I know it's been difficult for so very many of
you to wait so long for this next installment in my top films of the 2010s series, but I had to take a brief break out of respect for
Bette Davis week. Ms. Davis wouldn't take kindly to anyone stealing
the spotlight from her, and I respect that.
In the previous part, I shared my
appreciation for a dying French king and for an Iranian filmmaker
just hanging out with his pet iguana. This time I want to write
about:
Director/producer/writer/cinematographer/sound
designer/editor RaMell Ross chronicles the lives of two young
African-American men and their families in rural Alabama over the
course of several years. That description doesn't even begin to do
justice to Ross's remarkable feature-length debut.
Combining impressionistic imagery with
on-screen text and a dense, evocative soundtrack, Ross crafts a
unique audiovisual language that allows viewers to adapt to its
rhythms. Ross juxtaposes the personal with the celestial, sometimes
playfully like when he cuts from a Chick-Fil-A waffle fry to the
ghostly image of a partially eclipsed sun. The result is a movie that
feels both entirely grounded in quotidian life and transcendent, a
philosophical work that I would think any viewer could connect to on
a personal and visceral level.
In a stream-lined 78 minutes, “Hale
County” expresses both unbridled joy and inconceivable tragedy.
Ross has made a cinematic poem of radical empathy, and the most
beautiful documentary I've seen in years. I rewatched it recently to
see is any of the magic of the first-time viewing had worn off, but
the film has only grown in power for me. No single movie can claim to
be the definitive American film of its time, but I'm unable to think
of a more perceptive and moving portrait of American life in the 21st
century than “Hale County.” There's plenty of reason to be
skeptical when the word “visionary” is deployed by critics to
describe a movie, but believe it this time.
Screw it. I'm putting it on my list. I
wasn't going to. But I am.
I really need to see “The Lighthouse”
again. I might be significantly overrating it just because I love its
gauzy black-and-white look so much. Or because the movie is so
endlessly quotable - “'Tis begrimed and bedabbled!” Or even just
because of that all-time great Willem Dafoe rant (“Hark!”)
that I've now watched on YouTube over 100 times. (Ed. Note: 102 times
now. I watched it twice more while writing this.)
I'm not certain the movie really goes
anywhere in the end either, but it just doesn't matter to me. In
Robert Eggers' follow-up to his remarkable debut feature, “The
Witch” (2016),
the director creates such a tactile hermetic space – a
claustrophobic fever-dream reeking of sea-brine and “goddamn fahts”
all swirling around in a giant pox-ridden phallus - that there really is
no better place to go. Some critics found that unsatisfying and
hollow, viewing “The Lighthouse” a curated collection of stylish
signifiers that signify nothing in particular.
Maybe they're right. I really do need
to watch it again. All I know is that I can only think of a tiny
handful of recent movies that
generated more pure audiovisual pleasure (oh man, this sound design!) for me in the immediate
moment of viewing. I'm in awe of how gracefully the film shifts tone
wildly not just from sequence to sequence, but even within scenes.
The “Hark!” rant ranges from slapstick comedy to Lovecraftian
horror to “Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” domestic
psychological warfare all in the course of a few minutes. And God
what a punchline (“All right, have it your way...”)
I love every single choice Willem
Dafoe makes in this movie; every time he clenches his pipe upside
down in his rotted teeth, every time he delivers his trademark toast
(“Should pale death with treble dread...”), and every bilge-stained
bristle of his bushy beard. Pattinson is sensational too. In almost
any other film, he'd be the only performer anyone would be talking
about, but Dafoe is so damned elemental that his sheer force of will
cannot be denied. He's still in that lighthouse right now, just fahtin' up a storm. Pair this
with his work in “At Eternity's Gate” (2018) and I'm not sure
there's an actor working at a higher level and choosing more
interesting roles than Dafoe right now.
I already feel bad enough for only
briefly mentioning Pattinson's brilliance, so I'm going to finish
with a shout-out to cinematographer Jarin Blaschke. This
black-and-white photography – washed out in patches, grubby but
starkly beautiful – looks like nothing else I've seen in a theater
in years. I don't care too much about awards, but we can go on
ignoring them all if Blaschke gets shut out.
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