Burning Questions: How Does One Rank An Almost Masterpiece?

Michael C. here with a question I can't stop turning over in my mind.

After finalizing my list of the best movies of 2011 I experienced a powerful surge of cinephile guilt when I realized Joe Cornish’s fantastically goofy Attack the Block enjoyed a healthy place on the list while Malick’s The Tree of Life was nowhere to be seen. Certainly this was an unforgivable lapse of taste, if not a dereliction of my duties as a film writer. Tree of Life is about nothing less than - to borrow a phrase from Douglas Adams - life, the universe and everything. Even if I had gripes with Tree and thought it only reached its potential in fits and starts, shouldn’t laying a fingertip on such greatness guarantee it a spot? If Olympic athletes can be graded according to degree of difficulty, why not films?

The question, simply put, is how does one rank a flawed masterpiece?

If, by the way, you consider Malick's magnum opus an unqualified success, if you had a religious experience watching butterflies land on Jessica Chastain, then feel free to substitute the name Melancholia, Shame, Margaret or whichever hugely ambitious endeavor you felt stayed stubbornly Earthbound despite its attempts to reach for the stars. But for me, Tree is the one I wrestle with.

One problem with giving points for unfulfilled ambition is that it reinforces the idea that certain movies are superior to others in their very conception. This is the same lazy thinking that leads thudding Oscar bait to be nominated over exciting genre fare year after year. Frost/Nixon is history, Dark Knight is kid stuff. Nominate Frost/Nixon. Ideally both Attack the Block and The Tree of Life start with the same blank slate. 

Of course, the real dilemma is not unfulfilled ambition but those fleeting moments when a film earns all that hyperbolic praise. It would be irresponsible to ignore that Tree of Life frequently presents images that stop the heart and contains stretches that are just about flawless. But those moments come married to endless minutes of Sean Penn stumbling over rocks. Material that felt like Malick cut it down just enough to lose all meaning but kept it in to assure us that it had a purpose when he started. In the end, I was overwhelmed with admiration but my spirit remained curiously unstirred. Wouldn’t the professional thing be to chalk that up to my own problem and rank Tree highly because I recognize the film's potential to move others?

Sean Penn, stumbling around.

I don’t think so. If there is a benefit to the questionable practice of ranking artistic achievements against each other it is to level the playing field between the grand apples and the quirky oranges. What is owed to Malick’s achievement is respect and careful consideration, not genuflection. If in 2011 the film that made the strongest impression on me was the one with furry black aliens with bioluminescent blue teeth then I have to stand up and say so, even if that makes it appear that I have the critical acumen of a 12 year old boy on a sugar high. 

Because when you get down to it all movies from Kubrick and Tarkovsky down to Babe: Pig in the City are after the same thing: a lasting connection with the audience. The test of time is going to be merciless to those films that almost but did not quite achieve greatness, so we may as well be just as merciless in the present. Singin' in Rain was not made with an eye for the list of all-time greats, but there it sits while grand almost-masterpieces like Lost Horizon fade with each year. I would take any random Daffy Duck cartoon over Doctor Zhivago. And let's not forget: In 1998 it wasn't exactly fashionable for a critic to rank a shaggy mystery about a pot-addled bowler above Malick’s Thin Red Line. Yet which of those two films spawned a religion?  

Dudeism

Feel that I am being way too glib with a cinematic masterpiece? Have another example of cinematic emperor's new clothes that needs to be mentioned? Let me know in the comments. You can follow Michael C. on Twitter at @SeriousFilm or read his blog Serious Film

Previous Burning Questions...

SAG Ensemble Flashback: "The Birdcage!" & Oscar Trivia

With the Screen Actors Guild Awards less than a month away, let's look back at the history of our favorite SAG Category, "Outstanding Performance by a Cast" i.e. Best Ensemble. Though the Guild had long been in the business of lifetime achievement awards, they didn't hold their first full fledged awards ceremony until 1995 for the 1994 film year. That first SAG year did not include an Ensemble movie prize which is strange since they handed out TV ensemble prizes from the start so it's not like they hadn't dreamt up that honor! The next year Apollo 13, which was something of a frontrunner for Oscar's Best Picture prize (it eventually lost), won the inaugural ensemble prize. It beat a field that included only one other Oscar Best Picture nominee (Sense & Sensibility)... a percentage ratio you rarely see today.

At the third annual ceremony the award went to the (thankfully) dated gay marriage comedy The Birdcage (1996), based on the 1978 French classic and three-time Oscar nominee La Cage Aux Folles. The films farcical comedy emerges when a gay couple (Robin Williams & Nathan Lane) try to fool a conservative couple (Gene Hackman & Dianne Wiest) into thinking of them as a "reputable" traditional family so that the son can marry the other couple's daughter (Dan Futterman and Calista Flockhart). Everything goes wrong over dinner as the gay couple has a terrible time keeping up the facade.

This is so Guatemala. They put hardboiled things in everything down there. Because, you know, chicken is so important to them. it's their only real currency. A woman is said to be worth her weight in hens and a man's wealth is measured by the size of his cock."

Will you excuse me?"

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Complete the New Year Sentences.

In 2012 I'm hoping that ____________ at the movies.

The very first movie or actor I thought of today in this brand new year was _____ because ______.

Best of Year Pt 1: I Am Thirty-Two Flavors

I tossed. I turned. I Excel'ed. I Worded. I laughed at myself. I laughed at everyone else and their equally crazy assertions during top ten season. I worried what y'all might think. I worried about how I do think! And then I cast it all aside and just started typing and getting real with myself. You see, in earlier drafts of this Hugo and The Tree of Life, for example, were much higher but you know what? This is not consensus. This is me. Year End "Best" naming rituals are meant to be personal even though they're communal. Gather 'round my fire. There are plenty of places to keep warm, this being just one of them. (If you must skip ahead a few pages The Tree of Life dropped a few notches and Hugo no longer appears at all; I do not miss it all and, thus, made the right call.)

I kept trying to find a cutoff point for my year end "best" that I feel comfortable with and the magic finally happened at 32! The thirty-two highlighted films are my touchstones from this year at the multiplex. They're the only ones I just could not let go of when I tried to gather my memories and glue them awkwardly into this online scrapbook thingie known as The Film Experience. Two of the films even got glued together and I couldn't get them unstuck (Longtime readers will know I don't approve of ties but what the hell: new decade, more flexibility! If you're a purist shove everything else down one notch.)

squint your eyes and look closer
I'm not between you and your ambition
I am a poster girl with no poster
I am thirty-two flavors and then some
and I'm beyond your peripheral vision
so you might want to turn your head
cause someday you're going to get hungry
and eat most of the words you just said

The following thirty-two pictures were presented in vaguely ascending order but then the stairs were all rearranged to fit them into categories and for flow so don't read anything into the order...

Planet Ape
The year's cinema was overflowing with adorable dogs (too many to mention) and doomed cats (The Future, Dragon Tattoo) but the animal that seized the heart and truly shook us -- opposable thumbs are so handy! -- was the chimpanzee. The Oscar documentary finalist Project Nim charts the disastrous emotional fall out of a science experiment in the 1970s in which a chimp ("Nim") was raised by agonizingly fallible humans and taught sign language. Rise of the Planet of the Apes charts the disastrous sociological fall out of a science experiment in the right-now in which a chimp ("Cesar") is raised by a agonizingly naive human and granted super intelligence. Nim was a very real living thing and his heartbreaking story makes you want to scream "NOOOooooooo" as forcefully as the imaginary Cesar does at the climax of his own tale. That Cesar feels nearly as real as Nim is thanks to the Marlon Brando of mo-cap acting Andy Serkis, a brilliant visual effects team, and the superb action direction of Rupert Wyatt. (Wyatt's command is so impressive that the pictures fairly obvious flaws don't even register until well after the movie ends. If I were a Hollywood executive I'd be wining and dining him and offering him every franchise job on the calendar until he picked one.)

Favorite Unrewardables
The best thing I saw this year that's not eligible for my annual Film Bitch Awards is The Loneliest Planet (previously reviewed), about an engaged couple exploring a foreign land, which went unreleased. It had me from the stomping alien mundanity of its first image but in the end what really made it work for me was its sense of touch. That's rarer and rarer in our weightless CGI world but the images just felt so tangible: a lovers caress, cold water in your hair, rocky ground under foot; turns out when a movie is that good at touching, it's hard not to feel it. I could reward Clio Barnard's The Arbor, which did get a brief release, but I wouldn't know how. It's ostensibly a memoir doc about the short life of the troubled playwright Andrea Dunbar. But is it a documentary? Barnard's riveting experiment still uses traditional documentary tools like reenactments and talking head interviews but performs them instead, with actors lipsynching. There are so many layers it's suffocating; all the better to pull you under with these lives trapped in hand-me-down poverty and addiction. That probably doesn't sound like an endorsment but The Arbor sure is a fascinating novelty act.

Hip To Be Square
Who knew that we needed a 29th version of dusty Jane Eyre? Turns out we did! Okay okay okay... even if we didn't it was welcome since it was a beautifully rendered stride forward in four cinematic journeys we're on board with: Michael Fassbender seems to take another leap forward every three months, Mia Wasikowska is one of our most promising young actresses and this is her best film performance yet, director Cary Fukunaga and his cinematographer Adriano Goldman, who are two for two (see also Sin Nombre) are not just unusually capable but also unpredictable. We'll jump on their next vehicle whether that means more speeding trains or horse drawn carriages or something else entirely.

Two more unhip choices, abundant foreign pleasures and a few "only you could make this" treasures... After the jump.

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Happy New Year !

May yours be...

... as gorgeously lit and directed (but less violent) as Ralph & Angela's!

... as romantic as Harry & Sallys.

...as festive but less scarily eventful than Shelley Winters'!

...and as hilarious as an evening with Martha Plimpton would be if anyone showed up!

HAPPY NEW YEAR
be safe and happy and see you in 2012 right here! 

P.S. apologies on the top ten list. year in review starts in full force tomorrow. it's half written!