help but remind us of Vincent van Gogh—specifically, of his “Potato Eaters,” of 1885. The artist said of the painting, in a letter to his brother Theo:
Tarr to a tee, you might say. Not everyone, even among the few who saw “The Turin Horse” in the cinema, will like or admire it either; as if to fulfill some universally agreed pastiche of art-house style, it runs for two and a half hours, in black and white, in Hungarian. When I caught it, there were eight of us in the audience at the start and five of us remaining at the end. Even if its total fanbase was no larger than you would expect for a serious novel, (and therefore many times what most poets command these days), why should that not suffice? There is something heroic in a movie director who grasps his vision of the world and takes it, scorning compromise, to its irrevocable limit—ad infinitum, you might say, or, if you have other ideas, ad absurdum. In Tarr’s case, he drags it even beyond van Gogh; after all, there is no mistaking the political charge in the painter’s description of his peasants, supping on what they have striven for; and the dignity of custom is there on the canvas, too, in the starched white headgear of the women, and the forks with which their bony, angular hands reach out to spear the food. No such ceremony for Tarr’s pair: they break the tubers with bare fists, claw them apart, and mash the mealy insides into their mouths. Beside this brute behavior, van Gogh’s potato-eaters can, after all, be classed as civilized, although such is Tarr’s tranquil mastery that our sympathies, at the dying of the light, are never entirely snuffed out. If “The Turin Horse” is indeed an accurate trailer for earth’s demise, one shudders to imagine the main event. Even I, for once, can wait for its release.
