PERMANENT VACATION: JIM JARMUSCH'S 1980 DEBUT

Introduction
At the end of the year, Jim Jarmusch's "Paterson" is scheduled to be released in the United States. The film stars Adam Driver as a bus driver cum poet named Paterson who lives in Paterson, New Jersey, and the Iranian actress Golshifteh Farahani as his wife. (I was introduced to Farahani in one of my favorite films of all time, "Chicken with Plums." See 20012: Foreign Films) In anticipation of Jarmusch's 13th film, I undertook a retrospective, which began with "Permanent Vacation." Though it won the Josef von Sternberg Award at the Mannheim-Heidelberg International Filmfestival in 1980 and was shown at the Anthology Film Archives in New York in 1990, the film has rarely been screened. It was available, however, on videocassette before becoming a bonus feature in 2007 on the Criterion Collection's DVD release of "Stranger Than Paradise."

When "Permanent Vacation" was shown in 2014 as part of the British Film Institute's (BFI) Jim Jarmusch season,  Michael Wojtas observed in The Quietus, "That it's most readily available as an extra attached to Criterion's edition of 'Stranger Than Paradise' tells you plenty about 'Permanent Vacation'’s reputation. Hardly any real scholarship has been devoted to the film, which Jarmusch made before leaving NYU's film program sans degree. In an insightful and glowing review of ...'Paradise' that supplements the aforementioned DVD release, noted film critic J. Hoberman dismisses 'Permanent Vacation' as 'a plotless portrait of a teenage drifter.' Meanwhile, Jonathan Rosenbaum, one of the most reliably perceptive of all film journalists (and a champion of Jarmusch's), referred to the effort as 'apprentice work,' lacking in 'characteristic charm, stylistic focus, and feeling for interactions between people.' Reverse Shot's Nick Pinkerton provided what is probably the most evenhanded, thoughtful take on the film, though he also chides it for being 'draggy.' But it's just that anti-plot quality which deserves investigation. Because it's here that we can see the beginnings of that most ineffable yet vital aspect of Jarmusch's cinema: A slowness that suggests a constantly wandering consciousness, one untouched by anything but the basic need to just keep moving in search of something unnameable" ("Blank Generation: Jim Jarmusch's 'Permanent Vacation.' " September 12, 2014).

PERMANENT VACATION

“Permanent Vacation” opens with a soundtrack that evokes a 19th century thoroughfare pulsing with the sounds of a multitude of horses clomping along cobblestones, yet the scene that emerges in slo-mo is of a bustling contemporary streetscape. When it segues into stark deserted wind-blown backstreets, the music becomes surreal; then the scene segues again into a montage of empty rooms. A voiceover states, “My name is Aloysious Christopher Parker (Chris Parker) and if I ever have a son he will be Charles Christopher Parker, just like Charlie Parker.... This is my story… a connect the dots…. All of these stories are like rooms….”

We land in a suitably bohemian room with its bare accoutrements – mattress and phonograph on the floor, mirror leant against a wall, girl settled in a chair at one of two windows, cigarette in one hand and feet upon the radiator. He has been gone days. “I can’t seem to sleep at night, not in this city.” “Doesn’t seem like you sleep at all.” “I have my dreams when I’m awake.” He is Aloysious aka Allie, an adolescent, would-be flâneur who drifts through the streets of downtown Manhattan.

Chris Parker as Allie and Leila Gastil as Leila
in Jim Jarmusch's "Permanent Vacation"

“Permanent Vacation” evokes an atmosphere of enigma that recalls the collaboration between New Novel writer Alain Robbe-Grillet and New Wave director Alain Resnais in “Last Year at Marienbad,” along with a decided dose of Surrealist ennui. Indeed, the book that has recently engaged the couple is Lautréamont’s “The Songs of Maldoror.” “I’m tired of being alone,” she says. “Everyone’s alone,” he says, “…but it’s easier to feel that you’re not alone if you’re drifting” – and drifting is what Allie does. Some people have ambitions, Allie drifts.

The film progresses episodically, languorously, in a time out of time. Allie returns to the site of the building where he was born, explaining to a shell-shocked veteran that the rubble is the result of a Chinese bombing. Bombs punctuate the soundtrack. Are they contemporaneous or the man’s aural hallucinations? Allie visits his schizophrenic mother in the asylum where she resides. Back in the littered streets, he encounters a woman on a fire escape raving in Spanish. He goes into a movie theater playing Nicholas Ray’s “The Savage Innocents” only to buy popcorn and on his way out encounters a black raconteur spinning yarns of a Charlie Parker-esque jazzman, a nonconformist who was told he should go to Paris because his “sound was too advanced,” who, on the brink of suicide, is saved by a ray of light coming through the clouds as the soundtrack fills with a jazz rendition of “Over the Rainbow” – apropos for the Kansas-born Parker.

In the film’s denouement, Allie encounters the embodiment of this chimera, dressed in a white suit and toting a sax upon which he plays dissonant, discordant notes, though somewhere in the phrasing is a semblance of “Over the Rainbow.” Allie awakes on a quay; Big Ben tolls. In its tolling we recognize its steady gong, gong, gong has been a leitmotif throughout the film’s soundtrack, intensifying as the film nears its close. Allie wanders, steals, then fences a convertible, retrieves a suitcase and his passport from the garret room, and heads back to the quay where the white-suited saxophonist has remained. As both are setting off, Allie asks, “Think I would like it in Paris? I just got a tattoo the other day.” “So did I,” the man replies. “It’s in Islamic.”

Chris Parker in Jim Jarmusch's "Permanent Vacation"

So much in “Permanent Vacation” will become hallmarks of Jarmusch’s narrative and visual mythos – the allusion-laden scripts, the richly layered soundtracks that always precede the opening images on the screen – but most profoundly, the nature of the spiritual quest always at the heart of a Jarmusch film – episodic stories of loners, émigrés, strangers who meet strangers along their way on America’s mean streets and highways and byways – in taxis, on trains, on buses and planes.

"Permanent Vacation" (1980)
Written, directed, edited and produced by Jim Jarmusch
Starring Chris Parker as Allie
Music by Jim Jarmusch and John Lurie
Cinematography by Tom DiCillo and James A. Lebovitz
Available on the Criterion Collection's "Stranger Than Paradise" 2-disc DVD

A MAN CALLED OVE: THE GRACE OF COMMUNITY

"Men are what they are because of what they do, not what they say."

― Fredrik Backman, "A Man Called Ove"

There is an episode of the brilliant television series "Northern Exposure" called "Our Tribe" in which tribal elder Gloria Noanuk invites Dr. Joel Fleischman to be adopted by her tribe. Joel engages Ed Chigliak, his Tlingits friend, to try to get his head around the concept.

JOEL: Ed, let me ask you something. What does belonging to your own tribe mean to you?

ED: Well, I was raised by the tribe, but since I didn't have parents, I was passed around a lot. I never really thought about it. I mean, belonging to a tribe.

JOEL: I belong to the Jewish tribe, so to speak, but I'm also an American, you know? What does that mean? I mean, is there an American tribe? More like a zillion special interest groups. In my own case, I am a New Yorker. I am a Republican, a Knicks fan. Maybe we've outgrown tribes, you know? The global village thing. It's telephones, faxes, CNN. I mean, basically, we all belong to the same tribe.

ED: That's true. But you can't hang out with five billion people.

Swedish director Hannes Holm’s "A Man Called Ove" is a variation on this theme of community. What is community and how do we create it and then maintain it over time? How is the intimate community of marriage interwoven with the community of neighbors and friends? How do the interactions of the workplace sustain or betray community?

Adapted from Frederik Backman's 2012 novel and a 2017 Academy Awards selection for Best Foreign Language Film, "A Man Called Ove" is a moving portrait of a man whose suppressed emotion manifests in curmudgeonly bluster. Ove, realized in all his complexity by Rolf Lassgård and equally incarnated as a young man by Filip Berg, is the very definition of a wet blanket, yet from the time we meet him, we also see a widower whose well of grief is so deep it refuses to abate with time.

Ove lives in a townhouse neighborhood for which he and his neighbor and friend Rune – now the victim of the dual ignominies of a stroke and "the system" – spent much of their middle years structuring the rules and regulations. The erstwhile civic leaders of the self-governing community were pushed aside in what Ove insists was a "coup," and now Ove can only hold fast to his self-appointed morning ambulatory rounds, checking gates and locks and patrolling neighborhood menaces like a woman’s Chihuahua who pees on the sidewalk, an itinerant cat and a teen’s mis-parked bicycle.

After his morning routine, Ove heads to his job of 30+ years (we will learn he's an engineer) only to be called in by management to be made redundant, as the British say. The pair of millennial middle managers offer retraining in some sort of digital regimen, but Ove has a better solution, which is to walk out. After visiting his wife's grave, which he tries to do daily, he returns to his neighborhood home to regroup. When…

…into his enclave come the pregnant Parvaneh (Bahar Pars), an Iranian immigrant, her husband Patrick Lufsen (Tobias Almborg) and Parvaneh’s daughters Sepideh and Nasanin (Nelly Jamarani and Zozan Akgün). On day one Patrick backs his moving trailer into Ove's mailbox as Ove yells at him to watch out. Yet, in his fit of pique, Ove pulls Patrick out of the car, takes the wheel and expertly backs the trailer up to his new neighbor's front door. This seesawing behavior, the good deed exercised in the midst of ire, we come to understand as one hallmark of Ove's character.

Bahar Pars as Parvaneh and Rolf Lassgard as Ove in "A Man Called Ove"

Another is his desire to join Sonja, his dearly beloved, and to that end, Ove makes one interrupted or otherwise failed suicide attempt after another – each serving to ease him into a reverie of remembrance of things past. We learn first of his childhood and the loss of his mother, then of his coming of age with a loving but emotionally distant father, the events that compel him to make his way in the world alone, and his encounter with the woman who will be the love of his life – his Sonja (Ida Engvoll).

As we slowly come to know more about the man called Ove, we watch as the newcomers in his community, most especially Parvaneh, make inroads into his inner life. He tries to rebuff her saffron scented tubs of chicken and rice ("Why try to make it Christmas every day?" "What's wrong with boiled beef and vegetables?" he asks himself), but there is no disputing that these foreign dishes warm him with nourishment beyond the somatic.

I have a soft spot for these sorts of little narratives of community. Fellow Scandinavian, the Norwegian writer/director Bent Hamer, created a community of two in "Kitchen Stories" (2003), based on the post-World War II Swedish research project involving placing an observer on a ladder-high stool to observe Swedish housewives in their kitchens. In Hamer's imagining, the research centers on unmarried men not women, and in the course of "Kitchen Stories," researcher and subject, in something of a human inevitability, become friends. In "O'Horten" (2007), Odd Horten is a 67-year-old train driver on the eve of retirement. The film charts his, at times clumsy, attempts to leave his old community on the route between Oslo and Bergen behind and surrender to the possibility of the new.

Though most often noted for his social criticism involving themes of class and labor, British director Ken Loach approaches his critiques in narratives set among community. Looking at the most recent decade in a career that has spanned a half century, "The Wind That Shakes the Barley" (2006), "Looking for Eric" (2009),  "The Angels' Share" (20012) and "Jimmy’s Hall"  (2014) recall, like Kirk Jones's 1998 "Waking Ned Devine," the golden era of Ealing Studios – the oldest continuously working studio facility for film production in the world – that churned out one memorable little movie after another, including the 1949 "Whiskey Galore!" directed by Compton MacKenzie, Charles Crichton's "The Titfield Thunderbolt" (1953) and Alexander Mackendrick's "The Ladykillers" (1955). What these films have in common is that the material object of the quest is merely a vehicle for the quest's larger purpose: the power to bring community together. In these narratives, community, not family, functions as the central social unit, the ultimate source of human meaning and communion.

As "A Man Called Ove" unfolds, the constellation of neighborhood characters – who have known, not only Ove over time, but his wife Sonja, a teacher and nurturer at heart – must remind Ove of Sonja's spirit of laughter, love and giving. Ironically, it is something this old crab does again and again in spite of the fury Sonja's death and his consequent loneliness have engendered in him.

Ida Engvoll as Sonja in "A Man Called Ove"

Watching "A Man Called Ove," I was again struck by the diversity that comfortably inhabits European cinema – the Iranian Parvaneh and her children, Mirsad (Poyan Karimi), the gay teen thrown out by his father to whom Ove gives shelter. The only American directors I know of who incorporate immigrant actors and characters as casually as French, Belgian and various Scandinavian directors do are Ramin Bahrani who was born to Iranian parents in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, and Jim Jarmusch whose casts and crews are enviably international. I believe this is a timely observation to make in a country that ostensibly asks to "Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed, to me."

This is what Ove's beloved Sonja has taught those she touched in life through actions, not words. They are the words Ove's flawed neighbors somehow inherently understand without having to say them. They are the words that herald America's safe harbor – a safe harbor we have closed to so many across a war-torn globe.

"A Man Called Ove"
In select theaters
Director: Hannes Holm
Writers: Fredrik Backman, Hannes Holm
Stars: Rolf Lassgård, Bahar Pars, Ida Engvoll, Filip Berg
Music: Gaute Storaas
Cinematography: Göran Hallberg
Rating: PG-13
Run Time: 1 h 56m

LOVE, LONGING AND LOSS: SUMMER’S QUIRKY MOVIES

If you’re not into superheroes (“Captain America,” “X-Men”) and super villains (“Suicide Squad”); if thriller (“Jason Bourne,” “Independence Day,” “Now You See Me”) and sci-fi (“Star Trek”) and horror (“The Conjuring,” “The Purge”) and animation (“Angry Birds,” “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles,” “Ice Age”) franchises and  franchises-to-be (“Warcraft”) aren’t your thing; if just plain stupid makes you just plain sick (“Neighbors,” “Bad Moms,” “Mike and Dave Need Wedding Dates”)…

Hidden amidst the dross were some lovely little movies about relationships like Whit Stillman’s quick-witted adaptation of Jane Austen’s “Love and Friendship”; writer/director Rebecca Miller’s “Maggie’s Plan” in which Greta Gerwig and Julianne Moore are rivals, then co-conspirators in love; and “Don’t Think Twice,” Mike Birbiglia’s charming tale of a sextet of improv comedians and their abiding familial loyalty amidst life’s ups and downs.

A number of quirky little subversive gems also made for a delightful summer. “The Lobster” had only a limited release in March and came into the theaters of middle America at the end of May, making it, by default, a summer movie for those of us not living in New York or LA. Then came “Swiss Army Man,” “Wiener-Dog,” “Captain Fantastic” and “Hunt for the Wilderpeople.”

THE LOBSTER

Greek director Yorgos Lanthimos made his English-speaking debut with “The Lobster,” a black comedy about a dystopian world in which being single is a crime. Any adult person who has become mate-less has 45 days to find a new partner. The newly-single must check into a hotel-like institution, strictly run by a rigid staff, expressly designed to facilitate this process. Guests who fail to achieve paired status are turned into an animal of their choosing.

Colin Farrell and Rachel Weisz in The Lobster

We follow newly divorced David (Colin Farrell in a superb incarnation of a milquetoast who achieves rebel status) into a world that is eerily strange to us but matter-of-fact to him. He arrives with a dog who had been his brother, and should he fail to become half of a twosome, David has chosen to become a lobster. “An excellent choice,” the hotelier says to him flatly. The hotel is run like a summer camp – every minute of the day filled with activity, with demonstrations and expeditions.

An obverse system pertains in the forest that lies beyond the hotel. On forest expeditions, hotel guests are expected to hunt each other with stun guns, apparently to reduce the bother of too many failures for the hotelier/warden. During one such pursuit, David discovers his soulmate among a band of escapees hiding there. Played by Rachel Weisz and known only as Short Sighted Woman in the credits, she is also the film’s narrator. The forest people observe a wholly chaste covenant, so it is a tragic turn by the time Short Sighted Woman and David are deeply in love – for which there will be consequences.

Lanthimos wrote the script with Efthymis Filippou, with whom he previously collaborated on “Dogtooth” and “Alps.” Writing for rogerebert.com, Sheila O’Malley says, “Lanthimos is interested, here and in his other films, in the sometimes pathological human need for systems. Why wait for a totalitarian government to institute rules from the top-down when human beings submit to atomization of every aspect of their lives all on their own?” This is true, but Lanthimos is doing something more, I think. Perhaps unwittingly, “The Lobster” recalls a classic American novel, Sherwood Anderson’s 1919 “Winesburg, Ohio.” The book consists of 22 interconnected stories that Anderson introduces with a preface that concerns a writer and the book he purportedly wrote near the end of his life. “It was never published,” the narrator says, “but I saw it once and it made an indelible impression on my mind.” The book was called “The Book of the Grotesque” and it

had one central thought that is very strange and has always remained with me. [….]

That in the beginning when the world was young there were a great many thoughts but no such thing as a truth. Man made the truths himself and each truth was a composite of a great many vague thoughts. [….]

The old man had listed hundreds of the truths in his book. I will not try to tell you of all of them. There was the truth of virginity and the truth of passion, the truth of wealth and of poverty, of thrift and of profligacy, of carelessness and abandon. Hundreds and hundreds were the truths and they were all beautiful.

And then the people came along. Each as he appeared snatched up one of the truths and some who were quite strong snatched up a dozen of them.

               

It was the truths that made the people grotesques. The old man had quite an elaborate theory concerning the matter. It was his notion that the moment one of the people took one of the truths to himself, called it his truth, and tried to live his life by it, he became a grotesque and the truth he embraced became a falsehood.

I think Anderson’s concept – or something similar or parallel to it – informs “The Lobster.” The regular assemblies the hotel “guests” are required to attend stress the dangers of being single in the world and the safe haven of mating. But they also intimate that one will be successful only with a mate who shares one’s defining flaw: Lisping Man (John C. Reilly) needs to find a woman who lisps, Lame Man (Ben Whishaw) a woman who limps. That love becomes manifest in the shared flaw is the innate law that informs the narrative arc of “The Lobster,” whether within the walls of the institution or in the forest and the inverted laws of exile.

Through the lens of cinematographer Thimios Bakatakis, the hotel scenes recall a feeling of Hemingway’s clean well-lighted place; the forest scenes a somewhat murky atmosphere like a setting from Longfellow’s “Evangeline” where, in the forest primeval, “The murmuring pines and the hemlocks,/Bearded with moss, and in garments green, indistinct in the twilight…”; and the excursions into the city have a simultaneous feel of Big Brother patrols and techno-consumerism.

The soundtrack, predominated by classical chamber pieces – from an early Beethoven to Russians Alexander Borodin, Igor Stravinsky and Alfred Schnittke to Benjamin Britten – also includes two haunting early 20^th century popular Greek songs by Takis Morakis and by Danae Stratigopoulou about love and loss that are incorporated into poignant visual sequences, as well as Nick Cave’s “Where the Wild Roses Grow” loosely based on the Appalachian murder ballad “Down in the Willow Garden.”

SWISS ARMY MAN         

The premise of Daniel Scheinert and Daniel Kwan’s “Swiss Army Man,” which they wrote and directed, is no less absurdist, in part because we are reminded time and again of the realities that attend to the corporeal. We find Hank (Paul Dano) stranded on an island, sick with loneliness, trying to hang himself, when, of a sudden, a fellow soul washes ashore. Our desperate castaway manages to extricate himself from the noose and urgently runs to the aid of the beached man. Alas, it is too late, and grief attaches to Hank with the clutch of an unguis. He tries to let the body go, but his need is too great, so he drags the corpse into his lair and before long has christened him Manny (Daniel Radcliffe). 

Both actors excel in what is essentially a two-man performance, but Radcliffe is particularly adept in what would seem to be a close to impossible feat. As Hank becomes gradually more delirious from hunger and sheer exhaustion, Manny becomes more animated (with Hank’s help) – and talkative – in Hank’s mind’s eye. Radcliffe manages to allow us to suspend disbelief and hold the conviction that over the course of three or four days, Manny is beset by the process of rigor mortis, while at the same time becoming a very real friend to Hank.

Daniel Radcliffe and Paul Dano in Swiss Army Man

Again, I can’t help but see a literary forebear in “Swiss Army Man,” and though, as obvious as the title reference to Johann David Wyss’s 1812 “The Swiss Family Robinson” is, I am instead thinking of Samuel Beckett’s 1953 play “Waiting for Godot.” That absurdist masterpiece opens with Gogo (Estragon) saying to Didi (Vladimir) “Nothing to be done.” Yet as the magnum opus unfolds, we come to learn there is much to be done – through kindness, companionship, pity, and the need for grace – all despite the failure of Godot ever to materialize. Indeed in the face of that failure we create our salvation through each other.

There is a passage in the second act of “Godot” where the pompous and exploitative master Pozzo of the first act has been reduced to a pathetic blind man dragged along by his slave Lucky. Gogo and Didi, the two tramps, debate what they should do in response to Pozzo's cries for help until finally Didi says,

[….] Let us do something, while we have the chance! It is not every day that we are needed. Not indeed that we personally are needed. Others would meet the case equally well, if not better. To all mankind they were addressed, those cries for help still ringing in our ears! But at this place, at this moment of time, all mankind is us, whether we like it or not. Let us make the most of it, before it is too late! Let us represent worthily for once the foul brood to which a cruel fate consigned us! What do you say? (Estragon says nothing.) .... What are we doing here, that is the question. And we are blessed in this, that we happen to know the answer. Yes, in this immense confusion one thing alone is clear. We are waiting for Godot to come—

.... Or for night to fall. We have kept our appointment and that's an end to that. We are not saints, but we have kept our appointment. How many people can boast as much?

Gogo: Billions.

I quote at length to put those last three lines into context. “We are not saints, but we have kept our appointment. How many people can boast as much?” “Billions.” Day after day, millennia after millennia people have given and do give solace and devotion and understanding to each other in whatever way they can in the face of indifferent nature, in its finite mortality and its infinitude.

About two thirds through “Swiss Army Man” is a visual and aural expression of the joy and camaraderie and love that grows out of a devoted relationship – no matter how unlikely the pairing – in which Hank re-creates, out of forest branches and dumped detritus, the bus where he has encountered the stranger-girl he longs for. He play-acts the stranger-girl with an orange mop atop his pate and insists Manny play him, Hank – a doppelgänger inversion that allows Hank finally to express his longings through his double. In this magical scene we see the beauty that transcends the flaws of the human condition. Ultimately, Hank is Everyman – his doppelgänger, a corpse named Manny, the condition toward which we are all journeying.

Larkin Seiple’s cinematography gives a quality of wonderment to the film overall, with dappled forest floor, dancing firelight and glistening waters. The soundtrack consists of two dozen original pieces by Andy Hull and Robert McDowell of the Atlanta-based indie rock band Manchester Orchestra. Dano collaborated on three of the songs, Radcliffe on four, and Dano and Radcliffe together with the musicians collaborated on five.

WIENER-DOG

Todd Solondz (1995 “Welcome to the Dollhouse,” 1998 “Happiness”) wrote and directed “Wiener-Dog,” an episodic tale that examines the human conundrum through a dog’s-eye view as he is passed from one owner to another. Known for his dissections of suburbia’s self-absorbed underbelly, Solondz does not disappoint here. With the exception of a few sympathetic characters – a boy who has just dodged leukemia, a vet assistant (Greta Gerwig) who saves Wiener-Dog from euthanasia, the guy she accompanies on a road trip (Kieran Culkin) who turns out not to be the utter creep we have been introduced to, a sweet Down syndrome couple – the people we meet from the dog’s vantage point are self-obsessed, resentful, entitled, undeserving of man’s best friend.

Keaton Nigel Cooke in Wiener-Dog

The film is bisected by an intermission: a peripatetic sequence evocative of Sergio Leone’s Man with No Name in which Wiener-Dog has been green-screened before a montage of various neon-esque landscapes as the soundtrack plays “The Ballad of Weiner-Dog” by Marc Shaiman. The intermission, in addition to reinforcing the episodic nature of the dog’s existence, also gives Solondz something of an out in terms of narrative continuity. In Act I, we follow Wiener-Dog from owner to owner, but when we return for Act II, it is not clear how the pup arrived in his new home with an academic film critic (an angst-ridden Danny DeVito proving his enormous thespian range yet again) nor is there a clear transition to his final owner (a bitter Ellen Burstyn proving her enormous thespian range yet again). In this final episode, Solondz takes a detour into magical reverie as the bitter old woman sees incarnations of herself as a girl wondering aloud what her life might have been without resentment and acrimony.

Edward Lachman’s cinematography lends grace to the banal settings, and Claude Debussy’s “Clair De Lune” creates a melancholy leitmotif as it floats through James Lavino’s soundtrack.

HUNT FOR THE WILDERPEOPLE

Moving from a perpetually orphaned dachshund to a perpetually orphaned boy, the Kiwi film “Hunt for the Wilderpeople” is Taika Waititi’s (Taiki Cohen) film adaption of “Wild Pork and Watercress” (1986) by New Zealand comic novelist Barry Crump. (Waititi co-wrote and -directed with Jemaine Clement last year’s uproarious vampire comedy “What We Do in the Shadows.”)

Julian Dennison and Sam Neill in Hunt for the Wilderpeople

This is the end of the line for Ricky (Julian Dennison) who has been thrown out of every foster home into which the system has placed him. He has one last chance before being sent to juvie. He lies, steals, cheats, kicks, burns, hits – and that’s not the worst of it, explains social worker Paula (Rachel House). He also composes haiku. Paula delivers Ricky to the childless Bella (Rima Te Wiata) and Hec (Sam Neill). Well, to Bella, really, since Hec would like nothing to do with the boy, but he loves Bella too much to refuse her.

Bella and Hec live in a remote cabin on the edge of the New Zealand bushland, where the first night Ricky determines to run away. He only gets a few meters before petering out. Bella waits for him to awake the next morning and is too good at psychology to fall for his game. Instead, she encourages his escape, but suggests he have a good meal before setting off again. Ricky’s hooked – even insisting that he call his new guardians Aunt Bella and Uncle Hec, and, much as Hec hates the idea, it sticks. A few days later, Bella celebrates Ricky’s birthday (it’s not his birth day, but it is very much a celebration), the first time anyone has ever celebrated anything about Ricky. Only days later, Hec finds Bella on the ground, dead of a heart attack.

Now that Ricky is no longer with a couple, the state sends Hec notice that it will reclaim the boy. This time Ricky runs away for real, and Hec feels obliged to go after him. Ricky and Uncle Hec finally find one another only to discover that law enforcement and the media have concluded that Hec has abducted Ricky. A succession of comic episodes ensues as the fugitives traipse through the bush to elude capture and come, in every sense of the phrase, to one another’s rescue. 

Lachlan Milne’s beautiful cinematography makes the harsh bushland romantic. The wonderful original soundtrack was written, performed and produced by the group Moniker and features the collaborative efforts of Lukasz Buda, Samuel Scott and Conrad Wedde​. Late in the film, Ricky must go for help on his own, and Waititi segues from the Moniker soundtrack to Leonard Cohen’s “The Partisan.”

When they poured across the border

I was cautioned to surrender,

this I could not do;

I took my gun and vanished.

I have changed my name so often,

I've lost my wife and children

but I have many friends,

and some of them are with me.

“The Partisan,” in turn, segues into Ukrainian composer Mykola Leontovych’s 1914 “Carol of the Bells” creating nothing less than a gorgeous sequence that speaks to our need for one another and the existential desolation we experience in the face of isolation.

CAPTAIN FANTASTIC

Matt Ross wrote and directed “Captain Fantastic,” the most conventional of our suite of quirky films, but even it turns some conventions on their heads. For example, it varies the old trope of the dying girl by having her die only a few scenes into the film and by having her die by her own hand instead of wasting away from a romanticized disease. She will essentially remain an enigma to us, as we watch her closest intimates grieve.

Ben Cash (Viggo Mortensen) with his brood in Captain Fantastic

Viggo Mortensen is Ben Cash. He and the ailing woman, unreconstructed hippies, have been raising their family of six children off the grid somewhere in the wilds of the Pacific Northwest. It is not altogether an idyll. Hard work, filled with rigorous instruction, both physical and intellectual, informs every structured day. Even the youngest children are expected to tackle arduous rock climbing exercises and all are well-schooled in killing game.

Cash has sent their mother to be treated near her parents in New Mexico, and when she dies her overbearing father (Frank Langella) who, it is an understatement to say, wholly objects to the life his daughter and son-in-law have made for their children, mandates that they stay put and not attend the funeral. His haughtiness – and affluence – telegraph why his daughter might have chosen an alternative life, but once the family defiantly arrives, a back and forth begins to suggest that prudence and jeopardy affect both men’s points of view and their anger at one another ultimately grows out of their love for those around them.

Cinematographer Stephane Fontaine makes the most of forest verdancy, and the visual enchantment of the film’s penultimate scene, which I will not spoil here, is worth the price of admission.

Each of these movies is a variation on the on-the-road convention, which is itself a modern variation of the quest narrative. In “The Lobster,” David and Short Sighted Woman come to each other, not through institutions or tribal codes, but through a love that gives them the strength to violate laws. They, Hank and Manny, and Ricky and Uncle Hec sojourn on foot, Weiner-Dog through various conveyances, and Ben Cash and his brood in a dilapidated old school bus outfitted very much like a school. The journey teaches all of them about, not what it means to be human, but what it means to become human. Conventional orthodoxy about what constitutes familial love is turned on its head, and we are all the richer for it.

DVD and streaming release dates for films mentioned in this article:

“The Lobster” available on DVD, Blu-ray, Amazon and Redbox

“Wiener-Dog” available on DVD, Blu-ray and Amazon

“Maggie’s Plan” available on DVD, Blu-ray, Amazon and Redbox

“Love & Friendship” available September 6, 2016 on DVD, Amazon, Redbox and Netflix

“Hunt for the Wilderpeople” available September 27, 2016 on DVD

“Swiss Army Man” available October 4, 2016 on DVD, Amazon, Redbox and Netflix

“Captain Fantastic” available October 25, 2016 on DVD, Amazon, Redbox and Netflix

“Don’t Think Twice” TBA 

RARELY PURE AND NEVER SIMPLE: LOUDER THAN BOMBS

“The truth was a mirror in the hands of God. It fell, and broke into pieces. Everybody took a piece of it, and they looked at it and thought they had the truth.” ― Rumi

“Every journey into the past is complicated by delusions, false memories, false namings of real events,” wrote the poet Adrienne Rich. There is probably a photograph of a family event from your childhood, an event that occurred too early in your life for you to have remembered, and yet, because of its ubiquity, your sense of it is as memory, and it is part of your story of yourself. There are also stories that evolve from mere tellings of this-then-this-then-that into artful narratives we subconsciously hope will evoke deeper empathetic reactions from those we tell the stories to.

One of the best explorations of family stories is Sarah Polley's 2013 documentary Stories We Tell, about the messiness of life lived and the deep need we have for narrative to impose order on memory so as to give experience meaning. Polley tries to tease out the "truth" of her mother's intimacies using home movies, family snap shots and re-enactments interspersed among contemporary interviews with relatives and family friends. What emerges as each teller's perspective accrues is an ever-widening kaleidoscope of conjecture and construal. Polley's story does not exploit her mother's, but pays tribute to it and respects its mystery.

Each of us is ordinary and mysterious, each harbors secrets. Louder Than Bombs is Norwegian director Joachim Trier’s first English-language film. It is something of a movie making anomaly these days in that it is not based-on-a-true-story, a biopic or adapted from a story or novel. Trier wrote the original screenplay with Eskil Vogt, who co-wrote Trier’s previous films, Reprise (2006) and Oslo, August 31st (2011).

Much like Polley’s documentary, Louder Than Bombs circles the mystery of its central character. Isabelle Reed (Isabelle Huppert) is a deceased conflict zone photojournalist for whom the New York Times is preparing a major retrospective.

The narrative operates on a sort of double helix. On the one hand, there are the ethical questions the photojournalist herself had about the motivations for and execution of her work. Can her photographs reveal the human truth of her individual subjects, or do they merely serve as beautiful but stock examples of those living in war-torn regions? Does her eye, in the very process of framing the shot, manipulate the image and make it less truthful?

Her creative dilemma is one that the documentarian Errol Morris has been exploring throughout his directorial career, in his book Believing Is Seeing and in his many essays, among them for the New York Times’s “Opinionator” series. Morris insists, “If you think you're going to create an unposed photograph, think again. There is no such thing.” We might conclude that the struggle to find truth is an inevitable impossibility, yet the irony is that we can glimpse it through the creative lens of imagination and mythmaking, that very manipulation that is art. Isabelle’s older son Jonah (Jesse Eisenberg) explains how much he learned about visual composition – and by extension narrative composition – from his mother’s work, through what she determined to leave out and to keep in the frame of the photograph.

Indeed, it is her family's various frames of reference by which they placed, place and will place themselves into the context of their evolving understanding of Isabelle as secrets emerge. So, too, on the other hand, there is the dilemma of family secrets, and if not lies, then omissions. Isabelle has left behind a husband, Gene (Gabriel Byrne); a son, Conrad (Devin Druid), who was on the cusp of his teenage years when she died; and Jonah, who was in graduate school. Conrad has always been led to believe his mother died in a tragic highway accident, which he imagines in various iterations.

Not only are fragments of memories – real and imagined – explored from different perspectives, but fragments of points of view as the film eddies around Isabelle’s creative dilemma and the family’s dilemma in relation to her. A variety of flashbacks plumb, on one level, the problem of memory, and on another, the experience of the here and now, which has an equally multivariable quality depending on a character’s point of view.

There is Isabelle’s first person point of view juxtaposed with each family member’s memories of her as wife and mother. Then there is the question of the efficacy of immediate experience when a scene of the father surreptitiously following Conrad, worried about the boy’s state of mind, is repeated from Conrad’s point of view in an entirely different telling. There are also Conrad’s stream of consciousness diaristic musings that give Jonah new insight into his younger brother’s inner life, and Jonah’s warning against Conrad’s desire to share them with a girl at school because, Jonah cautions, she will not understand them for what they are.

Others characters exist on the periphery: Jonah’s wife, Amy, who has just given birth to their first child; his old girlfriend, Erin (Rachel Brosnahan); and Gene’s colleague and lover Hannah (Amy Ryan) – all of whom possess insufficient insight to avoid mistaken assumptions. 

Our ideas of the “truth” are inferential by nature. They are subjective, not objective, though we bring objective observation to bear on intuitive understanding. Kant uses a word for this experience – Anschauung. As philosopher Philip McPherson Rudisill argues, “The most difficult single word…for many non-Germans…in all of Kant is the Anschauung, the at-look or on-look.” Rudisill employs a wonderful analogy to explain the phenomenon: “When you tell a German that you see a face in the cloud, and she cannot, she might easily say, ‘Das ist Deine Anschauung,’ i.e., ‘that’s the way you’re looking at the cloud.’” Rudisill suggested another example to me: consider “an argument between two people facing each other as to who is here and who is there, since ‘here’ and ‘there’ are definitely subjective views or perspectives, and each will see him/herself as here and the other as there.”

Posing, framing. Once we are conscious of being viewed, a degree of manipulation is inevitable. I am a different person to different people and in different environments, and much as I may wish to be understood in a certain light, I will never know how I am seen through others’ eyes. What is "true"? from any one point of view, as opposed to, What is Truth? – especially when clouded by memory. “A picture,” Diane Arbus said, “is a secret about a secret, the more it tells you the less you know.”

SURVIVAL IN EXTREMIS: THE REVENANT AND SON OF SAUL

Sometimes even to live is an act of courage.
~~Seneca

You don't ask people with knives in their stomachs what would make them happy; happiness is no longer the point. It's all about survival; it's all about whether you pull the knife out and bleed to death or keep it in...
~~Nick Hornby, “How to Be Good”


Two of the most highly acclaimed films of this awards season have been Alejandro González Iñárritu's “The Revenant” and László Nemes’s “Son of Saul.” Oscars went to Iñárritu for Directing, Leonardo DiCaprio for Best Actor and Emmanuel Lubezki for Cinematography. Nemes’s “Son of Saul” won the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar. Both films center on a protagonist in unimaginable torment. One survives through an obsession with vengeance, the other through an obsession with atonement.

THE REVENANT

The Hugh Glass mauling incident is a perfect choice for a filmmaker given the ambiguity of the historical record, which leaves Iñárritu free to make of his narrative what he will. Hugh Glass was indeed a seasoned fur trapper who explored the watershed of the Upper Missouri River. Like a Jay Gatsby frontiersman, little is known about him. One rumor has it he was captured by privateers and forced to live as a pirate; another that he was captured by Pawnee Indians and lived among them for years, even taking a Pawnee wife. It is known that he accompanied several Pawnee delegates who had been invited to meet with U.S. authorities in 1821.

Hugh Glass

In 1822, one General William Ashley placed an advertisement in the Missouri Republican for 100 "enterprising young men...to ascend the river Missouri to its source, there to be employed for one, two, or three years" for a fur-trading venture that would become the Rocky Mountain Fur Company. In June 1823, believing they were being heralded by friendly Pawnee, the party went ashore only to be attacked by Arikara/Ree warriors. Survivors fled back to the long boats. Ashley’s associate, Andrew Henry, believed it prudent to abandon the river route, so, parting company with Ashley, he led fourteen of the men overland toward Fort Kiowa on the Missouri.

Glass kept to himself along the way, and in August, near the forks of the Grand River, was scouting for game when he surprised a grizzly with two cubs. The bear charged, Glass got off a shot, and the bear mauled him into unconsciousness. From there the story becomes conveniently murky. In one version, Glass’s trapping partners, John Fitzgerald and Jim Bridger, manage to kill the bear; in others, Glass kills the bear before they get to him. However the incident transpired, Glass appeared to his partners fatally injured. When Henry arrived, he, too, was convinced Glass could not survive, and he assigned Fitzgerald and Bridger to stay with Glass. In some accounts, they waited for as long as five days for Glass to die before abandoning him.

Iñárritu follows this historical record quite faithfully, only streamlining time and fusing Ashley and Henry into a single character for narrative economy. Where he strays is to conjecture a child for Glass by his Pawnee wife. His son Hawk’s murder at the hands of Fitzgerald, then, becomes the motive for vengeance, a far nobler motive than his own abandonment. 

Sitting in our comfortably air conditioned theater, it might seem more ethical for the men to carry Glass along and try to mend him back to health -- and they do patch him up as best they can. Yet, throughout the film, Fitzgerald, brilliantly embodied by Tom Hardy, makes the more pragmatic argument. You might not like the racist Fitzgerald, but he is not a coward or a fool. As the men attempt to move Glass on a makeshift litter, Anderson says to Fitzgerald, “They’re torturin’ the bastard,” to which Fitzgerald’s realistic rejoinder is: “And riskin’ gettin’ the rest of us killed in the process. Proper thing would be to end it for him quick.” When they finally stop, he tells Henry, “You ain’t doin’ him or us no favors, Captain, lettin’ him suffer that way.” And much as we might like to take a romantic view and condemn this line of reasoning, he’s right.

Tom Hardy as John Fitzgerald

About midway through “The Revenant” a scene occurs that to me seems central to the film. Fitzgerald and young Bridger are camped by a fire, when Fitzgerald starts to wax nostalgic and tell a story about his father, “who never believed in anything 'cept what he could use or shoot and eat. […] Then, starving and delirious on the Texas plain, he found God. And it turns out… God's a squirrel. And a big, meaty one. And he shot and ate that son of a bitch.” This story is not only a metaphor for Fitzgerald’s point of view, but the metaphor for the entire film. Survival comes at the expense of something or someone else. Exploitation is the law of nature.

“The Revenant” hinges on this existential reality. The bear that mauls Glass protects her cubs and the wolves that maul the buffalo calf feed their pack. Likewise, we survive at someone's or something's expense. We exploit resources – buffalo hides, forests, fossil fuels, human labor. (Who and what was involved in getting the precious metals out of the ground and into this MacBook I'm so blithely tapping away on?) That's what “The Revenant” is about. Some people grumbled about its being long and to a great extent, it is long in order to make us uncomfortable – and it doesn't make us nearly uncomfortable enough. It's too visually and aurally gorgeous for that.

Much has been written about Iñárritu’s desire to eschew CGI and use natural landscapes and available light, especially the dying light of the gloaming. This was one way to capture the lyricism of the novel upon which the film is based. In “The Revenant: A Novel of Revenge,” Michael Punke writes of the gloaming, “It was an interlude that he held as sacred as Sabbath, the brief segue between the light of day and the dark of night. [….] It was a moment for reflection in a space so vast it could only be divine. And if Glass believed in a god, surely it resided in this great western expanse. Not a physical presence, but an idea, something beyond man’s ability to comprehend, something larger.”

Some have referred to “The Revenant” as a Western, but Iñárritu rejects the categorization. “I wouldn’t say that Westerns were a big influence on 'The Revenant' at all, really. I was looking more toward things like 'Dersu Uzala' by Kurosawa, Tarkovsky’s 'Andrei Rublev' – which is maybe my favorite film ever – Herzog’s 'Aguirre, the Wrath of God' and 'Fitzcarraldo,' even 'Apocalypse Now.' These are movies that…are informed by the crazy…theatrical show that is the human condition. The beauty and harshness of nature impacts your state of mind in these movies. There’s a very intimate point of view from one single character in each. That’s the challenge. Anyone can film a beautiful landscape. Unless you have an emotionally grounded story…, it’s all just…sorcery.” (David Fear. “Into the Woods.” Interview with Alejandro Iñárritu. Film Comment. January/February 2016. Web. 26 Feb. 2016.)

Iñárritu infuses his film with this numinous quality through a series of dream sequences that punctuate the narrative. They reveal not only details of Glass’s past, but also glimpses into the mystery of humanity as it moves through the natural world. One sequence in particular – in the courtyard of a church ruins – is simultaneously an homage to Andrei Tarkovsky’s “Andrei Rublev” and to Béla Tarr’s “Satantango” and “The Turin Horse.”

Leonardo DiCaprio in The Revenant

In “Apocalypse Withheld: On Slowness & the Long Take in Béla Tarr’s ‘Satantango,’ ” (May 15, 2014), Janice Lee notes that “Cinephiles often compare Tarr to Andrei Tarkovsky. In response to this correlation, Tarr says: ‘The main difference is Tarkovsky’s religious and [I am] not… [h]e always had hope; he believed in God. He’s much more innocent than… me… Rain in his films purifies people. In mine, it just makes mud.’ ”

In Iñárritu’s telling, Glass exacts his revenge, but the record indicates that Glass found Fort Henry abandoned. Apparently a note indicated that Andrew Henry had relocated the company to a camp at the mouth of the Bighorn River. There, Glass found Bridger but is said to have forgiven him as an impressionable youth. Turns out, he spared Fitzgerald, too, perhaps because Fitzgerald had joined the United States Army, and the penalty for killing a soldier was harsh. When we mythologize true stories, we can hang meaning on them, but the true story itself too often gives the lie to the legend.

SON OF SAUL

“Son of Saul” opens not only in extreme long shot and not merely in soft focus but entirely out of focus. A long focus-through ensues before we finally make out the contours of our protagonist. The opening establishes two motifs: the verdancy of nature juxtaposed with its indifference and the isolation of the individual in suffering. The solitary man in the midst of the controlled chaos that is Auschwitz-Birkenau is Saul Ausländer, a Hungarian Jew and a member of the Sonderkommandos.

In his debut feature film, Hungarian director László Nemes breaks new ground. The telling of the Holocaust, a seemingly inexhaustible source of narrative fodder, has focused on prisoners’ sufferings in the camps or on exposing and dealing out punishment to those who engineered the death camps and allowed their perpetration. The gas chambers and smoke stacks are there, but the narrative arc typically follows characters who have escaped the ovens rather than dwell on the apparatus of death for the entire course of the film.

Nemes takes us into the deepest reaches of the Nazi hell – the Sonderkommandos’ world, and though the Sonderkommandos are groups of camp prisoners, each individual is under a death sentence so that his struggle for survival isolates him from the men at his shoulders.

Geza  Rohrig is Saul in Son of Saul

Like no director I can think of before him, Nemes uses cinematography and sound and a single point of view to impress upon us the relentlessness of living cheek by jowl with the industrial scale of the Nazi killing. Moving in and out of soft focus gives a sense of the blur of exhaustion overcome only by the adrenaline of fear, the frenzied confusion and clamor of panic, the acrid burning and blistering swelter from coal dust and human ash. The sound is often unintelligible noise – the blast and blare of machinery, a cacophony of screams and struggle, the desperate Babel of incoherent tongues – a living hell made all the worse by the mounting hubris of the Nazi project by late 1944. Transports come in faster than the bodies they carry can be disposed of, making an already incomprehensibly harrowing environment beyond all tolerance or understanding.

The German sociologist Wolfgang Sofsky, in his 1992 study “The Order of Terror: The Concentration Camp” writes, “The agonies suffered by members of the Sonderkommandos defy description. Attempts at interpretation must necessarily remain superficial. Nonetheless, some comments on this most extreme form of forced collaboration are in order. These individuals worked in a situation of the constant threat of death and paralyzing violence. The SS let them live in order to work. Whoever refused was put to death. On July 21, 1944, when four hundred Jews from Corfu who had spent three weeks in the quarantine camp refused any involvement with the Sonderkommando, they were gassed. Whoever wished to live another hour had to work. The only way out was suicide – martyrdom. It is known that some did commit suicide while being admitted to the Sonderkommando or immediately thereafter. In addition, there was no certainty whatsoever about how long a respite one might have. No one could predict when the SS would liquidate the Sonderkommando. Yet one often clings to the slimmest of hopes so long as the end is not imminent, even if virtually all facts speak against it. The sheer will to survive triggers rigorous defense mechanisms that brush aside even the greatest dangers. The death of the other person is not your own. Even in a situation of certain death, people frequently do not react with rebellion, but with apathy” (270-271).

It is against this apathy – and his own complicity in death – that Saul’s consciousness and conscience seize upon one boy’s body – to spare him the ovens, to find a rabbi to say Kaddish, to give him a reverential burial. In the face of Saul’s plight, his insistence on Kaddish is profound, for in the act of saying Kaddish one affirms belief in the goodness and sovereignty of God, even – or especially – in the face of death. Central to the act of saying Kaddish is remembrance, the obligation to never forget, and above all, it is a prayer that speaks not to the past but to the future, a time of redemption.

Y'hei sh'lama raba min sh'maya,
v'chayim aleinu v'al kol Yisrael.
V'imru: Amen.

He who creates peace in His celestial heights,
may He create peace for us and for all Israel;
and say, Amen.

In his director’s notes, Nemes explains that “Our aim was to take an entirely different path from the usual approach of historical dramas, their gigantic scope and multi-point of view narration. This film does not tell the story of the Holocaust, but the simple story of one man caught in a dreadful situation, in a limited framework of space and time. Two days in the life of a man forced to lose his humanity and who finds moral survival in the salvaging of a dead body.”

Géza Röhrig, who plays Saul, was born in Hungary. His father died when he was four, and he spent several years in an orphanage before being adopted. He was expelled from high school in Paris for anti-communist activity. He studied Hungarian and Polish as a university student and holds a degree in filmmaking from the Academy of Drama and Film in Budapest. After a visit to Auschwitz, he moved to Jerusalem and then to Manhattan to study at the Jewish Theology Seminary, became an Hasidic Jew, has been teaching kindergarten since 2000 and has published many collections of poetry, including “Book of Incineration” (1995) and “Captivity” (1997). I cite this vitae at length to suggest that few actors could be as uniquely qualified to embody the cursed soul of Saul.

Speaking at the film’s press conference at Cannes, Röhrig bristled at a reporter’s suggestion that the Sonderkommandos were “half-victims, half-hangmen.” (Catherine Shoard. “ ‘Son of Saul’ star: ‘God was holding the hand of every Jew in the gas chamber.’ ” The Guardian. January/February 2016.)

“ ‘[T]he Sonderkommando were not just equally victimised but more victimised. They lived in the epicentre of hell. I think they deserve utmost respect. Some of them tried to make their way into the gas chambers instead.’ [T]he Sonderkommando have long been the victims of such ignorance. ‘Partly because everything about them was hearsay. The rules of the Nazis meant they couldn’t meet with the rest of the inmates, so they were somewhat mysterious. And the victims had so much anger and frustration, they projected it on to them.’ ”

Director Laszlo Nemes and actor Geza Rohrig

“With movies like ‘Schindler’s List,’ you have an evil guy and you have a good guy,” Röhrig told The Guardian. “There’s no such thing. We are all evil and good inside. [….] [I]t wasn’t God who rounded up the Jews and the Gypsies and the Soviet PoWs and the gays and the perfectly German mental patients and the perfectly German midgets and slaughtered them,” he continued. “We did it. The human family did it.”

Röhrig wisely noted, “I think it’s fair to say that we haven’t learned anything from Auschwitz. The cruelty exhibited there exists today...”

REMEMBER THE LADIES: STELLAR PERFORMANCES FROM 2015

Much discussion has transpired this year about women vis a vis Hollywood: about percentages of women directors, producers, etc. and about salary equity -- a discussion fueled in part by information revealed in the Sony hack and by Jennifer Lawrence’s outspokenness. Yet for all the talk, we found ourselves in the midst of remarkably talented actresses who gave us a cornucopia of praiseworthy performances in 2015, though women of color were notably absent from the screen. (I very much regret that, living where I do, I did not have the opportunity to see Spike Lee’s “Chi-Raq,” Lee’s contemporary interpretation of Aristophanes’ “Lysistrata,” a play of which I have always been enamored.)

Four especially penetrating films focused on women that articulate a wide-ranging cultural critique. Taken together their impact should be nothing less than profound. “Room,” “Brooklyn,” “Carol” and “45 Years” have rightfully received their nomination due in awards in advance of the Oscars. Their impact has been amplified with greater complexity by the indie jewel “Tangerine,” giving us more reason for rejoicing.

The first decent movie of 2015 was Kenneth Branagh’s “Cinderella.” Lily James is the perfect embodiment of Ella, Cate Blanchett gives the Wicked Stepmother psychological depth, and when you say, “Fairy Godmother,” it’s a given Helena Bonham Carter be cast. Kate Winslet is wonderful as the unconventional landscape architect Sabine de Barra, who risked her career by rejecting the symmetrical design conventions of her era to create an unruly Romantic garden complete with grottos in Alan Rickman’s Louis XIV-period drama “A Little Chaos.” (Rickman himself, in a wonderful turn, played Louis XIV. He will be sorely missed.)

Kate Winslet and Alan Rickman in "A Little Chaos"

Winslet was also a knockout as Steve Jobs’s Apple marketing executive and confidant, Joanna Hoffman, in Danny Boyles’s film, for which she is receiving much-deserved recognition. Marielle Heller’s “Diary of a Teenage Girl,” starring Bel Powley in a performance that has also garnered award endorsements, also features a compelling supporting performance by the talented Kristen Wiig as her immature but sympathetic mother.

A clever satire on celebrity, Olivier Assayas’s “Clouds of Sils Maria” treads the boards of the self-reflexive trope of actors playing actors, specifically the older actress supplanted by the hungry, would-be starlet, but Assayas uses our expectations to subvert an “All About Eve” fatalistic inevitability. The film features nuanced performances from Juliette Binoche, Kristen Stewart and Chloe Grace Moret as strong-willed, independent women. Binoche challenged Assayas to write a film about women that left the rounding out of the characters to the actresses.

Binoche’s Maria is an international actress accompanied by her multi-phone wielding personal assistant, Val (Stewart). Maria’s mentor, the playwright who cast her in the role of a — perhaps manipulative — young woman in a relationship with an older woman, has died on the eve of the play’s revival. Moret as Jo-Ann Ellis is a paparazzi-baiting bad girl who has been cast in the role that made the young Maria a star. Maria’s commitment to her craft is juxtaposed with Jo-Ann’s pop culture celebrity in a film that is not ashamed to grapple with large questions of aesthetic and ethical concerns about artistic authenticity.

Juliette Binoche and Kristen Stewart in "The Clouds of Sils Maria"

Jennifer Lawrence is front and center in her third collaboration with David O. Russell and his troupe as the determined inventor of “Joy.” Paul Weitz brought the marvelous Lily Tomlin back to the big screen in “Grandma” rounding out a smart ensemble with Julia Garner as her granddaughter and Marcia Gay Harden as her daughter -- and with grace and humor they tackled the subject of abortion.

Winningly co-starring with their leading men, accomplished actresses had an opportunity to shine in little romantic vehicles: Dan Fogelman’s “Danny Collins” with Annette Bening and Al Pacino; Brett Haley’s “I’ll See You in My Dreams” with Blythe Danner and Sam Elliott; and Isabel Coixet’s “Learning to Drive” with Patricia Clarkson and Ben Kingsley. All three highlighted leading women on their own terms against their leading men.

If those pairings sparkled with chemistry, Marion Cotillard and Michael Fassbender utterly seethed with it in the Scottish play, directed by Justin Kurzel, and I found Alicia Vikander’s performance in Tom Hooper’s “The Danish Girl” more charismatic than the gender-bending Eddie Redmayne’s.

Michael Fassbender and Marion Cotillard in the Scottish play

Alicia Vikander also stars as Vera Brittain, a young woman who defied convention, first by attending Somerville College, Oxford, and then by leaving to become a nurse on the front lines in the Voluntary Aid Detachment in James Kent’s “Testament of Youth,” adapted from Brittain’s First World War memoir for the screen by Juliette Towhidi. Abi Morgan’s “Suffragette” with Carey Mulligan, Helen Bonham Carter and Anne-Marie Duff and Peter Sollett’s “Freeheld” with Julianne Moore and Ellen Page took on women’s issues, historical and contemporary respectively.

We also saw women in roles more typically inhabited by men. Taylor Sheridan’s script for Denis Villeneuve’s Mexican border drama “Sicario” cast Emily Blunt as a principled FBI agent caught in the murky amoral underworld of Mexican drug cartels. Peter Straughan’s script for David Gordon Green’s “Our Brand Is Crisis” was based on Rachel Boynton’s 2005 documentary of the same name about the campaign marketing tactics employed by James Carville and his Washington-based political consulting firm GCS for Gonzalo Sanchez de Lozada in the 2002 Bolivian presidential election. Sandra Bullock lobbied for the role of the central character, based on Carville and originally intended for a man.

In the realm of comedy stars, Melissa McCarthy has been developing her own version of franchise since 2013, this year’s installment being Paul Feig’s “Spy,” and with “Trainwreck,” Amy Schumer joined Judd Apatow’s repertoire of responsibility-phobic characters that went co-ed in 2011 with “Bridesmaids.” (N.B. Jason Moore’s abysmal “Sisters,” with Tina Fey and Amy Poehler, should never have been made.)

In addition to the supporting roles already mentioned, superb performances abounded in which a woman forms a kind of fulcrum between two male characters. Elizabeth Banks grounds Bill Pohlad’s “Love & Mercy” as Melinda Ledbetter, the savior who comes to the rescue of John Cusack’s older Brian Wilson (to Paul Dano’s younger) from the grips of his abusive therapist, Dr. Eugene Landy (Paul Giamatti). In a poignantly understated performance as the great detective’s housekeeper in Bill Condon’s “Mr. Holmes,” Laura Linney exudes an inarticulate love for the young son she lives to protect and endurance toward the irascible old man in her charge, marvelously channeled through Ian McKellen.

Ian McKellen and Laura Linney in "Mr. Holmes"

In the triad of excellent performances for Joel Edgerton’s “The Gift,” Rebecca Hall plays Robyn Callum, a woman pulled between the manipulations of her husband on the one hand (Jason Bateman) and the forgotten acquaintance (Edgerton) who shows up out of nowhere to haunt him. Laura Dern is the distraught mother of an unemployed, young single father, played by Andrew Garfield. Her salt of the earth son gets sucked into the home foreclosure racket by a ruthless real estate broker, played by Michael Shannon, in Ramin Bahrani’s chilling “99 Homes.”

The coming of age catalyst for the central character in Alfonso Gomez-Rejon’s “Me (Thomas Mann), Earl (RJ Cyler) and the Dying Girl,” is Rachel. Olivia Cooke navigates a beautiful re-invention of the dying girl trope sans sentiment and treacle. In “Youth,” Paolo Sorrentino gives Rachel Weisz’s supporting role as Lena Ballinger almost equal weight with the film’s co-stars: Michael Caine as conductor/composer Fred Ballinger -- her father -- and Harvey Keitel as film director Mick Boyle -- her father-in-law. Lena’s point of view enriches this meditation on age by considering the friends through the lens of the mature child and by presenting her understanding of Fred, not as an artist, but as a father and a husband to her mother.

Even before 2011, when his personal and creative collaboration with actress/writer Greta Gerwig began, Noah Baumbach explored multi-dimensional women in films like “The Squid and the Whale” (2005) with Laura Linney and “Margot at the Wedding” (2007) with Nicole Kidman and his then wife, Jennifer Jason Leigh. This year brought two Baumbach films, “While We’re Young,” for which he has the sole writing credit, and “Mistress America,” which was co-written with Gerwig. Like Apatow’s and Feig’s shallow creations, Baumbach’s characters have failed to grow up, but they differ by possessing a depth and complexity that the Apatow/Feig woman- man-child lacks, and as Baumbach’s films reach their denouements, we usually have a sense that the Baumbach/Gerwig character is going to come to terms with the necessity for maturity.

Speaking of Jennifer Jason Leigh, I do not want to overlook a performance that could have been ridiculously over the top but is not in Quentin Tarantino’s admittedly gory homage to the American western, “The Hateful Eight.” The range Leigh manages to achieve, through subtle facial expression alone, is beyond various: the contempt and scorn of a psychopath, the wounded hurt of a child or injured animal, the manipulations of a coquette, the defiance of an outlaw. Leigh seems to effortlessly traverse the gamut.

Jennifer Jason Leigh in "The Hateful Eight"

Of the plethora of astounding performances by women this year, four especially stand out, each a marvel of quiet subtly that dazzles. “Room,” “Brooklyn,” “Carol” and “45 Years” -- all four, each in its own way, share a quality of extraordinary eloquence through what isn’t said.

ROOM

I had seen Larson in small parts like Greenberg’s niece in Baumbach’s 2010 “Greenberg” with Ben Stiller and then in Oren Moverman’s 2011 “Rampart” with Woody Harrelson and Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s 2013 “Don Jon,” at which point she’d done over a dozen more roles in feature films. Yet when I encountered the force of nature that she is, in Destin Daniel Cretton’s 2013 “Short Term 12,” it was as if for the first time.

I started to write that in “Short Term 12,” Larson plays Grace..., but that would be wrong: Larson is Grace. She is both Grace the character, a supervisor at a short-term group home for troubled teens, and she is the embodiment of grace. Introverted by nature, she works with her boyfriend, Mason (John Gallagher, Jr.), who tries to draw her out, but for reasons that remain mysterious, whatever it is she feels she must guard fills a deep well of empathy she quietly yet ferociously shares with her charges barely younger than herself. In a delicate dance of ensemble reciprocity, Cretton’s cast touchingly captures the pain that is borne of abuse and the meaning of unconditional love.

Brie Larson as Joy and Jacob Tremblay as her son, Jack, in "Room"

To our wonderment, Larson dips into that seemingly bottomless emotional well again in Lenny Abrahamson’s “Room,” which Emma Donoghue adapted for the screen from her novel. Larson is Joy. Kidnapped at 17, she has been held captive in a dingy soundproofed room for seven years. Her salvation has been her son, Jack, and the action opens on the eve of his fifth birthday. Somehow, she has managed to raise Jack as a happy, well-adjusted child, allowing herself a pure joy in his being that he returns in the circumscribed life they share. Just as Jack is becoming old enough to start asking questions, Joy’s captor loses his job. The vitamins are not restocked; the heat bill goes unpaid. Joy understands the degree of their desperation, but an attempt to escape is fraught with danger, too. Larson’s visage can convey a deeply complex range of emotional subtlety, and we learn more about her and her relationship with Jack through what we see than through what she says, not simply about herself and Jack, but about the endurance of the human spirit.

Joan Allen deserves praise, too, for a poignantly perfect supporting role as Joy’s mother, a performance that has been wholly overlooked except by the Indiana Film Journalists Association. Allen almost silently conveys the tangle of a mother’s emotions in parallel with her daughter’s: the anguish, not only over the horror of her daughter’s captive experience, but of a mother’s pain in the knowledge that she will never fully fathom that experience. This understanding, in relation to her unabashed exultation in her daughter’s strength, perseverance and ability to have somehow spared Jack the clinically predictable consequences of having been raised in such unimaginable circumstances, infuses the film with a humanity almost impossible to describe.

BROOKLYN

Saoirse Ronan is the immigrant Eilis Lacey at the center of John Crowley’s bildungsroman, “Brooklyn.” Nick Hornby adapted the screenplay from Colm Toibin’s novel, and everything from the superb ensemble cast to Michael Brooks’s score to Yves Belanger’s cinematography to Jake Roberts’s editing is a quiet revelation. Just as during and after the potato famine of the 1840s, the United States generally and New York City especially, with its large Irish population, provided a beacon of hope for Irish young people fleeing a foundering rural economy in Ireland. As a wartime non-participant, Ireland received no help from the Marshall Plan that aided war-torn Western European countries. So in 1952, Eilis joins this wave of young people. A New York City parish priest (Jim Broadbent) has sponsored her passage, she secures lodging in a boarding house for young women, and she finds work in an upscale department store. She is a complex mix: overcome with loneliness but braving the unknown, filled with a sense of familial obligation but determined to forge her independence.

Saoirse Ronan in "Brooklyn"

Like Larson’s Joy, Ronan’s Eilis conveys her fluctuating feelings in her countenance. Writing for The Guardian (8 Nov. 2015), Mark Kermode says that Ronan, “the miraculous still centre of this beautiful, old-fashioned” movie, “appears to have developed the ability to act with her pupils, which seem to widen and contract at will.” Early in the film, and before Eilis meets her Italian beau (Emory Cohen), her fellow roomers take her for a dupe for agreeing to help with the parish’s annual Christmas dinner for the needy -- men, the priest explains, who built the city’s tunnels and bridges. It is a beautiful scene -- who cast this movingly realistic roomful over which the camera lovingly pans? -- in which one of the men, played by Iarla O Lionaird, stands and sings the achingly beautiful Irish love song “Casadh an tSugain” acapella.

When Eilis arrives back at her boarding house, her landlady, Mrs. Kehoe (Julie Walters), invites her in for a nip of sherry. Little is said; Mrs. Kehoe makes small talk, Eilis demurs. Yet in the course of this scene following her Christmas experience in the parish hall, Ronan’s face registers a deepening understanding of her privilege and good fortune, of the opportunity others have made possible for her, of her responsibility to make good on their generosity as well as her responsibility to honor the truth of her own self. What Ronan wordlessly conveys in these fleeting moments propels the balance of Eilis’s coming of age in America.

CAROL

Rooney Mara and Cate Blanchett in "Carol"

Phyllis Nagy adapted Patricia Highsmith’s 1952 novel “The Price of Salt” for Todd Haynes’s “Carol.” Cate Blanchett is the titular character whom we meet just at the point in her unhappy marriage when she is trying to break free. All that holds her is a deep maternal bond with the young daughter she adores. Out Christmas shopping, she encounters a department store clerk -- who, we will come to learn, is an aspiring photographer -- Rooney Mara, in an equally stellar performance. They fall in love, but it is 1952. All that can’t be said in “Carol” is paralleled with a visual leitmotif: expanses of glass -- shop and house and car windows, automotive windshields. What we see behind the glass is often obscured by rain or snow or the trickling humidity of fog. Glass is a barrier but a transparent one, and, like taboos, can be broken.

45 YEARS

Love stories are often cute or saccharine or otherwise superficial, none of which interests Andrew Haigh. His 2011 “Weekend” deals with the complexity of love, its messiness, its often bewildering lack of logic, its clumsiness and its intimacy. It is also a film about identity, the separate identity each lover confronts within the other and the thing between them, which becomes a third entity. “Weekend” is about the 48 hours two young men share; “45 Years” is about a life-long marriage confronted with an unexpected intruder who shatters that third entity. Written by Haigh from a short story by David Constantine called “In Another Country,” “45 Days” begins a week before the 45th wedding anniversary Geoff and Kate Mercer are preparing to celebrate.

Then, on the erroneous assumption Geoff is next of kin, a letter arrives explaining that the ice-encased corpse of Katya, his first love, has been recovered from a mountain crevasse she fell into as she and Geoff were hiking in the Swiss Alps 50 years earlier. Katya’s sudden presence is the wedge that opens a parallel fissure in Kate and Geoff’s marriage, and Haigh again confronts us with the complexity of love and the possibility that there is no such thing as a happy ending, at least in the conventional way we understand that phrase. Yet, whereas “Weekend” teems with the rich quickening and buoyancy of new love, “45 Years” exposes a long-ignored emotional vacuity through a specter frozen in ice and time that catches each spouse off guard.

Charlotte Rampling in "45 Years"

The couple is played by veteran actors Tom Courtenay and Charlotte Rampling in an anti-grand pas de deux communicated almost exclusively through gesture and expression. In his review for the New York Times (Dec. 22, 2015), A. O. Scott observes that “Mr. Courtenay, a naturally demonstrative actor, registers a convincing blend of longing, confusion and shame. Ms. Rampling, a stiller, deeper-running pool, conveys emotions so strange and intense that they don’t quite have names.”

That this many actresses achieved such heart-stopping performances this year — especially the intoxicating renderings from Brie Larson and Joan Allen, Saoirse Ronan, Cate Blanchett and Rooney Mara, and Charlotte Rampling -- is a veritable embarrassment of riches. They have elevated our story through characters that speak to women’s resilience and self-sufficiency through their endurance under circumstances of exploitation to the point of enslavement (“Room”), their dignity and independence (“Brooklyn”), their inherent nurturance and bravery in the face of the status quo (“Carol”) and their emotional vulnerability despite strength of character (“45 Years”). As interesting as the men were this year, the women on screen shone a brighter light on the better angels of our nature.