Oscar Season 2011 Roundup (Part II)

Dear readers, it's time to unveil my Top Ten films for 2011. I didn't see Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy or A Dangerous Method or War Horse yet. But for the sake of argument, here's how I'd rank them today. (I reviewed them all but Weekend, which is a graceful, quiet indie about two gay men sharing three days together, a brief encounter more believable and honest than most romantic dramas. You can--and should--watch it on Netflix.)

Josh's Top 10

1. The Descendants

2. Melancholia

3. Take Shelter

The rest, in no particular order:

4. Bridesmaids

5. Drive

6. Hugo

7. Margin Call

8. Moneyball

9. The Tree of Life

10. Weekend

For some diversity of taste, I pulled strings and got two other Top Ten lists for you readers. The only movie where we three overlap is The Descendants.

Oscar Season 2011 Roundup (Part I)

For last year's roundup, I postulated that the Academy Award voters have moved toward comedies and genre films. We've seen dark films win Best Picture recently (No Country for Old Men, The Hurt Locker), but these past two years have gone in the other direction. Audiences are falling for comedies and movies about the movies.

Many of the top nominees were in the running before anyone saw them, but Martin Scorsese's Hugo is a pleasant surprise. Like The Artist, this film delights as it explores the history of movies. Scorsese makes a compelling case for 3D, playing George Melies's utterly charming 2D movies within the three dimensions of Parisian hustle-bustle. Hugo makes technology seem wondrous again: Melies was a superbly innovative artist, inventing the rules of cinema as he went along, and he's given a sensitive rendering by Ben Kingsley.

Oscar Contenders #6: Life, the Universe, and Everything

Review: The Tree of Life

Yes, there are dinosaurs. They pass by quickly, like many images in Terrence Malick's fifth film The Tree of Life. Their time is fleeting--blink and you'll miss it! And once you see dinosaurs, you know Malick doesn't intend to explain everything. His film captures an essence: pieces of lives as they're lived, memories imagined and real. Does it need to be more than that?

Most of the story focuses on a 1950s family in Waco, Texas: Mr. O'Brien, the engineer father with twenty-seven patents (Brad Pitt); his gentle wife (Jessica Chastain); and three adolescent boys. We see scattered childhood memories as their son Jack looks back (Hunter McCracken at 10; Sean Penn in the present day). The images feel like pure cinema; too much plot would be intrusive. Malick's screenplay feels like the beginning and endings of scenes, with conversations left on the editing-room floor.

Brad Pitt fleshes out a father conflicted between sternness and affection for his sons. Jessica Chastain's mother is more archetype than character--earth goddess, free spirit--but she's filmed with a gossamer beauty that's hard to resist. The story that's told is very male-oriented. But juxtaposed with the Big Bang, all the hangups of patriarchal society seem arbitrary, and I bet Malick intended that.

Every frame is full of light. We feel the stifling fifties suburbia waiting to be opened up, just as we see the universe expand. (This definitely owes a debt to 2001: A Space Odyssey.) But the son Jack grows up to be a corporate worker (Penn), stuck inside a glass elevator, imagining his own escape. Penn's brief scenes were probably fuller in the script; his present-day role is a cameo that doesn't contribute very much to the whole. Where has Jack gone since childhood? Is the beginning the only part of life that Malick wants us to see? Why does Penn look so sad?

The emotions we experience are sometimes outside the story, but each image fills in the larger canvas. Sure, sometimes it reaches too far, as in Jack's afterlife reunion on the beach with his parents, transcending time and space. But focusing on just the O'Brien family in the fifties would have deprived The Tree of Life of its wonder. And this is a wonderful film, if you let it wash over you. What better subject for a sprawling epic than creation itself?