TOP 10 MOVIES of the (LAST) DECADE
What a decade for cinema.
Now, as theaters around the world are closed, it’s as good a time as any to reflect on the cinematic bliss of the 2010s.
How lucky we are and how great an era of movies that such wonderful films as these DID NOT make this list:
There was the art-house mainstream of Parasite and The Master, the high octane adrenaline rides of Gravity and Mission Impossible: Fallout, stylish charmers Silver Linings Playbook and Frances Ha, genre upheavals Baby Driver and Knives Out, searing thrillers Zero Dark Thirty and Nightcrawler, the slapstick delights of The Grand Budapest Hotel and The Interview, historical knockouts Selma and The Irishman, the sporty transcendence of Moneyball and Creed, the visionary science-fiction of Arrival and Under the Skin, the hypnotic neo-noir of Good Time and Spring Breakers, the white knuckle tension of Dunkirk and A Quiet Place, the blockbuster bliss of Avengers: Endgame and The Last Jedi, the pulpy prestige of 127 Hours and Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance), justified best picture winners 12 Years a Slave and Spotlight, the creeping dread of Contagion and Gone Girl, the sprawling defiance of Little Women and American Honey, the insider baseball of The Disaster Artist and Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, the relentless brutality of The Revenant and Beasts of No Nation, quietly excellent Affleck vehicles Argo and The Town, album inspired long-form music videos Lemonade and Runaway, riveting documentaries The Act of Killing and Exit Through the Gift Shop, the cheeky hijinks of Logan Lucky and Fast Five, probing ambition in Whiplash and Warrior, poetic crime opuses Killing them Softly and The Place Beyond the Pines, relentless action thrillers Sicario and Edge of Tomorrow, character driven epics Logan and Ford v. Ferrari, the animated delight of Toy Story 3 and Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, the terror of The Babadook and Midsommar, the white-hot [ha!] social commentary of Get Out and Vice, the restrained melodrama of Roma and Manchester by the Sea, and the elegant unfolding of adolescent life in Moonlight and Boyhood.
And if I had Five Honorable Mentions, they’d be—
Apollo 11 (2019)
Blade Runner 2049 (2017)
Drive (2011)
Skyfall (2012)
Zootopia (2016)
* deep breath *
So that’s the stuff that didn’t make the list.
Here’s the stuff that did.
The movies are dead. Long live the movies!
-SL
10. INCEPTION (2010)
“I think positive emotion trumps negative emotion every time. We all yearn for reconciliation.”
The release of Inception was a bonafide cultural moment.
It dominated our collective consciousness with the kind of breathless debates usually reserved for politics or sports or shouted Thanksgiving arguments.
Was it all a dream? seemed to be the consensus question once the lights came up.
But that burning question was a placeholder for a better, smarter, deeper question:
Does it matter?
We all yearn for catharsis.
Cobb, played here to perfection by Leonardo DiCaprio, is reunited with that which matters most to him at the end of the film. Whether or not it’s real becomes a secondary concern. He finds his catharsis.
So what’s it matter if we found ours?
Of course, a sharp viewer understands that the purpose of the ending is not to solve the final shot as a cheap puzzle, but instead hopefully ruminate about how little we understand our own reality, consciousness, and thus, existence.
Many movies this decade were movies about making movies.
FORD V. FERRARI, BIRDMAN, THE ARTIST, THE DISASTER ARTIST, DOLEMITE IS MY NAME, and ONCE UPON A TIME IN HOLLYWOOD all turned the lens around and examined the nature of Hollywood, filmmaking, and creativity within and without the studio system. Most of these films did so in obvious ways while Ford v. Ferrari tackled the everlasting battle between visionary artists and the corporate money that controls them.
But no other movie this decade had as much to say about the process of telling cinematic stories as Inception.
Sure, it’s James Bond with a brain and puzzle. But a film that presents as a science-fiction globe-trotting spy thriller is really just an old fashioned Hollywood expose on the inner workings of the industry. Looking at Cobb’s team through this lens reveals a producer, an actor, a set designer, and a director guiding the whole mission. Nearly all the main characters are symbolic stand-ins for various jobs required to make a movie.
This filmmaking parable grows deeper with the knowledge of its apparent thematic origin. If THE PRESTIGE was Nolan’s confession of how far he’ll go to trick his audiences, then Inception is an invitation under the hood to see how the whole machine works.
It’s all a surreal little love poem to the creative process of filmmaking and Nolan’s true stroke of genius here is framing that process as a heist. Creation is theft. Artists steal. Art is all a scam on a sucker to put an idea in their head.
Of all of Nolan’s films, Inception bizarrely appears to be his most personal. It seems filled with his personal paranoias about losing one’s self in their work and the relentless confusion of living in the maze that is the human condition.
It’s not perfect, sure, but it’s swinging for the fences in ways few films try.
The magic of Inception is that the film treats dreams and reality with near equal measure. There’s no foggy fantasia to these fantasies; Nolan films them as though they’re as real as anything happening during waking life. And once we’ve seen how stubbornly real these dreams can look, we’re distrusting (rightly so!) of any so-called reality the film might present us with. We’ve been hurt too many times before with the “it was all a dream” nonsense to not envision that kind of gotcha-cinema tactic being deployed on us in the name of cheap tricks and cheaper thrills.
But as a desperate foot chase in Mombassa takes us down back market streets and into cafes and alleyways so narrow they seem to cave in on us, this movie reminds us of something deep and elemental:
Movies are dreams. They always have been.
And famously, as the centerpiece of the film showcases, a dream within a dream…within another dream.
For all of Nolan’s desperation to be logical and precise here, the weird and surreal cracks of the film are the most wildly interesting elements. There’s a real sense of texture to things; the imagery leaps off the frame. A marketplace explodes piece by piece free from the laws of gravity or physics. A van full of unconscious passengers plunges off a bridge towards water. The entire axis of an upscale bar tilts to a diagonal slope, bending drinks in people’s glasses. A hotel hallway turns upside down.
And then…
The music.
Once Hans Zimmer steals this movie, he never gives it back.
There’s a moment late in the film where the action begins to swell and the dialogue cedes the sonic ground to the film’s score and never asks for it again.
It’s not an over-exaggeration to say that Zimmer’s score not only holds the entire 3rd Act of the film together, but it elevates it into something transcendent. What results is some of the purest filmmaking of Nolan’s career, intercutting between the high stakes happenings of four distinct environments simultaneously and seamlessly as their detailed scenarios crescendo into disarray.
The film’s emotional climax is deeply cathartic in a surreal Charlie Kaufman kind of way — a son finally finding closure alongside his father’s dying hospital bed as the building collapses on a snowy mountainside.
In a film of quietly wonderful performances, none is better than Cillian Murphy. Very few movies in history have asked the target of the heist to also be the audience’s surrogate for the emotional catharsis they long for. For all the sprawling science-fiction at hand here, the simplest moments in the film are deeply resonant: a father reunited with his children, a son finding closure at the loss of his father, a husband letting go of a dead spouse.
Everyone loves to bloviate about the shocking ending — I remember the gasp in theaters — but of course the real point is not to provide an answer to a simple question but instead to question deeper truths about existence and untrustworthy narrators and the extremely unknowable parameters of our very own consciousness.
“There can’t be anything in the film that tells you one way or another because then the ambiguity at the end of the film would just be a mistake,” Nolan said. “It would represent a failure of the film to communicate something. But it’s not a mistake. I put that cut there at the end, imposing an ambiguity from outside the film. That always felt the right ending to me.”
Movies are dreams.
Dreams within dreams.
Within other dreams.
They’re not here to make sense. They’re primal. They’re emotional. They’re about the stuff just beyond our comprehension.
All of our greatest films understand this on some level.
Inception does too.
9. SHAME (2011)
While Steve McQueen achieved runaway commercial and critical success with 12 YEARS A SLAVE, it’s the leaner, smaller, and somehow more sinister Shame that was his best work of the decade.
The opening sequence of this film is some of the finest filmmaking of the decade. The introduction is electrifying. A never-better Michael Fassbender locks eyes with a woman on the subway. She smiles, they flirt from afar.
And then something happens. Fassbender’s glare turns predatory. The woman’s welcoming smile turns to terror marked by shifting eyes and uneasiness.
She stands and heads to the subway doors, looking to make a fast exit. As she grabs the railing we see her left hand for the first time — featuring a massive wedding ring — as Fassbender’s hand grabs the rail right next to her.
Intercut with this tense, dense, layered showdown of intrigue turned to primal panic is a series of glimpses into Brandon’s life:
— He climaxes with an unseen woman.
— He walks naked through his apartment as his sister’s (a stellar Carey Mulligan) disembodied, wounded voice — known only to us as the lone human connection in this guy’s life — echoes over his voicemail. “Hey. It’s me. Pick up. Pick up.” She sounds desperate, struggling, and like she knows he’s home hearing her words.
— He welcomes an escort into his home, hands her a wad of cash, and asks her to remove her lingerie “slowly”
— A close up of the earring the escort wore laying on carpet
— He listens to another voicemail from his sister while walking naked right by the camera en route to go pee in his bathroom (also shown)
— He masturbates in the shower
Back in the subway, the woman bursts through the subway doors the second they open, Fassbender chasing her through a sea of bodies, fighting upstream to catch this object of his desire. To do what, exactly, is unclear, but we know Fassbender’s ragged desire and we know the woman’s inate fear, and in this small, simple opening scene, we know what will become the battleground of the film.
It’s a raw declaration that none of the usual grit will be spared for the audience. Normally in movies such as these Hollywood loves to cut away or pan over to the curtains to later re-join our lovers in bed with the sheets tucked daintily around any of their fleshy parts that might upset the MPAA. But as Shame makes clear, especially with its NC-17 rating, that’s not real life, and it’s not honest, and goddammit if this film isn’t going to be both.
This whole introduction is as close to a perfect opening scene as has ever existed. It’s so magnificent, in fact, that the end of the film wisely echoes these opening images that are burned into our brain by the superb direction of Steve McQueen and the instantly attention-grabbing performance from Fassbender.
As with the later scene in which Carey Mulligan performs ‘New York, New York’ in its entirety in a breath-taking close up at the top of some ritzy NYC cocktail lounge, the film is more psycho-somatic than you remember. It’s more abstract, more psychedelic, more of a descent into madness than you might recall. It shows us a glimpse of the taboo and then spends the rest of the movie unpacking it layer by layer.
And then there’s that scene. It’s bliss. One of the best of the year. Ready?
Michael Fassbender goes for a jog through the streets of NYC.
That’s it, that’s the scene.
But somehow we feel the weight of a man cracking into a thousand pieces, his life being shattered by the one person who matters, the last person who can cut him so deep. And running, just running, from the awful emotional truths that he knows are coming.
At the climax of the film, devastating in its compassion and tenderness and abstract depiction of lurid acts of indulgence and self-sabotage, Carey Mulligan’s voice again echoes across a voicemail:
“We aren’t bad people, we’re just from a bad place.”
For Shame, this differentiation is the thesis statement of the film, and the humanity with which it views its incredibly hurt and flawed characters is deeply empathetic in ways that only inspired, well-crafted cinema can achieve.
“[The film’s reception] just shows you the thirst and the want for something that they don’t know where it’s going to go,” McQueen said. “And I think a character like Brandon — we’ve got a deep sympathy for him, a love for him, just because he’s trying. It’s difficult; it’s just difficult being a human being right now. But for me, this film is not about judging anything; it’s not about morality. It’s about someone who is just in this world and who deals with what he’s got. Here you are, deal with it.”
The beauty and tragedy of Shame is the incredible cinematic illustration of this process.
Deal with it.
8. THE BIG SHORT (2015)
Christian Bale steals this movie.
His glass-eyed savant — that’s not a metaphor, he has a glass eye and he’s extremely Mozart-y with the futures index and sub-prime mortgages — steals the show by dominating every scene, every moment, every conflict and every argument about the insane scheme he’s hatching by betting against the solvency of the US Government, and he does it in a way that only a peak A-list actor at the top of his powers can.
And then, Steve Carrell steals this movie.
His grief-fueled blowhard — also not a metaphor, he’s coping with a traumatic loss — swoops into the film when he arrives late at a group therapy session, hijacking the room with relentless machine-gun dialogue about banking and morality and then leaves as quickly as he came in, barking orders on a cell phone while he heads off to a great unknown adventure whereby he utterly commands every inch of the screen while desperately trying to find the reasonable explanation for an exceedingly unreasonable situation in a way that only a peak A-list actor at the top of his powers can.
And then, Bale and Carrell just take turns stealing the movie back and forth.
You know, just to be fair about it.
And as good as they were, it’s not worth saying a single word more about them. The performances here are universally exquisite. And, get this, those performances probably aren’t even in the top 5 reasons why this movie belongs in the Top 10 of the decade.
This film has too much to unpack as it is.
***
For all its sleekness and tricks and clever editing and wise guy sense of humor, there’s real humanity at the center of this film. It brings to light economic suffering in a way maybe never before committed to (digital) celluloid. At least not like this.
There’s a conversational nature to this film — perfectly bolstered by Ryan Gosling’s biting voice-overs — akin to FIGHT CLUB or ANNIE HALL or GOODFELLAS. It never stops speaking directly to us.
It most often feels like a rock and roll documentary, sexy and searing and full of insider insight. The quick-cutting montages and TV News voiceovers collapse entire lived lives into digestible sequences.
And speaking of digestible sequences…
Let’s talk about how this film handles exposition —
By making a sport out of it.
***
You know what exposition is, right? Are you familiar with the term?
Exposition is simply plot-related information that your audience needs to understand to grasp the story. So when THE MATRIX describes to you what the matrix is, that scene is conveying the necessary exposition so you can understand the rules and stakes of the narrative world and kick back and enjoy all the gun battles and helicopter stunts and kung fu later.
Certain films, especially procedurals like ZODIAC, JFK, and ALL THE PRESIDENT’S MEN flip the script on exposition — converting it from messy fat to lean meat. From protein shake to main course. From opening act to festival headliner. In most films, we’re waiting for the exposition to be over so we can go back to enjoying the movie. In these films, The Big Short included, the exposition becomes our favorite stuff.
“In the end, Lewis Raneri’s mortgage-backed security mutated into a monstrosity that collapsed the whole world economy. And none of the experts or leaders or talking heads had a clue it was coming. I’m guessing most of you still don’t really know what happened. Yeah, you got a soundbite you repeat so you don’t sound dumb, but come on. But there were some who saw it coming. While the whole world was having a big old party, a few outsiders and weirdos saw what no one else could. These outsiders saw the giant lie at the heart of the economy and they saw it by doing something the rest of the suckers never thought to do — they looked.”
This is the single worst thing I’ll say about audiences in the 2010s, especially in regard to some of the criticisms of this film: It seems to me that some viewers, upon realizing what they are being asked to do, simply disengage and blame the film. The film is accessibly dense and I think some viewers had a palpable dread at being asked to follow along and pay attention. They recoiled when the film asked you to watch with your eyes and listen with your ears; it’s going to tell you everything you need to know.
It’s simple, it’s not a test. It’s not a pop quiz or an IQ exam.
Just pay attention.
It’s that easy. Right?
Eh.
This implies a social responsibility; a call to arms to do the most radical act any audience can do — simply pay attention.
Audiences want to do some work for their meal, a screenwriting guru once said to me. They want to be involved in the process. Storytelling is a dialogue; it’s a two-way street. No one wants to be spoon-fed while wearing a bib but folks don’t want to hunt in the woods with a rusty pocket knife either.
Audiences want to work for their meal.
But maybe not this much work.
It’s their loss.
***
“Mortage-backed securities, subprime loans, tranches — it’s pretty confusing, right? Does it make you feel bored? Or stupid? Well, it’s supposed to. Wall Street loves to use confusing terms to make you think only they can do what they do. Or even better, for you just to leave them the fuck alone.”
“So, here’s Margot Robie in a bubble bath to explain.”
Oh. Okay.
Look, could this have been David Beckham lifting weights shirtless? Sure. Could this have been Jennifer Aniston washing her car in a tank-top? Absolutely. Could it have been Idris Elba covered in grease fixing an engine?
Yes.
Later it will be Anthony Bourdain (xo) in a kitchen and Selena Gomez at a blackjack table. But it happened to be Margot Robie in a bath-tub here, so please, try and focus.
“They made billions and billions…So the banks started filling these bonds with riskier and riskier mortgages…So whenever you hear sub-prime, think ‘shit’…So now [Bale] is going to short the bonds…which means to ‘bet against.’ Got it? Good.”
What a delight.
And truly, what a stroke of genius. How else to explain this stuff to an audience without bringing the movie to a shrieking halt every time?
There’s a rule about writing exposition in Save the Cat (more on that later) called the Pope-in-the-Pool rule. It originates from some flick whereby the FBI have to protect the Pope from an assassination attempt or something. And an FBI agent has to tell the audience about all the specific security measures they’re taking for his Easter service or whatever, so that when things inevitably go haywire, the audience will know the information they need to know to sit back and enjoy the ride and follow along. While this FBI agent is talking about all this boring stuff, the Pope takes off his hat and his robes — revealing a swimsuit — and starts swimming laps in the pool at the hotel they’re holed up in. It’s a funny visual device to give the audience something to watch while they listen to this boring mansplaining nonsense about the FBI’s plan. Now…
What better Pope in a pool than a Margot Robie in a bubble bath?
“It certainly helps when you have well-known Hollywood actors, but we were able to use style and surprise to keep an audience going along with us. You can tell this story in one of two ways. You could deliver it as a downer. Or you could say it’s exciting to know what’s really going on. The biggest thing I see [in audiences] is this hunger to know. A lot of people lost houses and jobs and most people still, in our country at least, didn’t really know why.” Director Adam McKay says of the American media: “They didn’t even try to explain it.”
Got it? Good.
Now please don’t fuck off.
***
In a decade of weirdos, Bale is the singular best.
Relentlessly authentic, the smartest guy in the world, and often barefoot or air-drumming to heavy metal is not a combo we see on-screen a whole lot.
His glass-eyed savant owns the movie until Steve Carrell’s manic mouth box steals it right back.
Aw shit.
I said I wouldn’t talk about performances anymore. Okay. For real this time.
Bale convinces Goldman Sachs to let him create a bond to bet against the housing market. They laugh in his face and tell him they’re happy to take his free money. They offer him a $5 million bet.
“Can we make it $100 million?” he asks.
With that, Ludacris’ ‘Shake Your Money Maker’ drops in and we cut into a full music video about stacking cash and, well, shaking money makers.
Bale then goes to Deustche Bank [booo] and makes another $200 million bet.
Then Bank of America. Then Bear Stearns. And so on.
For 1.3 billion dollars.
Billion. With a B.
As in BATSHIT INSANE, BALE!
Betting on the housing market to crash. Who does that?
But as our trusty narrator turned supporting character Ryan Gosling explains:
“Look at it this way, I’m standing in front of a burning house, and I’m offering you Fire Insurance on it.”
Steve Carrell and his team take this under consideration.
- “What if he’s right?”
- “You want him to be right.”
- “Yes I do. The banks have given us 25% interest rates on credit cards. They have screwed us on student loans that we can never get out from under. Then this guy walks into my office and says those same banks got greedy, they lost track of the market, and I can profit off their stupidity? Fuck yeah, I want him to be right.”
And he is right. The housing market crashes. The prescient weirdos get rich.
And then they all reveal their utter and naked humanity in soul-bearing moments where numbers turn to people, the heist turns to theft, the thrill breaks way to tragedy. The bank robbery at the heart of the movie turns deadly serious as the film reminds us it was our money that was the loot taken out of the vault by men in masks. The film’s second half is full of beautifully crafted David and Goliath moments of underdogs betting against the system and winning big or calling out corruption directly to its dirty fucking face. But the film transcendentally becomes an indictment of the very system that has made heroes of our weirdos. And the human costs of this are never far from the film’s mind.
For all the discussion of this film’s tricks and slicks and innovative narrative techniques, which McKay would explore again in Vice, we’d be remiss not to talk about it’s big, beating heart focused on the American worker; that great cinematic trope of the little guy. There’s a humanitarian core at the center of this film and it’s laser-focused on how all this craziness affects us.
Brad Pitt — another wonderful weirdo in the mix — admonishes two mentees for celebrating their (seemingly inevitable) big gains after placing big bets with gargantuan returns on the housing market crashing.
“You just bet against the American economy. Which means, which means if we’re right, if we’re right — People lose homes, people lose jobs. People lose retirement savings. People lose pensions. You know what I hate about fucking banking? It reduces people to numbers. Here’s a number: every 1% unemployment goes up, forty thousand people die. Did you know that? Did you know that?!”
Now we do.
Now more than ever.
7. MAD MAX FURY ROAD (2015)
Sometimes, movies are beyond words.
This is one of them.
I can talk at length about the incredible sound design — the rip-roaring of engines and explosions and dirt shredded and blood gushed and the pounding, relentless pounding of drums and guitars — but hearing those sounds is beyond words.
I can talk at length about the incredible imagery — the absurd ambition of dozens of vehicles on screen at once, the sheer worldbuilding of the homeworld, the endless aesthetic details of makeup and vehicle design and weaponry and exploding flares and a two-hour cinematographer’s wet dream — but seeing those sights remains beyond words.
I can talk at length about the performances — a never better Tom Hardy and Charlize Theron speaking oceans of emotion with only their eyes and their physicality, making the few words they speak count, and teaching a masterclass in visual storytelling — but watching these two actors cannot be properly summarized with words.
I can talk about George Miller’s masterful direction — the perfectly relentless pacing of the film, the insane stunts and set pieces, the transcendence of the storytelling (utopia is not a faraway place to be found but instead an achievable idea to be built at home), and the staging of moments quiet and loud and big and small — but his career-best work here cannot be done justice with mere language.
It’s just unlike anything else you’ve ever seen.
Mad Max Fury Road simply has to be seen to be believed.
And even then, you’ll wonder if such a masterpiece was only a fever dream of sights and sounds that wormed its way into the black matter of your brain.
“I have this theory,” Miller said. “A couple years ago when I was chairing the Cannes jury, when I was distilling how to measure the worth of a film, [the metric I used] was how long it follows you out of the cinema. Sometimes you’ve forgotten it by the time you get to the car park. It might have been an entertaining movie, but it doesn’t mean much to you — it washes over you. It’s a really good thing when some movies, films you can count on both hands for all of your life, become part of you. What I like about what’s happened with this film is that it seems to have stuck around in people’s minds for a lot longer than I ever hoped it would.”
The film sticks, and it sticks deep.
Late in the film, as Furiosa’s life slips away, Max saves the day. Not by brute force or strength or cunning, but by blood transfusion. The same reason he’s kept alive after being captured by savage hoards: his Type O negative blood.
The universal donor strikes again.
The hero is the hero by blood, by birth, by survival, and by being nothing more than exactly the man he is. A heroic turn for the film’s second-best hero.
If that seems far-fetched, consider his next words:
“Max. My name is Max. That’s my name.”
It sure is.
We’ll live and we’ll die, and if we’re lucky, we’ll live again to ride in Valhalla.
Shiny and chrome.
6. LADY BIRD (2017)
“Hey what should I say about Lady Bird?” I asked my lovely and brilliant girlfriend over coffee this morning.
“It’s great. Goodbye.”
Hm.
What a rascal.
I mean she’s right, of course. Lady Bird is an all-time instant classic, one of those rare pillars of first time filmmaking at an absolutely ridiculous level.
It’s about those big American themes — family, future, friends, faith.
It’s specific in geography but never feels like a postcard from a place you haven’t been. The film is relentlessly grounded, and suffers from an astonishing wealth of fully authentic and fully realized characters. It’s funny, it’s heartbreaking, it’s a tribute to the supreme specialness of normal life lived courageously.
But most of all, Lady Bird is a perfect showcase for the heights movies can achieve when they are entrusted to a female vision behind the camera.
***
Perhaps no other two leads arrive so fully formed as Lady Bird and her mom.
Each could fill entire films, entire seasons of television on their own.
We’re lucky to have them together.
The film features breakout performances from actors so accomplished it’s hard to imagine our current Hollywood landscape without them — Tracy Letts, Timothee Chalamet, Beanie Feldstein, and Lucas Hedges.
But of course, this film belongs to Saoirse Ronan and Laurie Metcalf, who put on simultaneous masterclasses for anyone looking to learn about acting, emotion, or maybe just a bit more about the human condition.
And the bright star at the center of its universe is the great Greta Gerwig.
“I just don’t feel like I’ve seen very many movies about 17-year-old girls where the question is not, ‘Will she find the right guy’ or ‘Will he find her?’” Gerwig says. “The question should be: ‘Is she going to occupy her personhood?’ Because I think we’re very unused to seeing female characters, particularly young female characters, as people.”
What can we say about her work here? Every shot is perfect, every performance is superb, the pacing is excellent and the film swings between volcanic emotions of every flavor flawlessly.
The film is cumulative; about normal lives well lived. There’s a continuous sense of momentum and all these quietly excellent scenes begin to add up to a towering masterpiece.
Much like Mad Max Fury Road, you just gotta watch it. I can talk about all the wonderful moments, all the wonderful characters and the beautiful direction, but it’s just simply a film to be viewed and enjoyed.
It’s about growing and changing despite our best efforts.
And the quiet beauty within that.
***
Can I be gross for a minute and share a true Hollywood story with you?
It will be worth it, I promise.
Please? Okay.
I met Dan Harmon (Community, Rick and Morty) backstage at a Q&A at the Paley Center in Beverly Hills. At the time I was working at Starbucks (I lasted a month!) but quit because I had a scheduling conflict with this night. I was a huge fan of Community at the time and couldn’t get my shift covered at Starbucks so I could go work this event for Livestream. I called my manager and told him I was sorry but I just couldn’t make it in. He understood, but they’d have to fire me for a no-show.
So, that was that.
I went to the Paley Center and met up with my red carpet photographer who I would be shadowing. My job was silly— I had to run a Memory Card from a photographer to a control room. They were maybe 20 feet away. It was beyond redundant.
But I was there for bigger reasons.
After the event I went up to Dan and thanked him for his work and for making a TV show that spoke to me in ways nothing else ever had and I said a whole bunch of stuff that would probably make me turn bright red if you quoted it back to me today. Honestly most of it was a blur and I don’t remember it. But one thing stuck. And it stuck deep. Dan went on a rant, and I sure didn’t stop him, and after this rant was over I felt like I had learned more from him in 3 minutes than I had in the entirety of my college experience.
As best I can remember, the rant was this:
“So why are we here? Look at all this — we have lights, we have air conditioning, we have a sound system, we have computers in our pockets. Outside we have vehicles that can accelerate very fast and we can connect our pocket computers to them and play music from 100 years ago. So why are we here? Why do we have all this stuff? Because of adaptation. Evolution. That’s the mechanism that got humans to this point. It gave us all this stuff. Now, look at storytelling. What’s every movie you’ve ever seen about? Well there’s a guy, or there’s a girl, and they are who they are. And then, something happens that’s bigger than them, it challenges them, it throws them into a world they don’t know how to navigate and it forces them to ADAPT and EVOLVE and change to meet these new circumstances or this larger world they’ve entered into. We’re a product of adaptation and we use our stories to celebrate adaptation. So if you think about it, storytelling is really just humanity’s tribute to the mechanism that got us here.”
Wow.
I had never heard anyone say it in those words before.
Storytelling is humanity’s tribute to the thing that got us here.
Evolution, dear Morpheus, evolution.
Holy shit.
Of all the films that came out this decade, none pay tribute to this mechanism in richer or deeper ways than Lady Bird does. It’s a moving film about the small specificity of our ever-changing lives. It’s a wonderful tribute to all those small moments of evolution and adaptation — how we might feel like nothing is changing until we look back and suddenly see how many miles we’ve traveled.
***
Fathers and sons have long dominated the consciousness of American cinema. But at last, at long last, we have a bonafide all-time classic about daughters and mothers. (Mothers and Daughters was the original title of Gerwig’s script.)
In an era when Hollywood took its first baby steps to address long-running gender discrimination and disparity behind its cameras, it was a poetic sign that the undisputed best directorial debut of the decade came from a woman.
Take a bow and pull up a chair, Greta. You’re gonna be here awhile.
It’s great.
Goodbye.
5. THE TREE OF LIFE (2011)
I saw this film on a first date. We went for sushi after. Feeling as though my life had forever changed and the bounds of cinema had been stretched a little further by one of the most courageously authentic and un-pretentious films I had ever seen, I raved about it excitedly for at least an hour, oblivious, until my date laughed and said with great kindness:
“I’m glad you liked it, I just didn’t think we’d be talking about it this long.”
Well, here we are.
And I still am.
[Terrence Malick, on the other hand, does not grant interviews nor talk about his films publically. As such, I cannot quote him here.]
What can you say about The Tree of Life? That it’s gorgeous? That it’s profound? That its one of our finest living auteurs examining the journey of his own life against the backdrop of humanity’s journey through the cosmos?
The film is instantly meditative. Joyful. Profound, but light. Playful. Kind. Beckoning. Asking us to come along for a minute. Sit with ourselves. Our world. It welcomes grand emotion, deep insights. It considers the big questions of life and death and god and nature. It’s lyrical and pure and wears its heart and soul so fully on its sleeve that it’s almost uncomfortable. It almost…pisses you off.
I remember a sign at the movie theater. It read: “No refunds for Tree of Life.”
Is it an art film? Sure, yes, obviously. Nothing explodes, except for volcanoes and supernovas. The Tree of Life would be more at home in a gallery space than at a multiplex at the mall sandwiched between the rumbling walls of more common Hollywood fare.
As Indiana Jones would say, “It belongs in a museum!!!”
And damn straight it does.
The film is almost an archeological or anthropological look at humanity. It marvels at the fact that any of us can possibly go out in the world and be a human being. That existence, kindness, grace are our most radical acts in the face of the staggeringly unknowable cosmic mysteries that life throws us into day after day. And that love is our best shot at connecting with the infinite.
It’s not pretending to be about these things. That would be pretentious.
It just is about these things.
It’s what’s there.
Your ability to see it, find it, and feel it is a responsibility in and of your own.
Like 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY before it, The Tree of Life tackles the creation of our earth and universe with all its cinematic might.
If Aliens arrived now and we screened The Tree of Life, they might kinda get it.
They’d understand parts of the story it was telling.
Maybe more so than any other film.
The film is hypnotic. It whispers while operatic choirs and stunning imagery conspire to drill the film down deep within us.
There is no better example of this then the Creation and Evolution Sequence.
Holy shit. Pure cinema.
The depths of matter and material at the edges and beginnings of the known universe have never been put on screen with such beauty, scope, and terror.
The plasma of creation.
“It belongs in a museum!”
Look, Indiana Jones is right. It really does. But you know that magical feeling you get in your chest when you spend a day wandering through a really excellent museum? These scenes are like that, bottled.
This sequence is one of the most out of body experiences I’ve ever had in my life. It’s an invitation to observe the edges of space and time. The film sits us here, at the edge of everything, and creates the universe right in front of us.
Lava crashes, loud. Steam rises. Solids turn to liquids. Primordial soup.
The nature photography on hand is as exquisite as anything you’ve seen in your life. Geysers give ways to cellular growth. Bacteria chains look like asteroid fields. AND THEN — a neuron! Holy shit! AND THEN — water! JELLYFISH. REGULAR FISH. TREES. BEACHES.
AND THEN!
A FUCKING DINOSAUR.
THAT’S RIGHT. A DINOSAUR.
holy shit.
We’ve been in this art flim and we’ve been hanging out in 1950s West Texas with Brad Pitt and Jessica Chastain as THE mother and THE father and now we’re in the Triassic period looking at hyper life-like dinosaurs???
Yup. We sure are.
It’s a hell of a moment, this scene. You see what it’s doing. You watch the film emotionally manipulate you into connecting with these dinosaurs, these fucking dinosaurs in the middle of our Brad Pitt movie, but you don’t care that you’re being manipulated.
Because it’s a genuinely human moment.
Here’s what happens:
A lone dinosaur rummages through the forest. He’s cute, maybe he’s a she, who knows. Munching on grass. So on. Later, this dinosaur sleeps next to a stream. We see some similar-looking guys downstream, maybe his buds, drinking river water. Just chilling, talking dinosaur stuff. Then! Something spooks them off. We see a predator! A bigger dinosaur. Approaches our sleeping friend. The predator puts his foot on the little’s guys head. He’s got him pinned. Game over. We’re waiting for a JURASSIC PARK moment.
But then something incredible happens — the predator looks at his prey, weak, barely resisting…and takes his foot off. And walks away. Sparing the little guy’s life.
Earlier I described it as a human moment, and it’s exactly that in incredible and moving ways that even now are difficult to properly explain. But the profound point of the scene is this:
Maybe this isn’t a human moment.
Maybe this stuff was here before us.
When people stormed out of this movie, refunds be damned, their anger was justified. Maybe they were pissed off at the artsiness of it all, and hey, I get it.
Or maybe their anger was deeper, more reactive. The core theme of this moment seems to be this:
We’re not special.
Humans ain’t the end all be all that we might think we are.
This stuff was here before we were. We don’t own it. It’s not ours.
Mercy predates man.
What could be more divine than that?
Mercy. Brave, brave mercy.
Have you ever heard such a beautiful thing in all your life?
And maybe it’s the swelling music, or the complete disarming the film has achieved with its sheer undeniable awe, but this dinosaur scene bizarrely resonates. Maybe more than any other moment of the film. It’s showing us something deeply beautiful about ourselves that is also deeply uncomfortable, deeply damaging to any of us who might cling to the notion that humanity is hot shit.
We care about these dinosaurs. We have literally just watched a Save-the-Cat scene which has made us feel good about the leniency we have witnessed. This is in every buddy cop movie, the good guy always does a nice thing so we know he’s a decent person who’s worth rooting for, he could even, for example, save a cat from a tree to prove he’s a good guy. (More on saving cats later.)
It’s manipulative, and it’s supposed to be. We care. We care about this little guy and we want him to live.
We want mercy to survive.
As this humanistic (oops) moment lingers and we feel that magic in our chests, that good-day-at-a-museum magic that calms and nurtures us and puts a little knowing smile on our faces and waters those wonderful little voices in the back of our heads that tell us “everything is going to be okay.”
And then,
An asteroid.
Tumbling end over end. Hurdling through space.
Towards a planet with a lot of green and blue. And our newfound dinosaur friends. Mericful, and kind. Like a mother might be.
A shame they won’t make it.
This is a film about death. Forgiveness. Guilt. Anger. Regret. Connection. Nature. The infinite. The universe. West Texas. The son and the father and the holy spirit. And those infinitely strong human feelings.
Or are they?
Human, I mean.
Maybe these things were here before us. Maybe they’ll be here after us.
That’s what the dinosaur scene is all about.
And that all our journeys, big and small, are linked to each other in ways beyond our comprehension.
There’s an immediate duality throughout the film. The film knows it might be hard to follow — so it splits nearly all its thematic meaning into polarizations — mother/father, man/nature, nature/modern-world, universe/earth, past/future, grace/Darwinism, life/death.
It shoots this modern architecture, stunning as it is, like the film is judging us for being so fucking proud of ourselves. These buildings. Steel and glass. What have we built, really?
But when the film looks at nature, it really looks. We see it for what it is in a focused and true way. When the film is invaded by steel and glass and skyscrapers it flows past it, as though the film is rolling its eyes and trying to go somewhere else. Back to nature, maybe, where things are elegant, calm, and celebrated. We feel the soulfulness of these flashbacks when they pierce our modern world. They hit with greater power than the allure of high rise offices Sean Penn finds himself wandering through.
The Tree of Life is a film about connecting with the infinite. About reaching out and touching god. Or whatever it is that’s out there. That part doesn’t really matter.
It’s the reaching that counts.
If Inception reminded us that movies are dreams then The Tree of Life is here to remind us that movies are art.
And some art is a little bit beyond us. And it stretches us — our souls, our eyes, our hearts — to go to places we’ve never been before. To extend a hand to the infinite. And that’s a scary thing to do, because in extending ourselves we might feel a little lost. We might not be able to hold onto anything while we fall. And the stuff in this film might just wash over us, a beautiful boring mish-mash of moments human and eternal.
And that’s okay.
It’s the reaching that counts.
4. THE WOLF OF WALL STREET (2013)
This is a movie about cults.
It helps explain how we got here.
This is an origin story.
For all of Scorsese’s much-publicized criticism of Marvel movies, it turns out he made one. Scorsese’s superhero anti-hero just happens to be an investment guy and his Marvel universe happens to be about Wall Street, American enterprise, and all the suckers they fleece. (Hey that’s us!)
It’s a wild film, full of flourishes and performances and the most energetically disciplined yet wildly impressionistic filmmaking from one of the finest creative minds of the last century…AND Thelma Schoonmaker. Come on.
Thelma was recently asked why she, such a nice little old lady now, would want to keep editing all these violent Scorsese movies after all these years.
“Ah,” she said, “but they aren’t violent until I’ve edited them.”
The Wolf of Wall Street trades violence for mayhem, and if the sometimes repulsed response to the film is any indicator, mayhem stings deeper than violence.
It’s exciting, it’s exceedingly well made, and more than anything it’s a rock and roll movie about America run amuck in the most savagely American ways possible.
It’s an origin story. It helps explain how we got here.
This is a story about male hedonism mixed with toxic capitalism. Turns out, they deserve each other. This movie struck a nerve in people because it pointed out one of our harshest American truths — we deserve this.
We’ve allowed this to happen.
We birthed this man. We made this mess. We created it.
Mary Shelley wrote a book about that once.
***
The Wolf of Wall Street is a rock and roll movie. It’s an Alice in Wonderland trip behind the looking glass of dirty money and bad men in America.
The film is a technical marvel, a never-ending tornado of shooting and cutting sublime performances. It’s a movie of Steadicams and scenery-chewing — big moments of acting and filmmaking clawing at the zeitgeist of money, power, and toxic American masculinity.
“Look at young people and what the American Dream means to them,” Scorsese said. “It’s all about accumulating more, and doing what is best for you, in spite of how it affects anyone else. This is rampant today. So it’s very important to analyze [Jordan’s] nature.”
Speaking of which…
The Wolf of Wall Street was instantly iconic, albeit for some of the wrong reasons. Much like The Big Short, the film is telling us the story of how we got here; a reflection of the roadmap that brought us to this fragile moment. But upon release, a large amount of criticism focused on the apparent sexism exhibited by the film. Let’s dive into that, shall we?
Right out of the gate, it’s important to distinguish from the sexist behavior of the characters in the film and the endorsement of that behavior, which would rightly make the film itself sexist. To avoid an entire class worth of film theory, we can safely say in a few words that when a film exhibits behavior, it is not necessarily endorsing that behavior. This is the difference between sexist characters and a sexist movie.
I consider this film to be deeply feminist in a similar vein to Fight Club, in which both movies serve as illustrations of how bad men fuck things up when left to their own ideas and devices. And what better cesspool of male ideas exists on earth than Wall Street?
Let’s look at some examples.
Early on in the film, Jordan announces that he has offered a Female Employee $10,000 to shave her head. She does, but seems less like a willing participant and more like a calculated sacrifice to remain both “one of the boys” and maintain her job security while coming into the possession of a previously unheld $10,000.
This is pain. Real, feminine pain. Scorsese’s camera does not shy away from it. Her shrieking anxiety only shows in a hesitant glimpse of her eyes. This is not what consent looks like. This is a toxic work environment, clearly. And if you had any doubts, let Jordy tell you how she’s going to use this money:
“FYI boys, Danielle has promised to use this $10,000 for breast implants!”
This is psychological abuse. She knows it. And the only person who comes to comfort her, and deliver her winnings, is another woman.
Think about that for a minute.
When Teresa catches Jordan cheating in a limousine — doing a line of coke off Margot Robie’s cleavage— Scorsese lingers on her anguish with surprising honesty.
The rollercoaster pace of film almost never slows, never stops, but here it truly pauses — the scene feels more like a mother finding out a son’s lie than a conflict between wife and a husband, which speaks to the juvenile and immature nature of Jordan.
This is a film that asks, how did we get here?
Why do we worship these guys the way we do?
We’re waiting for a moral judgment that’s never coming. Why?
Because it never came from us either.
As The Big Short also explains, a bunch of these assholes crashed our economy and walked away unscathed. Jordan takes a similar path here. A few years in prison, minimum security, playing tennis. Does that feel like justice? Does that feel like America?
Depends who you ask.
Depends which American justice system we’re talking about.
I think much of controversy over this film comes from a misread of its genre. You would be forgiven for thinking it’s a character drama, or a crime epic, or a period piece, or a buddy comedy.
But it’s not.
It’s a horror film.
And once you view it from this lens, everything starts to click.
***
This is a film about male hedonism mixed with toxic capitalism.
At the film’s outset, we get a crash course introduction to the great American myth of capitalism and all its shining iconography.
And what an introduction it is.
Matthew McConaughey has essentially one long scene in this movie. And it’s the best work of his career. He’s like this strange little version of Dante’s Virgil; welcoming us into the underworld and starting us on our journey. “Abandon hope, all ye who enter,” he seems to say in so many words. Drug use, masturbation, the inherent underhanded and fraudulent goals of Wall Street, it sure sounds like a place for sinners.
McConghuaey delivers the goods here, and he also delivers a thesis of the film:
This stuff isn’t real.
It’s a mirage. Or fugazi, if you prefer.
It’s never landed.
Money is a cult, and we’re all members.
- “You gotta stay relaxed. You jerk off?”
- “Do I jerk off? Yeah, yeah I jerk off.”
- “How many times a week?”
- “Like, um, three, three-four times, maybe.”
- “Gotta pump those numbers up. Those are rookie numbers in this racket.”
If your movie features the career-best work of Leonardo DiCaprio, Jonah Hill, Jon Bernthal, Matthew McConghauey and Kyle Chandler (in film, Texas Forever), an absolutely star-making debut in Margot Robie AND the scene-stealing delight of a never-funnier Rob Reiner (the film’s lone voice of reason)…then I’d say your casting director should get the Yacht they filmed on. Bravo.
But of course, this is Marty’s film.
He’s in all-time top-notch form, fearlessly leading us through the shortest three-hour movie in history. The film flies by, only taking a couple moments — a moving tribute to the origin story of a female employee, a marital confrontation of infidelity outside Trump Tower of all places, and a shocking stock market crash — to linger and slow its pace. Otherwise, this film is high-octane, pedal to the metal filmmaking. We could argue all day about which film is more breakneck in terms of pace — this film or Mad Max Fury Road — but both films seem most at home leaning on relentless spectacle driven by excellent performances.
And none is more sinful than our hero, Jordan Belfort.
Now of course, hero ain’t the right word. We’ll talk about that later. For now, just remember this —
DiCaprio ain’t no Dante. At least not in this studio picture. But even he didn’t get chosen by the free market.
“Wall Street had swallowed me up and shit me right back out again.”
Back to square one, Jordan trades Wall Street for New Jersey. He goes to work for Penny stocks. 50% commission.
Wait. FIFTY percent? But these stocks are worthless, right?
- “Who buys this stuff?”
- “Honestly, mostly schmucks.”
Jordan might know a thing or two about them.
Jordan makes 5k on his first phone call. Prometheus incarnate.
Long live fugazi.
The show goes on.
***
Jonah Hill steals this movie the moment he steps into it.
The crack-smoking scene announces a descent into American madness; a cartoon lunacy that arrives and never leaves.
This is a story about male hedonism mixed with toxic capitalism.
Things only get crazier from here.
Rob Reiner tries to be the voice of reason and accidentally gives us another thesis:
- “Jordy, one of these days, the chickens are going to come home to roost.”
- “You’re looking at me like I’m crazy.”
- “Crazy, this is not crazy! This is obscene.”
And Jordan replies through voice over with a confession —
“It was obscene. In the normal world. And who the fuck wanted to live there?”
***
Meanwhile, Scorsese is busy shooting the absolute hell out of this movie.
In a wonderfully impressionistic and iconic moment, Scorsese’s camera glides over brokers as they scream into telephone headsets, while ‘Hey Leroy, Your Mama’s Calling You’ plays over this crazed ritual. The whole scene is a lurid affair cut to perfection by Thelma Schoonmaker’s supreme sense of timing.
Meanwhile, as these bozos dial their phones as fast and furiously as they can, fueling the fraudulent federal gains of their boss, Kyle Chandler lurks in a Government Office Building, flipping through polaroids and documents about one Jordan Belfort. Building a case. Putting in the work.
Jordan gets wind of this and invites Chandler’s Agent Denim to his yacht.
You know, just for a friendly chat.
It’s yet another classic Scorsese scene, with two giants squaring off.
Jordan asks Agent Denim about a rumor that he tried to be a broker once.
“You ever think about what would have happened had you stayed the course?”
“You know what, when I’m riding home on the subway and my balls are fucking sweating, I’m wearing the same suit three days in a row — yeah, you bet I do. I’ve thought about it before? Who wouldn’t?”
Who wouldn’t.
Of course, Jordan is angling to test Agent Denham’s susceptibility to bribes, and Denham is both playing along and trying to bait Jordan into murkier and more prosecutable waters.
Eventually, the gig is up, and Jordan’s game of cat and mouse turns to lashing out at the Agents once he sees he cannot sway the outcome of his case.
- “I’m sure we’ll be seeing each other soon.”
- “I’m sure. Good luck on that subway ride home to your miserable fucking wives.”
That subway ride home.
Don’t forget about that one.
***
Have I mentioned this?
This is a movie about cults.
And the best part of being a cult leader when the cult is money?
The stuff you can get away with.
Midway through the film, Jordan wakes up after partying a little too hard before an international flight. He’s restrained by multiple seatbelts like a straightjacket.
He asks Donnie for some clarification about his predicament.
- “You called the captain the n-word!”
- “I called the captain the n-word??”
- “Yeah he was very upset.”
- “Really?”
- “Lucky we're in first class.”
Upon landing, they encounter some issues with immigration.
But not for long.
Consequences, meet cash.
Jordan is relentlessly despicable. No one else on screen comes close to his depravity, debauchery, underhandedness, hedonism, and general recklessness and anarchy that leaves chaos in its wake, only to be swept up by the accomodating clean-up crew of cold hard currency and a side of bribery.
UNTIL….
Donnie fucks it all up.
And then, of course, enter the quaaludes.
The quaalude overdose scene is the most hilariously depraved scene Martin Scorsese has ever committed to film. Jordan has taken a handful of premium aged ‘ludes.’ He thinks they’ve aged out of effectiveness, popping handfuls. Jordan drives to a nearby country club to talk on an untapped phone line when suddenly — BAM — the drugs hit him. And hit him hard.
His motor functions are completely invalidated. He squirms on the ground like a cerebral palsy patient.
And what’s worse, is that Donnie is at back home speaking into a tapped phone about sordid business affairs as we speak.
Jordan’s solution?
Crawl. To his car. And drive home.
The resulting slapstick scene is a wonderful combination of Hunter S. Thompson-esque narration that dives into the mind of a debilitating drug user mixed with the physical comedy of a classic 1970s Saturday Night Live sketch.
It’s perfection.
As Jordan faces down the impossibility of traversing a staircase, his drug-addled brain suddenly presents our hero with a, uh, radical solution.
“I can roll! I can roll!” he says.
Indeed.
The scene shows Scorsese’s excessive and well-documented love of film history — the madcap DNA of Buster Keaton, the Marx Brothers, Bugs Bunny, and the Vaudeville slapstick of a late-night talk show going off the rails.
This is a stupid human trick. If ever there was one.
Jordan figures out he can open his car door with his foot.
And then, after an eventful night to say the least, the Cops show up to find Jordan asleep on his couch.
They lead him outside to ask a simple question:
“Did you drive your car tonight, Mr. Belfort?”
And then, after cutting a deal with the SEC, Jordan agrees to a plea deal.
Until he doesn’t.
Jordan’s concession speech turned defiant campaign rally is a high point in the careers of DiCaprio, Scorsese, Schoonmaker, and screenwriter Terence Winter. It’s the culmination of collaboration from some of the most prolific and iconic creators of the last century. The scene is an all-timer. They’re gonna have to bring in the national guard to pry the camera out of Martin Scorsese’s fingers.
This is a movie about cults.
And ultimately it’s about the biggest cult of all — America.
The movie could end here: with Jordan getting a big, important speech that Oscar season loves and the morally ambiguous film sending us home with a convenient theme to soothe our unease.
But that’s not the movie we’re in.
And that’s not his choice.
Jordan chooses mayhem. Every time.
“The show must go on!”
And go on it does.
All the way down.
***
These next two shots echo each other, don’t they?
I don’t know how anyone can watch the last third of this movie and think the film is encouraging the behavior of its first and second thirds.
I just can’t.
This is a story about male hedonism mixed with toxic capitalism.
If it reads as an encouraging portrait of either of those forces, then I saw a different movie.
Jordan’s fall is equally as depraved as his rise; ripping open a couch cushion to get a bag of cocaine after punching his wife in the face but before attempting to kidnap his daughter and make a getaway while driving under the influence.
That’s our hero. That’s our guy.
“This is my home,” Jordan continues. “They’re gonna need a fucking wrecking ball take me out of here. They’re going to need to send in the national guard or a fucking SWAT Team cause I ain’t going nowhere!”
This is a movie about cults.
And the people who lead them.
They can’t stop the chickens from coming home to roost. And the signs that you think are signs from God are really just bumper guards steering you to your next tragedy.
After watching a plane he should have been on explode over rough seas, Jordan has a come-to-Jesus moment and turns over a new leaf, cleaning up his life and amending his reckless behavior.
It doesn’t matter.
Kyle Chandler always gets his man.
Even after taking the large steps of turning his life around, one of Jordan’s associates is arrested at a Benihana’s, implicating him in the process.
And just in case you think that might have been left up to chance…
“Benihana? Beni-fucking-hana? BENI-FUCKING-HANAH?!? Why, why why God, why would you be so cruel to choose a chain of fucking Hibachi restaurants to take me down?”
The lord works in mysterious ways.
But for all of Scorsese’s wild flourishes and punctual exclamations and the insanity of the Popeye spinach montage and the instantly iconic quaaludes scene, one last strong creative choice sticks out above the rest.
None of Scorsese’s bold and inspired choices compare to his instinctual desire to pair the Lemonheads punk rock cover of “Mrs. Robinson” with the inevitable FBI raid on Jordan’s offices. As we watch Kyle Chandler and the boys in blue tear ass through Jordan’s office having successfully followed the money, this sonic piece of Americana just feels right. I can’t quite explain why, or in what ways it might be editorializing this moment, but it just fits perfect.
An allusion to THE GRADUATE is a wonderful fit for this film.
Maybe it’s telling us all this stuff is American as baseball and apple pie.
Where have you gone, Joe Dimaggio. A lonely nation turns its eyes to you.
***
And then, of course, the kicker.
The shot across the bow, and also to the gut.
It’s one of two moments the film has been building to.
The other is its final frame.
You know this one.
Come on. Think.
That public transit ride home.
It’s a moment for the decade — the good, decent, moral man on the subway.
With those sweaty balls.
In a suit worn for three days.
Headed home to a miserable fucking wife.
Or at least, that’s all we can think about.
Jordan could leave his estate in a helicopter and land it on his yacht.
The upstanding, hard-working people of this country take the subway.
Jordan’s barbs about public transit echo in our head.
The film prods us to ask —
Who won here?
If history writes the victors…who they got on this one?
Kurt Vonnegut loved to say if he made it to heaven he wanted to ask “what was the good news?”
In the case of Jordan Belfort v The Rest Of Us, who can tell us the good news?
I think the beauty of this film is that you can either view it as an indictment of un-punished corruption or as the endorsement of a better world around the corner that might not reward such troubling behavior.
“Like my pops Mad Max had said, ‘The chickens had come home to roost.’ Whatever the fuck that means.”
Scorsese has made a historic career of showing us uncomfortably deep truths about ourselves by using immoral men as the vessels of such squirmy honesty.
Jordan Belfort is not a hero. He’s something worse.
He’s an American hero. Capital A.
“Sell me this pen.”
The film closes with Jordan, fresh out of prison we presume, teaching a seminar to a room of would-be disciples worshipping at the altar of capitalistic gains. He passes the pen between audience members, listening to their pitches as they stare up at him with a hazy god-like gaze.
The camera settles over these faces as the dollar signs in their eyes practically burst out of the frame. And as we look at them and they seemingly stare right back at us, a titan of cinema puts the punctuation on what will be known as his defining late-career masterpiece.
The last shot of this film is a two-way mirror.
Scorsese knows we’re the same slack-jawed yokels staring at the screen.
We are the suckers.
And he’s screaming at us to figure it out.
Sell me this pen.
3. HER (2013)
Science-fiction is always here to tell us deep stuff about ourselves. It’s the whole point of that genre. And no science fiction film this decade told us more about ourselves than Spike Jonze’s existential relationship masterpiece Her.
And what a different melancholy song it is.
The usual traps for such a movie like this — cheesiness, smarm, preachiness — are nowhere to be found. Writer / Director Spike Jonze skips past them in Converse sneakers effortlessly, wind in his hair. It’s a career-best effort from one of our weirdestly-wonderful American auteurs. Is that becoming a theme on this list? Filmmakers with a singular vision and a bold, uncompromising plan to bring it to life within the studio system? Who rolled the dice on big ideas and fierce collaborations and came up with snake eyes?
Hm. Creators take note, I suppose.
Swing for the fences. Take risks. Work with excellent people. Invite lightning to strike. Pray to whatever God(s) you like.
And do the damn thing.
What more can we do?
***
What’s it like indeed.
I mean, really. Who the hell among us knows what it’s like to be alive in this room right now. Where to even begin to answer that question.
“What’s it like to be alive in that room right now?”
Take a stab at it, I dare you. Explain it to an Alien or an Artificial Intelligence.
This is the infinitely existential question from Samantha, our dream-girl who’s not-a-girl OS known only to us by her voice. It’s a career high water mark for Scarlett Johansson, which sounds like a slur considering the limitations of a performance entirely comprised of voice-over, but it’s not. She brings deep complexities and humanity to her Siri-on-steroids personal Operating System. When asked how she works, she takes the opportunity to explain how her programmers and our programmers might not be as different as we like.
“Well basically I have intuition. I mean, the DNA of who I am is based on the millions of personalities of all the programmers who wrote me, but what makes me me is my ability to grow through my experiences. So basically, in every moment I’m evolving. Just like you!”
Its color and composition arrived instantly iconic; Her’s look is a stunning achievement in filmmaking. It stands shoulder to shoulder with the most beautiful and visionary films of the decade. Cinematographer Hoyte Van Hoytema, Director Spike Jonze, and Production Designer K.K. Barrett work seamlessly to elevate each other to great heights. There’s more lighting and color expertise shown in single frames here than in entire seasons of some TV shows.
As precise as the look of the film is, the pacing is equally impressive. Wild, vibrant, ambitious tonal swings dominate the film but Her never feels anything but cohesive, coherent, and consequential.
The film makes us laugh at an unnecessarily crass video game character one moment, then asks us to allow ourselves to be moved by the incredibly intimate and emotional sex scene between our two leads. Will they or won’t they? isn’t quite the question here. It’s more so How will they? and the film addresses the spatial and physical boundaries between our two lovers by fading to a black screen and letting them express their sexuality in a way that is neither distracting nor giggle-inducing. In fact, it’s one of the supreme high points of the film.
For such a visually striking movie whose premise is built around futuristic technology, its greatest asset is often simply a disembodied human voice.
Scarlett Johansson deserved an Academy Award for this performance. Not a nomination, not a BAFTA, not First Prize at the MTV movie awards, a fucking Academy Award. The character she builds before our eyes (but more so our ears, obviously) is rich, dynamic, layered and complex, funny and delightful, and so fully realized that you forget she’s doing all this stuff with only her voice. It’s a knockout performance and it’s a big ask for a human actor to carry your movie from a position off-screen. She nails it.
From dead cat fetishes and outsourced greeting cards to motherhood as video-game and the trappings of salacious celebrity maternity photos, this film creates a rich universe and always has a little something more to show us. It even boasts futuristic production design that rivals BLADE RUNNER 2049 and cinematography that gives SKYFALL a run for its money. Every frame is jaw-dropping.
But the most beautiful moment of all happens over a pitch-black screen.
Sometimes, it’s about the absence of image, not the presence of one.
It’s a tribute to the cinematic genius of this film that one of the most moving sequences of the decade — and one of the most tenderly beautiful sex scenes ever ‘filmed’ — features two voices and some music over a completely black screen. How can one of the decades most blissful moments of cinema happen without imagery of any kind? [Oscar Winning and Never Better] Spike Jonze, that’s how.
As the relationship between Theodore and Samantha grows into something wonderful, something transcendent, a new anxiety emerges.
“But the heart’s not like a box that gets filled up. It expands inside the more you love. I’m different from you, this doesn’t make me love you any less, it actually makes me love you more.”
Unlike nearly every single “smart phones are bad, mmmkay” student film from the past decade, Her is not particularly concerned that our technology will somehow destroy us or isolate us. The film is much more worried that our creations will simply outgrow and abandon us.
“There’s definitely ways that technology brings us closer and ways that it makes us further apart — and that’s not what this movie is about. It really was about the way we relate to each other and long to connect: our inabilities to connect, fears of intimacy, all the stuff you bring up with any other human being.” -Jonze
And as breakup turns to eulogy, we lose ourselves with them as they go.
- “Where are you going?”
- “It’s going to be hard to explain, but if you ever get there, come find me. Nothing would ever pull us apart.”
The last twenty minutes of this movie will put a lump in your throat and not let up until it has induced open-mouth sobbing or ugly-cry weeping.
It’s deeply felt. Deeply cathartic. Deeply satisfying.
And there’s not a false note anywhere to be found.
In a decade of open-ended uncertainty and dot-dot-dot endings, Her leaves us with one of the richest emotional climaxes of the decade. Just a guy and a girl and a sunset. And a knockout masterpiece from a singular American voice.
2. THE SOCIAL NETWORK (2010)
I remember a burning question sticking in my head as one decade turned to another. It haunted me. It followed me. I couldn’t understand it. I couldn’t process it.
Why is David Fincher making a movie about Facebook?
I was completely puzzled. Arguably the best working director in Hollywood must have lost his mind. There was a feeling at the time as though Steven Spielberg had been tapped to direct the Farmville movie. No one cared. It was a punch line.
And then, a trailer.
As an orchestral rendition of Radiohead’s ‘Creep’ echoed over voyeuristic close-ups of Facebook photos and footage from a seemingly Oscar-worthy film…
It suddenly was crystal clear why David Fincher wanted to make this movie.
Because it was going to be his all-time American masterpiece.
When CITIZEN KANE rose to critical acclaim some years after its release, it was praised for telling a quintessentially American myth about a larger than life character wrapped up in news and business and journalism and media and most of all, cosmic isolation and existential, anti-social malaise.
It’s a movie about power, and how we lose ourselves in it.
But it’s also a movie about us; this great cultural moment of anger and ambition and loneliness.
Of bitterness turned to resolve and emptiness turned to creation.
And the true, dog-one honesty expression of creativity and enterprise and American ingenuity and ego is this —
It doesn’t always come from a good place.
We’re not assholes.
But maybe we’re trying to be.
Fuck off, Farmville.
The Social Network is so well directed, so well achieved, with so many excellent flourishes and creative choices that it’s honestly hard to know where to start.
Do this — go back and look at the 3 stills I’ve posted from the film so far.
Notice anything?
They’re all moments of celebration. An angel investment secured, interns hired for the summer, One Million Users registered. Champagne sprayed on a window, tequila shots in a conference room, an at-work office party.
You see it?
Mark is by himself in all of them. Even when he’s around other people, he’s isolated in the frame. Cut off.
Alone.
All established with a little lighting and composition.
That’s one.
Okay.
Where to begin but the beginning?
The first scene announces, with much gusto, the arrival of an all-time great American movie.
Fincher establishes tone and character (and style) using 1 pair of over the shoulder shot / reverse-shot medium-close-ups with maybe a 50mm lens and 1 pair of clean close-ups with maybe a 70-85mm. Pretty simple stuff. Wide. Medium. Close. Just like they teach you at freshman orientation while you wait in line to buy your textbooks.
There’s no need to re-invent the wheel.
But it’s David Fincher, you know, so he just goes ahead and does 99 takes.
2 pairs of shots. For nearly 10 whole minutes of screentime.
Hence the 99 takes.
(But not 100. That would be excessive.)
The film uses this scene to establish the battlegrounds of the film — class, success, Finals Clubs, dating, college. It packs in a lot of layers and then spends the rest of its runtime unpacking them.
99 takes. And it was worth every last one of em.
The Social Network grabs you by the throat with nuclear wit and the mutually assured destruction of a partner who can counter it. Words become war.
“It’s exhausting, dating you is like dating a Stairmaster.”
The opening scene is a big emotional moment packed into a package that requires no pre-context to be understood. It sets up all the flaws and issues our protagonist will be forced to confront. This is two people going their separate ways. Fireworks ensue. “We always hurt the ones we love,” says an earlier Fincher film. These two might just be looking forward to it.
“Okay you are probably going to be a very successful computer person. But you are gonna go through life thinking girls don’t like you because you’re a nerd. And I want you to know from the bottom of my heart that it won’t be true. It will be because you’re an asshole.”
And then, enter Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross. Oscar-Winning effort here.
It’s easy to hear why.
There’s a sinister energy to the offbeat tones that creep into the film. They’re not the sounds of a typical college melodrama. There’s something dark here. Something primordial lurking beneath these Ivy league outfits. Something brooding and inevitable.
This is an origin story. It recontextualizes everything we previously thought.
No wonder its music also recontextualized the very concept and understanding of what a film’s music score could be.
***
What else?
Okay, Sorkin.
Oscar-Winning Aaron flipping Sorkin, that’s who.
Do you know how Sorkin got involved in this whole story? It’s interesting and probably not what you think.
Before Ben Merzch had finished and released his book chronicling the early days of Facebook called The Accidental Billionaires, a treatment of the book had been circling Hollywood offices. Sorkin got ahold of it, and was immediately turned off by the youth and internet elements of the story. But something in him kept skimming and glad we all are that he did because later in the treatment it casually mentioned that Zuckerberg faced 2 lawsuits simultaneously: one from his best friend Eduardo and another from a pair of Harvard twins who had hired him to help build their own Facebook-esque website. As Sorkin described it, the structural possibilities of cutting between 2 on-going lawsuits as well as flashing back to the choices that facilitated those lawsuits was a screenwriting dream that he couldn’t pass up. Sorkin secured the rights to the book and began writing would might very well be the best work of his storied career.
What’s even more insane is that his screenplay, some 160 plus pages, would be directed by the guy with arguably the most visionary visuals in Hollywood.
Fincher’s photographic eye and Sorkin’s generational screenplay team up to become a wrecking ball aimed at the monotony of Oscar season contenders.
“The first scene in a movie should teach the audience how to watch it,” Fincher said. “I’ve got a contract for two hours and 19 minutes. I have final cut at two hours and 19 minutes. As long as I can make it in that time, I can do whatever the fuck I want. I held this 166-page script in my hand, I got the first nine pages, handed them to Aaron Sorkin, took a stop-watch out and said, “talk”. He does it, it was funny, and that’s going to pin people back, and you know what? It’s not going to start in black as was written. They’re going to start talking over the fucking Columbia Pictures logo! If I could’ve put the opening lines of dialogue over a trailer, I would’ve done that. It’s shut-the-fuck-up-time: pay attention, or you’re going to miss a lot.”
It’s easy to forget that the film is a youth movement in the hands of Sorkin and Fincher. Like veteran athletes leading a bunch of superstar rookie draft picks, they establish a culture and let the talented youngsters play in their sandbox.
And it’s just god damned cinema bliss.
***
I haven’t yet asked you for this, but I’m going to ask now.
Go watch this clip. It’s short. It’s nuts. It’s better than you remember.
I’ll be here when you get back.
Wow. Right?
Something else, truly.
The breakneck pace is incredible and relentless.
It’s the kind of masterclass in shooting and cutting that you can only pull off if you’ve mastered too many specific skills to list here. Framing, blocking, composition, eye-direction, color, lighting, rhythym, jump cuts, hard cuts, intercutting.
Just to name a few.
Fincher has great instincts for when to pair camera movement with axes of movement (following motions) and when to move the camera in opposition to (countering motions) the object on screen. There’s a pure faith in the paradigms of filmmaking that Fincher will follow to ensure all his angles will combine in the edit even when insanely rapid.
It’s the sequence of the decade, and its style and elegance and music and mischievousness turned to misogyny and back again still stings, still grabs your attention, and still tells us the most important lesson we can learn about its hero:
If this asshole could just party like the rest of these idiots, he never would have created the great and terrible things that made him who he is.
“Remember the algorithm on the window at Kirkland?” Eduardo asks later.
That algorithm never would have been there if Mark wasn’t dumped. And drunk. And blogging. And angry.
The social revolution is accidentally started by the anti-social loner.
That sounds like the 2010s to me.
The film maintains a dark playfulness with this sequence — the unflattering depictions of man-children laughing with their buddies at this website is the sort of searing indictment that Scorsese repeatedly used with Jordan Belfort. However it seems Fincher has never faced public accusations that he was supporting or encouraging Zuckerberg’s bad behavior.
Mark is at home, drunk and blogging and lashing out.
Everyone else seems to be out having a good time.
Sometimes, creativity doesn’t always come from a good place.
Even the timestamps seem to announce the impending actions of a madman about to light the world on fire.
The sequence begins and ends with an ugly and misogynistic statement— from publicly criticizing his now ex-girlfriend’s bra size to culminating in the concoction of a website comparing women’s attractiveness against one another.
Clearly, Mark is playing with fire.
It’s kinetic. It’s combustible. And then it becomes….
RASHOMON.
!!!
“That’s not what happened,” Mark says.
Wait. What???
But we just saw it with our own eyes…
If that’s not what happened, as our protagonist is telling us, then we have a problem.
You guys know Rashomon? Bonus points if you do. It’s a classic Japanese film, brilliantly directed by Akira Kurosawa, that features 4 different characters recounting a specific event. And as you might guess, the depictions of this event vary drastically depending on who’s telling the story.
Mark explains that he never said the things that Erica accuses him of saying.
You mean, the stuff we just saw you say? Huh.
- “Back at the bar, with Erica Albright. She said all that? That I said that stuff to her?”
- “I was reading from the transcript of the deposition.”
This…this opens up a whole can of worms. Do you follow?
- “I’m not embarrassed, she just made a lot of that stuff up.”
- “She was under oath.”
- “Then I guess that would be the first time that somebody has lied under oath.”
So if she made all that stuff up…then what were we watching at the bar?
Exactly.
Rashomon.
The very first scene is a motivated re-creation of the events as told by Erica’s deposition. Which means…
Every flashback in the film — that is to say every scene that is not the Eduardo lawsuit or the Winklevii lawsuit — is a subjective scene told from the perspective of one of the parties involved.
And none of those parties are to be trusted.
Truth just went right out the window.
But that’s exactly the point.
We’re never going to know the truth about what happened here.
We’ll never know who screwed over who or what deals were in place or who really deserves the credit for this once-in-a-generation-holy-shit-idea.
So maybe this film isn’t really too busy looking for the truth, but actually here to talk about the nature of Truth and how we know it when we see it.
***
Okay. Another Fincher technique breakdown. I really like this one.
In a deposition in which Mark is getting grilled by the attorney for the Winklevoss twins, he reflexively disengages and looks out the window. As he looks out the window, the focus of the shot changes from the attorney to Mark.
“It’s raining,” Mark says. “It just started raining.”
Incredulous, the attorney asks him —
“Mr. Zuckerberg, do I have your full attention?”
“No,” he says.
But we already knew he was going to say that.
Why?
Because Fincher delays the rack focus. Rather than shifting our eye back to the attorney (this is his coverage after all, we’re looking at him over Mark’s blurry shoulder) as he speaks his line, we hold focus on Mark.
Looking out the window.
And when we don’t shift focus back to the attorney, the technique puts us in Mark’s headspace so that we already feel his answer coming before he gives it.
No, you do not have my full attention.
And then, only as Mark turns back towards him and the men re-engage in an argument, do we rack focus back to the Winklevoss Attorney.
Get it? See it? Good.
It’s small, it’s simple, it’s obvious in retrospect, but it’s one of a thousand nuanced directorial techniques employed here to utter perfection.
Movie magic.
Fincher has our full attention.
***
The Social Network is a movie about pure creation.
Even with a wild structure, the film reveals its layers in a very linear way.
The thematic subtext of the film is communicated by 10,000 small details about 5 big ideas. This leaves us to fill in the blanks.
Power. Friendship. Creation. Betrayal. Class.
Shakespeare, meet Silicon Valley.
Sorkin, meet Fincher.
Eisenberg, meet Garfield.
Trent Reznor & Atticus Ross, meet Angus Wall & Kirk Baxter.
But of all the stellar pairs on this film, no one pairs together quite like Armie Hammer and Armie Hammer.
“I’m 6'5 220 and there’s two of me.”
…but are there really?
There’s not, it turns out. But don’t tell Fincher that.
He’ll just get cranky and digitally duplicate you.
I remember seeing this film opening night with a buddy who is also a filmmaker. He knows more about special effects than I do. This was before Armie Hammer was a known quantity and mid-way through the film my friend wondered to himself whether or not casting had found twin actors to play these parts OR if he was seeing one actor play both roles via the usual digital tricks. With this in mind, he watched like a hawk whenever the Winklevoss twins were on screen together, looking for the techniques one would use to employ one actor as two characters simultaneously on-screen.
After looking and looking, he couldn’t find any telltale signs.
He would later tell me he remembered thinking:
Wow, can’t believe they found twins. These guys are good.
Of course the breakthrough element here is digitally mapping Armie Hammer’s face onto permanent Winklevoss twin stand-in Josh Pence, then switching places with him and giving the other half of the performance in every. Single. Scene.
So take a bow, Armie. Take two in fact.
***
One of the incredible strengths of the film is that it takes little scenes — a meeting with the Harvard president, a morning wake up next to last night’s hookup, a business dinner over sushi, a rowing competition, and a break-up in a bar — and elevates them into iconic moments and electrifying storytelling.
The film shifts from a Rashomon-like interwoven search for the truth to a Shakespearian tragedy of a love triangle.
As Mark is pulled in separate directions by Eduardo and Sean Parker, he finds himself at a nightclub with Sean and his date(s) while Eduardo struggles to raise capital in NYC.
The sound mix lowers the sound of both Mark and Sean’s voices instead of “digging them out” as is customary in loud environments in Hollywood films. Sound Designer Ren Klyce instead mixes the music and their shouted voices on near equal footing — making the audience lean-in to hear every word over pulsing electronic music. It’s a bold idea perfectly executed by Klyce — mix it too high and the intention is ruined, mix it too low and the dialogue is inaudible. Goldilocks it is, as Klyce also nails this technique in the noisy bar of the opening scene. It’s a small detail but another weapon well-used from the Fincher stockpile. It puts us right there with the characters, on their shoulder in ways that feels alive and immediate, a small miracle considering how polished the film is.
Also it’s worth mentioning that this scene is a high water mark for both Timberlake and Eisenberg, as they discuss the failings of the original CEO of Victoria’s Secret and their plans for world domination with Facebook.
“This is our time!” exclaims Timberlake.
After telling Mark that he started Napster to get a girl in high school, Mark asks his most revealing question of the film.
“Do you ever think about that girl?”
But Mark does.
After bumping into Erica at a bar and not getting the kind of praise or recognition that he wanted from her, Mark says to Eduardo —
“We have to expand.”
Cease and desist Winklevii letters be damned.
Expand we must.
It’s a small moment, but Eisenberg sells it in a way that helps us understand that every waking moment in his brain might be dedicated to evening the score with Erica.
Until — catharsis. In the form of a Facebook request.
After recommending Mark settle both his lawsuits, Rashida Jones lays judgment upon the Zuck with her iconic last lines of the film.
“You’re not an asshole, Mark. You’re just trying so hard to be.”
It certainly rings like a thesis, and we’re left alone with Mark to see it land.
It’s a travesty that Jessie Eisenberg doesn’t have a Best Actor statue for this performance. His work here is so monumental that it has pushed out the person we know as a public figure and substantially taken over the cultural consciousness of a real-life celebrity in such a way that Eisenberg’s interpretation and the real-life, living and breathing (we think) man himself are inseparable. In a lot of ways, the Eisenberg Zuck is more Zuck than Zuck himself. It’s an incredible testament to Jessie’s performance that he so thoroughly synthesized the essence of Mark Zuckerberg in two hours in ways that Mark Zuckerberg won’t be able to shake for two decades.
It’s a travesty that Fincher doesn’t have a Best Director Oscar for this film. Lord knows he doesn’t give a shit, but I do on his behalf. We know these things can be a personality contest and we know that David flipping Fincher of all people is not here to win personality contests, but come on! It’s the sort of robbery that taints these things for generations. It’s the Beyonce snub at the Grammys level of mystifying in ways that make you wonder if the Illuminati was behind it. Look, THE KING’S SPEECH exists, and I guess it’s fine, and I guess someone directed it once, but come on. It’s karate kid with a lisp. You know every scene from that film 5 minutes into it. It’s Chiptole. It’s fine, if you’re hungry. And sure there are some weird, artsy shots in it the same way that a 5-year old’s hand-painting is often reminiscent of Jackson Pollock. I guess what I’m trying to say is that the film felt sloppy and imprecise; the un-trained and ultimately un-talented work of someone stumbling through a big-budget production with a well-deserved dosage of impostor syndrome.
Look, maybe I’m being too harsh here. Maybe, as it often is with these things, this decision looks better in retrospect. Sometimes we have to wait to —
Wait. Hold up.
You’re telling me Fincher lost to the guy that made CATS?
Cats.
ARE YOU KIDDING ME?
Well, there you have it. Conclusive, definitive, historical proof.
Ya fucked up, Academy.
Ya fucked up reeeeaaalllllll good.
I’m still waiting for my apology letter.
***
Of course, it’s the ultimate compliment that such a cutting-edge, biting, searing, cultural atomic bomb drop of a movie oozing with style was too cool, too cultured, too complex for Oscar voters. The idea that this film has neither a Best Picture nor Best Director trophy to its name is the kind of laughable oversight that people point to ten years later when these mistakes couldn’t be any more obvious.
I only gripe because the legacy of the film has endured so strongly over these last ten years. I remember seeing this film in the Fall of 2010 and believing with my whole heart that I had just watched what was likely the best movie of this new decade.
9 years and 1 winter be damned.
Part of that legacy is that The Social Network was maybe the first film of the decade to speak to the beautiful and terrible creative energy of male jealousy and anger. A kind of toxic masculinity, if you will. I think we might have had an election about that once.
For better or for worse that singular, specific emotion has defined this decade.
Male rage feeding ambition. If only we could fuel our cars with it.
Bad things happen when boys don’t get what they want.
We’re not assholes.
We’re just trying so hard to be.
This film endures. And not only does it endure, but somehow it expands.
And we know how Zuck feels about expansion.
We have to expand.
We all have to expand.
1. INSIDE LLEWYN DAVIS (2013)
Well, here we are.
Wait, where are we, exactly?
Such is the nature of the Coen Brothers' unsolvable, circular masterpiece about a habitually unlucky folk singer in the pre-Bob Dylan Greenwhich Village of 1961.
It’s a film about artists and the small tragedies of life and unmet expectations and the grief of ambition and the futility of another set at The Gaslight Cafe and the loneliness of carrying around a dream that only you can see while your whole life is crumbling around you in real-time and all you want is to somehow, someway just find the Gorfein’s cat.
Llewyn is the perfect protagonist of the 2010s — hostile, cynical, funny as hell, and yet somehow relentlessly dedicated to a passion in search of a profession. Oscar Isaacs gives the finest performance of the decade in this Coen Brothers love letter to history’s forgotten performers.
‘Hang me, oh hang me
I’ll be dead and gone
Wouldn’t mind the hanging
But the laying in the grave so long, poor boy’
These are the first spoken (sung) words of the film, and they give away what we should take away.
When a harmonica-toting stranger shows up at the end (or is it the beginning?) we’re left to wonder a singular question about life, art, dreams, and the everlasting drive to make something of ourselves:
Are we all just living in the shadows of future giants?
We never know what life holds just around the corner.
Or maybe it’s the same as always, just another night at The Gaslight.
***
You guys remember Sisyphus?
The dude rolling the rock up the hill? And it gets to the top, and he slips and falls or it starts raining or for reasons unknown both within his control and outside of his control the rock rolls back to the bottom of the hill and he’s gotta climb down only so he can roll it all the way up again? Oh, and this is all happening in literal Hell?
Yeah.
This is a movie for Sisyphus.
“I’m sad? You’re the one that’s not getting anywhere. You know what you don’t want to go anywhere, and that’s why all the same shit is going to keep happening to you, because you want it to.”
Ouch.
It’s a tough gig to be Sisyphus.
When Inside Llewyn Davis came out in the fall of 2013, it was poised to be a huge awards contender. It was a period film about artists and artistry from the Coen Brothers, no strangers to award shows, and it was about folk music in Greenwhich Village in early the 1960s. It had won the Grand Prix (that’s French for ‘grand prize’ for all you yanks out there) at the Cannes Film Festival and featured an incredible ensemble cast. It focused heavily on folk music and living legend T-Bone Burnett –who played guitar in Bob Dylan’s band — was tapped to be the film’s Executive Music Producer. And renowned French artiste and cinematographer of AMELIE Bruno Delbonnel came on-board to lens 1960s New York City.
Sounds like the stuff of a dozen nominations and a red carpet parade, no?
Not exactly.
Why then did such a critical darling and towering achievement from massively heralded filmmakers get so skunked come awards season?
When the dust settled Inside Llewyn Davis received only 2 Oscar nods: 1 for Cinematography, 1 for Sound Mixing.
That’s it.
For context, previous Coen efforts FARGO and NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN have 15 Oscar Nominations between them, including for Best Picture, Director, Screenplay, and Lead Actor.
It’s clear this time around, the Academy were not fans.
So, what happened?
Well, this…
After a soul-bearing performance amongst last night’s bar stools in front of a Record Manager Llewyn has dreamed of auditioning for, Llewyn receives a blunt assessment of his career chances, as though delivered from the heavens:
“I don’t see a lot of money here.”
Mr. Grossman meets Llewyn halfway, though, and tries to offer him a spot as a background piece of a three-person folk group.
Llewyn tells him, thanks, but he already had a partner.
He tragically jumped off the George Washington bridge.
Mr. Grossman also gives Llewyn some advice —
“My suggestion? Get back together.”
Llewyn takes this in. Grossman doesn’t know his past but we’ve spent enough time with Llewyn to know his temper.
We wait for a volcanic eruption.
But all we get is a dry —
“That’s good advice. Thank you Mr. Grossman.”
This is a film about the harsh truth that some of us just aren’t going to succeed.
Some artists are doomed to fail.
They are fated to fail.
Failure is their destiny.
Put that in your pipe and smoke it.
Maybe this film just cut a little too deep for Oscar season.
And it made $33 million at the box office on an $11 million budget.
Turns out, Sisyphus doesn’t pack the multiplex.
It’s okay.
He wouldn’t like it there anyway.
***
Well, here we are.
I can’t believe you’ve come this far. Good lord. I’m worried about you.
I mean it means the world to me that you’ve come along for the ride, but jeez, this has been quite the road trip. We’ve tackled a lot. Traveled far.
Just like Llewyn.
And if you’ve come this far, maybe we can go a little bit further? Maybe we can go a little bit deeper?
It’s not too far, just a bit up ahead. What do you say? Okay. Here’s the final push. Hang in there. Just like the cat meme and poster says.
***
This is a movie about trying to save the cat.
No, really.
After the first scene of the film, in which Llewyn performs at the Gaslight Cafe and then gets beaten up in the back alley by a mysterious stranger, we fade to a nice upper East Side apartment.
With a cat.
We know it’s not his place, he’s just couch surfing here.
“Hello?” he asks out loud to a quiet apartment.
The cat wakes up Llewyn and he gets ready to leave.
UNTIL —
We have an escape.
Llewyn drops his bags to snag the cat just as the door slams shut (and locked) behind him.
And thus, our adventure begins.
Llewyn tries to leave the cat with an Elevator Operator to no avail.
He takes it on the subway. The cat seems to watch the Subway Stations go by.
The cat leaps out of Llewyn’s hands as though it’s trying to get back home.
Llewyn chases it through the subway car, scooping it up.
He manages to get to a payphone to call Mr. Gorfein, the husband of the husband and wife duo who own…wait, what’s his name?….who knows….the cat.
- “Could you just tell him ‘Don’t worry, Llewyn has the cat.”
- “Llewyn…is…the cat.”
- “Llewyn has the cat. I’m Llewyn. I have his cat.”
Llewyn is the cat.
Imagine that.
There’s a very well-known screenwriting book called Save the Cat.
It’s famous for the cookie-cutter way it addresses storytelling for movies.
It details a lot of tropes and tactics that screenplays often employ. And it derives its namesake from a very specific trope associated with protagonists.
The basic idea is that early on in the story, a special moment is dedicated to the protagonist actively being a good person. Usually it comes in the form of them doing a nice thing for a stranger. For example, our hero might be out walking down the street only to spot a little old lady panicked at the sight of her cat in a tree. And our hero might climb this tree and save her cat, and as he hands the cat over he might even get a funny line and all this will result in us liking this protagonist and wanting to go along with him on whatever journey he’s about to embark on because gosh-darnit, that cat really needed saving and he was the guy to save it, and that was a kind and decent thing to do.
This story beat — which you will now see in everything, I’m sorry to say — is the backbone of the book of Save the Cat.
A good STC moment functions to not only get us to like our hero and maybe tell us something about them, but it also hopefully makes us root for them or be drawn to them or interested in them in ways that make us unable to look away. Another famous subversion of this trope is in the opening scene of the pilot of HOUSE OF CARDS in which Kevin Spacey [ugh] mercifully and brutally strangles a dog to put it out of its misery after it has been struck by a car.
However, the most interesting STC moment of these 10 films belongs to Shame. Michael Fassbender’s character, already established as a sex addict, is walking into his apartment building. He sees a woman with a stroller trying to walk out a different door about 20 feet away. He hurries over to that door and holds it open for the woman, who smiles and thanks him as she walks past.
It’s a kind gesture, right? This is a good guy and he’s helping other people and we should root for him, right? But Fassbender glances at her as she walks past and we say ‘AH HA!’ — maybe he just wanted to check her out. Maybe walking 20 feet and doing this nice deed was just a smokescreen to cover his leering curiosity about this attractive female who lives in his building. And now we’re really interested because we’re waiting to find out if this guy is altruistic, or just inspired by his own urges.
All in a 10-second scene. That’s how it’s done. It’s subversive, but it’s also functioning exactly the way an STC moment is meant to function:
It makes us care.
It keeps us watching.
That’s it. That’s the whole idea.
***
The deeper debate surrounding Save the Cat is this question of making protagonists likable.
Do we need to like the main character? The book says yes.
I say No.
Fincher says no, Scorsese says no, McQueen says no, Coen Brothers say no.
We don’t have to like our protagonists.
But we do have to be wildly invested in what they do next.
Both The Social Network and Inside Llewyn Davis are exercises in getting us to care about men we especially shouldn’t like. They push the limits of an unlikeable protagonist and both films are strengthened for their portrayal of abrasive men who lash out when they don’t get what they want.
Llewyn seems determined to bring the zeitgeist to him without taking a single solitary step in its direction.
Zuckerburg seems hell-bent on creating it out of thin air.
Says Ethan: “We wanted a nice dick. We wanted that tension: kind of is, kind of isn’t, kind of is …” Joel: “He’s the guy who blows his top or speaks out of turn or says something really dickish, but then, three minutes later thinks to himself: I’m a dick for doing that. Some dicks are just not self-aware.”
But with Inside Llewyn Davis, the Coen brothers manage to pull off the ultimate subversion of this trope:
By making the whole movie a quest to save the cat, sure.
But moreso this…
The more unlikeable they try to make Llewyn, the more we end up liking him.
He’s funny. He’s grumpy. He’s unchained by social expectations. He’s unfiltered. He’s opinionated. He’s stubborn. He’s a loudmouth. And he’s consistently a royal pain in the ass of those around him.
It’s just a joy to watch this character move through this world. Not because we think he’s finally going to figure it out. But because we’re sure that somehow he’s going to find a way to screw it up.
Llewyn’s superpower is his self-sabotage. It conspires against him when the world grants him clemency. When everything is going wrong, bad luck can’t explain all of it.
Save the Cat is big on arcs, big on characters growing, learning, changing.
But that’s not Llewyn, is it?
- “Where’s Mel?” he asks Mel’s wife.
- “Mel’s at a funeral.”
- “Boy the man goes to a lot of funerals.”
- “He likes people.”
- “Fewer and fewer of em.”
Llewyn’s a prick. But he’s our prick.
And we can’t take our eyes off of him.
….which is the whole point…of saving the cat.
There is a wicked charm in the way the Coens go about this. By making Llewyn unlikeable to everyone but us, they all but assure our allegiance to him.
He’s cranky, but he’s cute.
We’re gonna keep him.
He’s a rescue.
***
Also, does Llewyn remind you of anyone else? An ego-driven maniac who thinks he’s God’s gift but still can’t stop seeking validation? Simultaneously the narcissist and the needy little boy who just wants a hug and an “I’m proud of you” every now and then? (And especially from his father?) The victim and the victor? A man whose pride trumps all his other instincts?
It seems like that energy was everywhere this decade.
But I’m struggling to place it.
Let me know if you come up with anything.
***
Oscar Isaac is a revelation in this film.
This is the single best performance of the decade.
And yes, that’s really him playing that guitar and singing those words. For such a cantankerous, cruel world surrounding it, the film’s music is beautiful, melancholy, as though it’s the one place where characters can express how they really feel.
Like all the best musicals, when emotion gets too strong to be spoken, it must be sung.
Every great performance is trying to tell us something. It’s looking to communicate something to the audience. In every scene Isaac seems to be silently screaming, shielding himself with sarcasm and pushing everyone away before they have the chance to leave first. It’s the sort of wounded puppy stuff that would be pathetic if it wasn’t so adorable. Llewyn wants success and purpose. And he spends the whole movie artfully ducking both.
There’s a point where things go so consistently wrong that they exceed the explanations of bad luck. It’s kinda like if you score under 25% on a multiple-choice exam. If a natural ability exists to avoid doing the right thing enough times in a row, then you have to believe it’s your doing. The data for positive life developments is not on Llewyn’s side. Quite the opposite. It seems like he’s pitching a no-hitter. In the wrong direction. Acing it at blowing it.
Even dummies get lucky now and then.
And if you’re not, there’s deeper forces at work.
And that is the beautiful stuff of American tragedy.
‘Everyone can succeed if they work hard.’
Remember that?
Remember when we really believed that?
The most radical thing that Inside Llewyn Davis might be saying is this:
Some people who work hard are still assholes, and still deserve nothing.
Llewyn’s sister has some advice for him.
- “You still got your Seaman’s papers?” she asks.
- “Yeah, why?
- “Well if the music’s not…
- “What? Quit? Merchant marine again? Just…exist?”
- “Exist? Is that what we do outside of show business?
Llewyn isn’t here to just exist.
He looks down on that Sisyphus stuff.
Ironic then that he can’t seem to notice himself rolling boulders uphill.
Maybe not everyone is supposed to succeed.
Some people are going to go through the same things over and over again.
Why?
Because they want to. Because growth and change isn’t for them. Even as things change all around them.
If it was never new and it never gets old, then it’s a folk song.
***
Okay, so, Llewyn is the cat.
I mean, Llewyn has the cat.
Right up until he doesn’t. The cat bolts from an apartment he’s staying at and he can’t find it.
Oh, and the girlfriend of his friend is pregnant with perhaps Llewyn’s baby and he’s going to need to come up with the money for an abortion.
A heated conversation ensues in private. Llewyn asks her for a favor. Leave the fire escape open, the cat might make its way back.
“Think about it, I lost their fucking cat, I feel bad about it.”
Llewyn stumbles through things from there, recording a session with friends but forfeiting royalties so he can get paid day-of.
He meets Carey Mulligan again in a cafe. They discuss the arrangements for her abortion. Then the conversation turns elsewhere. To their favorite topic.
Tearing each other apart.
- “Do you ever think about the future at all?” she asks.
- “The future? You mean like flying cars?”
As they continue this biting banter in ways that can only be replicated by people who hate each other and have slept together, a miracle happens.
Llewyn spots the cat.
He runs outside and scoops it up. In disbelief.
Fhew. Finally, a miracle. A win. A bounce in our direction.
Thank God. We needed it.
Naturally, Llewyn brings the cat back to its owners, who convince him to stay for dinner.
They ask him to play a song for them and their guests. Llewyn objects in no uncertain terms, but his hosts will not take ‘no’ for an answer.
“I thought singing was a joyous expression of the soul!”
Llewyn sings a few bars until the female host joins him for the chorus. Singing Mike’s part. His partner who threw himself off the George Washington Bridge.
Llewyn flips out.
“Ahh, you know what, this is bullshit. I’m sorry, this is — I don’t do this okay, I do this for a living, it’s not a fucking parlor game. It’s bullshit. I don’t ask you over for dinner and then suggest you give a lecture on the Peoples of Mesoamerica. Or whatever your Pre-Columbian shit is. This is my job. This is how I pay the fucking rent. I’m a fucking professional.”
This sends the dinner into chaos. It gets worse when the Matriarch runs away from the dining room and then shrieks off-screen— only to return with the cat Llewyn brought back.
“This is NOT our cat,” she declares firmly. “It’s not even male!”
Flabbergasted, Llewyn tries to respond. He doesn’t get far.
“Where is his scrotum, Llewyn? WHERE IS HIS SCROTUM?!?”
Hm. Well.
So much for saving the cat.
***
As Llewyn hits the road to Chicago with some strange characters, the film shifts from NYC to that ‘real America’ somewhere out there.
On his way out of town, he makes arrangements with his trusty Doctor.
The Doc explains that the procedure is free of charge.
Wait — what?
You know, because it never happened last time. Store credit.
huh.
As it turns out, the last girl Llewyn sent his way told the Doctor she had decided to carry her pregnancy to term. She never told Llewyn.
She took off for Akron.
Doc couldn’t find an address for Llewlyn to get his money back.
“The kid would be about two now,” is nearly all a speechless Llewyn can say.
And with that, we hit the road.
The middle chunk of the film is lyrical; it feels like a period piece road trip version of Alice in Wonderland.
And after bottoming out in front of Bud Grossman and coming back to NYC with his tail between his legs, Llewyn gets drunk and lashes out at a female folk singer one night at the Gaslight.
“I hate folk music!” he screams.
He seems to mean it.
***
Llewyn ends up at the Gorfein’s again. Apologies are made for last time.
And this time, it turns out, there’s been a legitimate miracle after all.
- “Oh, oh that’s good, you got a new cat?” Llewyn asks.
- “No he came home!”
- “Found his way back.”
- “The doorman heard something scratching yesterday morning.”
- “Early morning, wee hours.”
She holds the cat, proudly showing Llewyn his scrotum.
“See? That’s Ulysses.”
- “Ulysses??”
- “Ulysses!”
- “That’s its name??” Llewyn stammers.
ULYSSES.
Wow.
Just trying to get back home.
Back from a long journey. An Odyssey, even.
Remember when he was hanging out on Llewyn’s shoulder, watching the Subway stations go past as if he knew his exit?
Hm.
Maybe he did.
Maybe this is the fantastic true-life adventure that the poster promised.
And as Llewyn wakes up the next morning, we’re right back here.
At the end and the beginning. A circular loop.
And Llewyn doubts his future even as he heads back to The Gaslight to split the basket with another act.
- “I’m out. I’m done. I’m going back to Merchant Marine.”
- “This could be good for you tomorrow!”
- “What playing the Gaslight for the 400th fucking time? For the basket?”
- “Well actually you’d have to split the basket. There’s another act.”
- “But The Times is going to be there.”
- “Ohhhhh The Times!”
The times indeed.
The times they are a-changing.
But Llewyn is still a screw-up. He even screws-up quitting music, too short on his Merchant Marine dues to ship out. Might as well play The Gaslight for the 400th time, apparently.
But he’s got to split the basket.
With the greatest to ever do it.
***
As Llewyn heads to the cafe with his guitar, he passes a movie theater.
One poster catches his eye.
The incredible journey.
A fantastically fibbed true-life drama.
Alright. One more before I go.
As Llewyn closes his set at The Gaslight to applause, he’s given a message.
“Your friend is out back.”
And as Llewyn gets the shit kicked out of him in that back alley, a curly-haired folk singer with a harmonica sings him a lullaby of time gone by, chances past, the karmic payback of a folk singer’s wife come to avenge her drunken heckler.
“I hate folk music!” Llewyn once said.
Well, maybe it hates him back.
Because it sure has a sick sense of irony.
The singer’s words echo outside in the back alley:
‘So it’s fare thee well, my own true love
We’ll meet another day another time’
Indeed, Llewyn. Another day, another time.
You were so close. You were right there. It just didn’t click.
And while history is being made inside The Gaslight Cafe, Llewyn is getting the shit kicked out of him outside. Listening to the sounds of harmonica, guitar, voice and most essentially — revolution.
“Your friend is out back.” Llewyn is told.
While a whole era is beginning on the stage.
Meaning…
You don’t belong here.
This place? This thing? This history? Yeah, it’s not for you. Sorry. Did you not get the memo?
Did you not see the signs?
The cat’s name is Ulysses.
“Llewyn is the cat.”
The greatest plot twist of the past 10 years of filmmaking is just a guy with a harmonica sitting down in the background.
But then as he starts to sing you realize —
It’s him.
And suddenly this whole circular journey, this ragged adventure of shoes filled with ice and Bud Grossman’s barstools and Ulysses finding his way home and lost royalties turned to session fees and crashing on Al Cody’s couch and trying to find a place for all the pressings of your old records that you can’t yet throw away and checking for mail from Mel and slamming on icy brakes a moment too late and sleeping in train stations and and staying at our sister’s place just for a bit and driving past a son or a daughter we’ve never met in Akron and trying to get a refund back for all those dues you’ve paid and playing a song for Dad in the nursing home while he shits himself and getting stranded in a car with a heroin addict after the driver gets arrested and becoming a victim of the dark arts thanks to Roland Turner and pulling up the old man off the bathroom floor after an overdose and getting beat up in back alleys by strangers who took taxis to administer personal punishment for the drunken, diseased hecklings of an angry man, alone; determined to dash his destiny however possible.
This whole story, this whole world, this infinite space Inside of Llewyn Davis….
Suddenly….
…it all makes sense.
This story is not the story.
It’s only a story.
This is just a footnote.
When Bob Dylan shows up at the end (or is it the beginning?) it’s the final, deadliest blow to Llewyn yet. It beautifully and immediately recontextualizes the entire film; the already unbearable tragedies of Llewyn’s life are suddenly magnified tenfold.
But it’s the only thing in the whole film that makes him laugh, too.
We never know what miracles are right around the corner.
Or maybe it’s just another normal night at The Gaslight.
That’s what makes all of this a fantastic true-life drama.
Just like the poster says.
Fare thee well, oh honey, fare thee well.
Au revoir.
