Photo via The French Dispatch/Facebook
Bill Murray in the French Dispatch
Bill Murray in the French Dispatch
Musicals made a comeback in 2021 and for the first time in years, the music was actually good. Sure, it’s hard to go wrong with the Leonard Bernstein-Stephen Sondheim songbook for West Side Story or Lin-Manuel Miranda’s In the Heights, recast for the screen by Steven Spielberg and Jon M. Chu respectively. But then there’s also Cyrano, Joe Wright’s imaginative retelling of Cyrano de Bergerac (scheduled to finally reach Milwaukee theaters in February 2022).
What happened this year beyond musicals? I don’t like assembling a “best-of” list because who am I to say what’s best, but I don’t mind looking back on the year and picking favorites. Here are a few more of mine from 2021.
About Endlessness
The mordant surrealism of Sweden’s Roy Andersson has never been more apparent. About Endlessness is a set of vignettes colorized a bit like antique postcards in hues a little strange and unreal. The settings, whether outdoors or interiors, are as sparse as the emotional lives of their inhabitants. About Endlessness is a droll look at loneliness, disconnection, lack of communication, lack of empathy.
Belfast
When he was nine years old, Kenneth Branagh witnessed a Protestant mob tearing through his Belfast neighborhood, marking the homes of Roman Catholics. It was at the start of “The Troubles,” those violent years when Northern Ireland’s Protestant majority fought to maintain their grip on the province’s Catholic minority as the British army failed to keep the peace. Branagh’s childhood memory is the grain of sand around which formed a pearl of a film, Branagh’s latest as a director, Belfast.
Broadcast Signal Interruption
The title sounds like a training video, but indie director Jacob Gentry’s film is surprisingly engrossing. Haunted by his wife’s disappearance, the protagonist becomes obsessed with video hackers who disrupt broadcast signals with strange apparitions accompanied by unsettling sounds. The horror thriller looks like neo-noir with wet nocturnal streets and dark colored neon as the hero descends into a labyrinth that leads down one rabbit hole after another.
The French Dispatch
The French Dispatch is a fake documentary, a droll comedy about a make-believe magazine of that name whose page design and editorial tone suggests The New Yorker in its golden years. The film successfully juggles several storylines tied to the magazine’s art, “poetry and politics” and food sections, all of them looping back around to the magazine’s editor. Arthur Howitzer Jr., played by director Wes Anderson regular Bill Murray, is the deadpan eye at the center of a whirling hurricane of eccentricity.
I’m Your Man
In the opening scene, Tom is stiffly affable and Alma edgy-wary. He’s effusively poetic, and when she demands to know his favorite poet, Tom’s verbalization gets stuck in repeat. He’s an android, she’s human, and his microchip needs replacing. “It’s hard to program flirtation,” explains the representative of Tom’s manufacturer. With the serious comedy I’m Your Man, German director Maria Schrader taps into a long, anxious history of humanoid replicants in her nation’s fiction, starting with E.T.A. Hoffmann’s “The Sandman” (1817) and continuing through Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927).
Lapsis
Lapsis is among the best American indie films of recent years. Writer-director Noah Hutton works astutely with low-budget location shots and a screenplay that explains the near future—like today, only a bit worse—without bogging down or digressing. The protagonist is in the same position as the film’s audience, continually needing to be brought up to speed. The future in Lapsis is as matter of fact and banal as everyday life in our own time.
Nightmare Alley
For Nightmare Alley, writer-director Guillermo del Toro went back to the book—hardboiled crime writer William Lindsay Gresham’s 1946 novel, adapted as a film noir in 1947. Del Toro’s fascinating version can be called neo-noir, but not unlike his Oscar-earning The Shape of Water, it also exists in its own category. His Nightmare Alley is saturated in unnatural hues, its brooding palette the material from which del Toro shapes an artificial world.
Stillwater
Matt Damon beefed up for the role and—more importantly—achieved empathy in his characterization. His Bill is the sort of character Gary Cooper could have played—a man of few words determined to do the right thing. But in the today world of Stillwater, he’s a hero as well as—in his own words—a “dumbass.” He needs more words in his search for truth than are found in his thin vocabulary and his frontiersman integrity crumbles into cruelty when under pressure.
Swan Song
As in previous outings, LGBTQ director Todd Stephens places Swan Song in Sandusky, the run down, run-of-the-mill Midwest town he calls home. Udo Kier gives a memorable performance as a flamboyantly gay hairdresser who comes out of retirement in the nursing home for what turns into an odyssey as he stumbles toward his final job. He encounters old friends and enemies as well as strangers whose random but well-meant kind words can mean the world to the old and lonely.
Can’t Get Enough Documentaries
Thirty years ago, documentaries that found distribution outside PBS usually ran for a few weeks at art houses before disappearing. Nowadays, there’s more demand and more documentaries than ever because of streaming services. Perhaps most remarkable this year was Summer of Soul, edited by Quest Love from footage of 1969’s Harlem Cultural Festival. Unlike the chaos and mud at that adventure for affluent middle-class kids called Woodstock, the Harlem Festival was a multi-generational party where vendors sold collard greens, not brown acid, to a throng that included women in big hats clutching Bibles and dancing to the music. Questlove deftly wraps the music and crowd scenes into an entertaining history lesson that asks: Why was this marvelous event overlooked and eclipsed by the bogus mythology of Woodstock?
Summer of Soul wasn’t the lone music documentary of interest. The Sparks Brothers entertainingly chronicled Sparks, the brother act whose eclectic, genre-hopping career puzzled fans and irritated record labels. With The Velvet Underground (2021), Todd Haynes documented a band that sold few records during their time together but became legendary and seminal after their demise in the early ‘70s. Without Getting Caught or Killed by Milwaukee expat Tamara Saviano surveys the life and times of songwriter Guy Clark. But nowadays the real rock stars are chefs, a trend that began with Julia Child (celebrated in Julia), and fascination with food is displacing music (see Roadrunner: A Film About Anthony Bourdain).
Let’s not forget the importance of locally owned media (check out the inspirational story of a struggling small-town paper, Storm Lake) or the vital role of being unafraid to tell it as you see it (Martin Scorsese’s series on Fran Liebowitz, “Pretend It’s a City”). Let’s support filmmakers outside or at the edge of the Hollywood system as they continue to make provocative and entertaining films in 2022.
