my favorite movies of 2011:
(1) A Separation
(2) Margaret
favorite of 2011:
A Separation [Persian: Jodaí-e Nadér az Simín]سیمینجدایی نادر از
(Peyman Moaadi, Leila Hatami, Sareh Bayat, Shahab Hosseini, Sarina Farhadi, Babak Karimi, Merila Zarei, Ali-Asghar Shahbazi. Directed by Asghar Farhadi.)
Ebert said this about A Separation, which won the Oscar for what’s now called Best International Feature Film:
This film combines a plot worthy of a great novel with the emotional impact of a great melodrama. It involves a struggle for child custody, the challenge of a parent with Alzheimer’s, the intricacies of the law, and the enigma of discovering the truth. In its reconstruction of several versions of a significant event, it is as baffling as “Rashomon.” … “A Separation” will become one of those enduring masterpieces watched decades from now.
An anonymous Iranian wrote a piece on this movie in the New York Review of Books:
[A Separation] is a fine account of Iran’s predicament; anyone interested in the mysteries of change and tradition — the difficulties faced by many people as they try and reconcile themselves to modern values and norms — will learn much from it. I saw it in Tehran this summer, and so movingly did it reflect what I was witnessing around me, I was surprised that the authorities had allowed it to be screened.
Stream A Separation on these sites.
2nd favorite of 2011:
(Anna Paquin, J. Smith-Cameron, Jean Reno, Allison Janney, Mark Ruffalo, Matt Damon, Jeannie Berlin, Kieran Culkin, Matthew Broderick, Kenneth Lonergan. Directed by Lonergan.)
A high school student, Lisa Cohen (Anna Paquin), has a comfortable upbringing on the Upper West Side of Manhattan until her life gets shaken up by becoming a strange part of a bus accident that kills a stranger named Monica (Allison Janney).
In this sprawling drama (which is either 2 and a half or 3 hours long, depending on the version), we see how the tragedy affects Lisa in many ways, both overt (getting involved with a police investigation, the victim’s family, litigation, etc.) and subtle. Before the accident, her comments in classroom discussions about hot topics like terrorism are righteous expressions of moral clarity; after the accident, she’ll have to navigate one moral grey area after another.
Lisa isn’t well-equipped to do that at age 17. Whenever any adult seems like they might be there for her and offer guidance, emotions (the adult’s or Lisa’s) threaten to get in the way. Lisa, who’s a virgin at the beginning of the movie, also struggles with relationships with boys her age (including a sleazy cocaine user played by Kieran Culkin), and she has an inappropriate fixation on one of her teachers (Matt Damon). She can’t seem to form a strong connection to anyone. You wonder if the strongest personal connection she’s ever had in her life was with Monica, in the last few minutes of her life.
In many movies focused on teenagers, the parents are predictable, cardboard figures, but this movie allows Lisa’s mom, Joan Cohen (J. Smith-Cameron), to be a complex character in her own right. Divorced from Lisa’s dad, Joan starts an unsatisfying relationship with Ramon (Jean Reno), who comes across as well-meaning but stilted, and he doesn’t realize how little he’s connecting with Joan. (When Joan observes that only after the play she’s starring in got critical acclaim did audiences start reacting effusively even though the play was always the same, Ramon misses the subtlety of that point and reacts as if she had simply said, “I think I’m terrible in the play!”)
Margaret had a troubled path to being seen: it was shot in 2005 but was held up by legal issues until 2011. It could’ve used more editing; we didn’t need the subplot about Lisa’s relationship with her father (played by the director, Kenneth Lonergan), who lives across the country in California and feels caught between his daughter and his girlfriend. The few scenes with Matthew Broderick, who plays Lisa’s English teacher, easily could’ve been cut; while he is in the only scene that explains the movie title (which is from a poem — there’s no character named Margaret in the movie), they could’ve either changed the title or named one of the characters Margaret. (This paragraph was inspired by this video about problems with the movie’s editing.)
So Margaret is uneven, but it’s held together by a strong cast, especially a phenomenal performance by Anna Paquin. Anytime something in the movie might seem implausible or overdramatic, Paquin convinces us that this is real life — that this is what it’s really like to be a passionate, flawed teenager who’s just woken up from a dream world to face a reality she isn’t ready for.
Stream Margaret on the Criterion Channel (leaving after February 2024). If you don’t subscribe, try getting a free trial.
3rd favorite of 2011:
[Norwegian: Oslo, 31. August]
(Anders Danielsen Lie, Hans Olav Brenner, Ingrid Olava. Directed by Joachim Trier.)
Oslo, August 31st and The Fire Within (my favorite movie of 1963) are both based on the same novel. They’re about a man who struggles with suicidal thoughts after being released from treatment for an addiction. The book and the 2011 movie are both about a heroin user; the 1963 movie is about an alcoholic. In both movies, his drug of choice is less important than the fact that he can’t connect with other people, while he longs for some kind of comfort or meaning in his life.
“Oslo, August 31st” is quietly, profoundly, one of the most observant and sympathetic films I’ve seen. Director Joachim Trier and actor Anders Danielsen Lie … understand something fundamental about their character. He believes the ship has sailed without him. … He can’t go back and he can’t go forward. … What a sad, true film.
The director talks about the impression The Fire Within made on him:
Once in a while a movie hits you on a personal level as a pure experience, and that’s what happened when I watched it. At the heart of it is an honest conversation between two friends about the most difficult thing in the world: one of them doesn’t know if he wants to live anymore. It’s an impossible conversation, but in art you can talk in an intimate way about something that serious. … [Louis Malle, the director of The Fire Within, is] one of the absolute greatest filmmakers. He was always dealing with transgressive subject matter but did it in such a light and unshocking way that you just had to respect. … I was inspired by the idea of doing something like Alice in Wonderland, with a dream logic that you recognize intuitively — also like in David Lynch’s films. You can’t reduce it to something you can explain easily; you have to just see it. … I think people should keep making versions of this film every ten or twenty years, in different cities and with different characters, and maybe it will be a mirror of society at a certain time.
Stream Oslo, August 31st on these sites.
Click here for the full list of my favorite movie(s) of each year from 1920 to 2020.
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