The Best of 2017

Here are my responses to what I consider the three best movies of 2017, with a few notes on the rest of the year as well. I found these three films deeply moving, generously and observantly written and beautifully played by strong acting ensembles. They're also very personal visions for their directors -- Greta Gerwig, Luca Guadagnino and Martin McDonagh.

      (And yes, I know the middle of February is a little late for a year-end review, but retirement ain't as restful as it's cracked up to be. I feel like I've been touring in Mame…with Ann Miller.)

In reviewing another great coming of age tale directed by a woman — Gillian Armstrong's 1987 High Tide — Pauline Kael pointed out that female directors often say that's the kind of film they want to make rather than conventional, male-driven action films. As she states, action films are actually much easier to make. To make a coming-of-age film as effective as High Tide takes a real command of the craft. The same could be said of Greta Gerwig's Lady Bird.

Working from her own semi-autobiographical script, Gerwig focuses on the senior year of Lady Bird McPherson (Saoirse Ronan), a disaffected teen who, as Gerwig had done, attends a Catholic high school in Sacramento, California. While her workaholic mother (Laurie Metcalf) pushes her to attend a state college her family can afford, Lady Bird dreams of going to NYU. Having displayed no discernible talent for anything except aggravating her mother, she thinks that moving to another coast, away from family and friends, will give her a chance to find herself. As a first step, she's even dropped her given name, Christine, to call herself Lady Bird. Through her senior year, she experiments with doing student theatre (an hilariously bad production of Stephen Sondheim's Merrily We Roll Along), drops her best friend since childhood (Beanie Feldstein) to hang out with one of the school's resident mean girls (Odeya Rush) and tries out two different boyfriends (Lucas Hedges and Timtohée Chalamet).

It would be easy to write and shoot this film entirely from Lady Bird's perspective, turning her parents and friends into caricatures, but Gerwig is too smart for that. The girl's unemployed father (Tracy Letts, in a really good performance) could have been a two-dimensional emasculated father, but Gerwig takes us inside his problems, with a lovely scene in which he discovers that his competition for a much-needed job is his own adult son. Lady Bird's first boyfriend seems the perfect choice until she catches him making out with another boy. Again, that could be played as a quick joke, but Gerwig then gives the boy a beautifully written scene in which he begs her not to tell anybody. And Lucas Hedges -- who with this film, last year's Manchester by the Sea and his role as Frances McDormand's level-headed son in Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, is fast becoming the screen's everyteen -- manages to be both heartbreaking and silly in his desperation. Her second boyfriend is a self-righteous hipster wannabe who smokes hand-rolled cigarettes, plays in a dreadful band and puts down everything he can. Chalamet makes him as maddening as a high-school sophisticate can be. Yet when Lady Bird finally sees through him, he's rather sad. You can't help thinking he'd be happier dropping the façade and making out with Hedges.

Where the film really soars, however, is in its depiction of mother-daughter relations. Lady Bird has a surrogate mother in the school's principal, Sister Sarah Joan, played to perfection by stage veteran Lois Smith. I've been a fan of hers since she played Dr. Conrad's dotty wife on The Doctors back in the 1960s. She's such an expert actress, she must moves into the part and breathes. You may even be thinking Ronan is lucky to have had the chance to work with her.

Lady Bird's real mother provides a great vehicle for Metcalf, the Steppenwolf member who's been the best thing about just about any film, play or TV show she's been in for a couple of decades now. Her pained reactions to her daughter's latest transgressions could easily be the stuff of sketch comedy. But she adds more dimension. You're always aware of the love and pain beneath the exasperation. This is a woman who feels as if she's single-handedly fighting to keep her family together, and it doesn't just make her angry when they don't cooperate. It breaks her heart. One of Metcalf's best scenes occurs when she's just listening to Lady Bird go on about her dreams. Even with her back to the camera as she washes dishes, she's totally involved in the moment, giving Ronan something to work from and keeping the monologue a scene.

As Lady Bird, Ronan is just a wonder. The 23-year-old, Bronx-born, Irish-raised actress has a light inside her, even when the character is at her most withdrawn. When she jumps out of a moving car to escape one of her mother's harangues, it's not a cheap laugh. You can see the fire burning in her throughout the scene, and you know it had to break out somehow. She also has the intelligence to pace the character's development. She never tips us off too soon that she's going to grow up and start connecting with her family. Rather, she works through a series of little awakenings as she sees through her douche of a boyfriend and the mean girl who had once seemed glamorous.  Gerwig has paced those moments carefully throughout the script, and Ronan brings them to life beautifully. Their teamwork makes Lady Bird a thing of beauty, and that's no easy task.

 

To paraphrase Martin Mull, writing about Call Me By Your Name is like dancing about architecture. Luca Guadignino's film, adapted by him and James Ivory from Andre Aciman's novel about a 17-year-old coming of age when he has an affair with his art historian father's male graduate assistant during a beautiful summer in Italy, is so much of a piece, so completely thought out and realized, that it's hard to pick the pieces apart. For its two hour plus running time, it simply is.

The film's emotional relationships develop gradually and subtly. At times the scenes between the young Elio (Timothée Chalamet) and the older Oliver (Armie Hammer) are so delicate watching them is like listening to chamber music. They start out distant from each other. The more introspective Elio is put off by Oliver's brashness and even makes fun of it.  When they go to an outdoor dance, Elio sits and watches while Oliver dances with abandon (this is repeated later, during their final three days together in Bergamo). Even as they grow closer, Oliver remains a mystery to Elio. He can't understand why he would wear a star of David in a world where Jews are still sometimes treated as outsiders (the film is set in 1983). When Oliver picks up some American cigarettes delivered to him in Italy, Elio points out that he doesn't smoke. Oliver agrees, while lighting one. Later they start to make out after swimming together in a secluded lake where Oliver likes to go to think. But Oliver stops them, saying they shouldn't do anything they'd regret.

That line, which sounds like something out of an old Hollywood romance, provides one key to the careful jousting that comprises their relationship.  This is the world of the 1980s, still early in the liberation process and one in which the appearance of HIV infections has become a tool for the bigots. At one point, Oliver tells Elio he envies the boy his parents, whom he's sure know the extent of their relationship. If his own father had been aware of something like this, he says, he'd have sent him to a correctional facility. Elio's a part of that world. Like his mother, he derides a gay couple his parents know as "Sonny and Cher" (and the aging men are presented as stereotyped effeminate gay men, the image of homosexuality with which Elio and Oliver would have grown up). Elio initially deals with his attraction to Oliver by losing his virginity to his girlfriend. In the film's last scene, Oliver announces that's he planning to marry a female friend. In the 1980s, that often seemed the only path open to gay men hoping to get ahead in academia.

If the film errs at all, it's that it's almost too much of a piece, too complete, and some of the choice seem almost self-consciously precious Does the academic paper on which Oliver's working have to be about the concept of time as a river, a classic trope that also calls up memories of Gore Vidal's seminal gay novel The City and the Pillar? Does Elio's father have to be studying erotic male statuary. Early in their relationship, Elio and Oliver accompany him to a seaside archaeological expedition that's recovered a naked male statue. The image of it rising from the sea is beautiful, but it's almost too much. Symbolism at a time like this? Towards the end of the film, Elio's father tells him he knew of his relationship with Oliver and approved, partly because in his youth he had been tempted to a relationship with another man. It's a great acting moment for both actors, with Michael Stuhlbarg, a character actor who's been almost ubiquitous this year with strong performances in two other films (The Post and The Shape of Water) and the third season of TV's Fargo, delivering the lines with great compassion as Chalamet listens actively. But the character's focus on male statuary makes the speech seem almost too pat. As if the father had been set up from the beginning to sympathize with his son's emerging sexuality.

That's really just a quibble weighed against the overall achievement of the film and its cast. After learning that Oliver is going to marry a woman, despite his assurance that he remembers everything, Elio stares into the fire in a lengthy close-up that ends the film. It's a great acting test, and Chalamet passes it. It's almost impossible not to see in it echoes of the great final shot of Garbo in Queen Christina (1933), and the fact that it can stand up to that memory is a testament to Guadagnino's overall conception and Chalamet's talents.

With her powerful profile and unflinching glare, Frances McDormand presides over the many moods of Martin McDonagh's Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri like one of the heads on Mt. Rushmore. In a film whose music and compositions position it as a modern day Western, she performs a similar function to Henry Fonda's in some of his John Ford films. She's a living embodiment of integrity, or what we could call integrity in the morally shifting postmodern 21^st century. Yet she's also distinctly female. Her response to confrontation is verbal aggression, at which the script and actress are both quite good, and hard work. When someone burns down the billboards she's rented to call out the town's police chief for not solving her daughter's rape-murder, she sets her jaw, tries to put the fires out and then rehangs the posters. She's the American pioneer spirit struggling to find a foothold in a contemporary world of moral corruption. Moreover, she captures the script's many emotional shifts, transitioning almost effortlessly from cynical anger to guilt to fear as the film moves from ironic comedy to social drama.

Films are conceived, written and shot so far in advance of release it's almost impossible for them to deal with immediate issues, yet Three Billboard seems the perfect film for late 2017. McDormand's fight to find some kind of justice for her daughter seems a reflection of the current "me, too" movement, particularly when she has to deal with a violent, aggressive male who may or may not be the girl's killer. The references to one police officer's habit of beating up black suspects with no real evidence and the arrival of a new, African-American chief who has to cope with his force's racism call up powerful echoes of the Black Lives Matter protests. From the way people in Ebbing act, it seems a town about to explode from unresolved racial and gender issues.

It isn't all McDormand's show. McDonagh writes and directs with great generosity towards his array of small-town eccentrics. Woody Harrelson's police chief is a fundamentally decent man, trying to keep the peace while dealing with a case that's almost impossible to solve and fighting his own losing battle with cancer. McDormand's ex-husband (John Hawke) is capable of physical and verbal abuse but also has moments of tenderness dealing with the memory of his daughter's death. His teenaged girlfriend (Samara Weaving) starts out as a joke of a character, the girl who may be shacking up with McDormand's ex- but could never replace her in the audience's heart, but also has a fundamentally good heart as she tries to help Hawke deal with his anger issues.

      At one point, McDonagh's generosity seems to go too far. When the police chief commits suicide, he leaves notes for McDormand's Mildred, his wife (Abbie Cornish, proving her dreadful performance in Geostorm wasn't necessarily representative of her talents) and his protégé on the force, Dixon (Sam Rockwell). In the note to Dixon, he tells him he has the makings of a good police detective, but his letter is the only indication of that. It's not Rockwell's fault. He's a master at grounding off-the-wall characters like Dixon and throughout the film he pulls off a great balance of goofy and ferocious. One thing Dixon isn't, however, is savvy. When he comes close to solving the murder case, he shows some presence of mind, but the whole thing is just a case of being in the right place by accident. However well Harrelson reads his note to Dixon, it's not enough to convince us that there's much of a brain in there.

Those weren't the only pleasures to be found at the movies this past year, just the most consistently joyful.  The year also featured Taika Waititi bringing his sketch comedy sensibility to the Marvel cinematic universe in Thor: Ragnarok (and Chris Hemsworth, Mark Ruffalo and Tom Hiddleston gleefully going along for the ride), easily the best of the Marvel superhero movies to date. Jordan Peele made one of the year's most assured directing debuts with Get Out, another film that seemed perfect for its time with its look at the paranoia underlying African-American life. On the acting side, there was Holly Hunter's incandescent work as the mother of a sick woman in The Big Sick, particularly in the way her relationship with the girl's ex-boyfriend (Kumail Nanjiani) evolves, Meryl Streep's character growth as newspaper publisher Kay Graham in The Post, another film that seemed made for the 2017 zeitgeist and Gil Birmingham's towering strength as the father of a murdered Native woman in Wind River. His work brought some much-needed weight to what was essentially a noble-white-woman story of an inexperienced FBI officer (Elizabeth Olsen) running the investigation into a Native woman's rape and murder. There was a lot of good stuff in Wind River, but when the script suddenly cut short Birmingham's grieving so white leading many Jeremy Renner would tell us how he felt when his daughter was killed, I wanted to set fire to the screen.

There were some clunkers, too. After making two great visionary films with Pi (1998) and Requiem for a Dream (2000), Darren Aronofsky crashed and burned big time with Mother!, an uneven grafting of a home invasion suspense thriller with a big symbolic whatsis about poetry, rabid fandom and eating babies that only succeeded in making talented actors like Javier Bardem and Jennifer Lawrence look bad (fortunately, Ed Harris and Michelle Pfeiffer can rise above just about anything). Geostorm, the latest environmental disaster flick, may have been set in a world wise enough to elect Andy Garcia president, but it mainly succeeded in making Gerald Butler look like crap, though at least they cast James Sturgess as his brother. His plastic overplaying guaranteed that Butler wouldn't give the film's worst performance. And Flatliners seemed an abject lesson in how not to make a remake. First, don't start with a film that wasn't that good to begin with unless you have the talent to improve on it. Second, don't cut the one thing that worked in the original, in this case the humor (hint, instead of giving Kiefer Sutherland from the original a few scenes to snarl at the hapless medical students as one of their teachers, have him pop in with sarcastic one-liners the way he did in the original). Third, don't kill off your best actor, Ellen Page (often the best actor in whatever she does, even in better company than this), so we can spend screen time watching Nina Dobrev play "To be beautiful" as her superobjective.

Fortunately, even crap can have its good moments. Suicide Squad may have been too noisy and bordering on incoherent, but at least it had Viola Davis as the angry Amanda Waller of any comic geek's dreams and Margot Robey, who made Harley Quinn — the Joker's over-sexed, obsessive female sidekick — into a ferocious comedy machine. It's interesting that the women are the sole bright spots in the DC comics universe (with Gal Gadot's Wonder Woman bringing a lot of light to their dim, depressing world as well). With Robey slated to star in and produce her own Harley Quinn feature (rumored to be based on the Gotham City Sirens comics that teamed her with Catwoman and Poison Ivy), things could be getting very bright indeed.