With everybody and their fichus issuing a list of 2007’s best film accomplishments, I’ve been pondering what of last year’s slate of movies affected me the most. What I’ve realized is that “Bests” and “Favorites” are by no means like defined. Respecting a film is hardly the same as adoring it. And individual susceptibilities reveal themselves shamelessly for me this year.
I’m a songwriter, and movies about songwriters and songs made a deep impression on me. Nothing blew me away like Todd Haymes I’m Not There (his Douglas Sirk homage of a few years ago, Far From Heaven, affected me similarly). Employing six actors as various incarnations of Bob Dylan, I’m Not There succeeds brilliantly in exploring the conflict between public perception and private identity. Who is realer? Richard Gere’s desperado or Heath Ledger’s hotshot superstar or Cate Blanchett’s media-fried junkie? Blanchett, for the record, is amazing, turning what could have been nothing more than a gender gimmick into a moving, truly scary portrait. Her Dylan is simultaneously hyper-articulate and nonsensical, like a creature popped by from some particularly acid Lewis Carroll trip.
Songwriting is also at the heart of Once, a romance (my favorite genre) set in contemporary Dublin. It’s the only movie of the year I saw twice. If you haven’t seen it, rent it. The developing love between an aspiring pop writer and his muse is intoxicating in the “it should only happen to me” manner.
Marion Cottilard’s Edith Piaf, for whom songs were food and air and life itself, blew me away in La Vie en Rose. The dizzy delights of Hairspray’s singing ensemble made me very happy and Johnny Depp’s reimagined Sweeney Todd ended the year with a welcome jolt. And for me, a lover of New York City, fairy tales and musicals, what could be better than a misplaced princess inspiring a ridiculous and delicious production number in Central Park? I wanted to love Enchanted more, but for a few splendid minutes in the middle it was all I could dream.
Of course, there were other films and performances having nothing to do with songs and writers that I loved. Atonement. Daniel Day Lewis in There Will Be Blood (though his enormous-for-film performance could easily be considered operatic). Ellen Page’s Juno.
But the performance that haunts me most this year? As I said, our opinions all are colored by our particular susceptibilities. Julie Christie’s turn as a woman disappearing before her beloved’s eyes in Away From Her has kept me awake too many nights. It’s a performance that is beautiful, horrible and much too close to home.
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