Top 10 Films of 2005
by Brian Eggert
9/18/2007
I imagine many critics' "Top Ten" lists for 2005 don't look like mine, especially given the high-placement of blockbusters like Batman Begins. Rarely are there years where talented filmmakers create such skillfully-constructed, big-budget entertainment, imbibing thrills with mature sensibilities. We’ve got a list of incredibly smart films this year; even adventure stories resisted being labeled as cheap thrills.
Big budget escapism is the first of three tones marked by this year’s list. Intelligent-and-violent-yet-mainstream seems to be the second category, which includes Sin City and Lady Vengeance. Contrasting both previous types are temperate and emotional dramas. Our first entry at #10 fits into this category.
10. Saraband
Ingmar Bergman’s sequel to his 5-hour masterpiece Scenes from a Marriage (1973), Saraband doesn’t dwell on tying up loose ends left ambiguous in the original film. Instead, he uses these characters to awaken us to the passing of time. Liv Ullmann and Erland Josephson reprise their roles, both performers now worn and aged. Their characters’ relationships with each other and their families remain selfish. Unchanged by the specificities of life, both Marianne and Johan continue to be their often cruel, often tender selves. Once again, Berman meditates with cinematic poetry on human despair, his characters driven toward misery rather than happiness—a theme present throughout Bergman’s sixty-year career. Though in 1982 he claimed Fanny and Alexander would be his last picture, Saraband is now said to be the capper on his legendary filmography. A fitting end for an artistic legend.
9. Kingdom of Heaven: Director's Cut
I was admittedly disappointed by Ridley Scott’s theatrical cut of Kingdom of Heaven, as were many critics. Regrettably, Scott was forced to make cuts to his original version, reducing his picture to 145 minutes from 194 minutes. But a year later, in 2006, his “Director’s Cut” was released on DVD at the original length. Anyone familiar with Scott’s revisits to Blade Runner, Gladiator, and Alien (a film I thought could never be improved, but alas, was), knows that his changes aren’t merely superficial add-ons like so many DVD “unrated” versions. Instead, entire plotlines are introduced or elaborated on. Balian (Orlando Bloom) has his angst fully described, making his growth to heroism all the more gallant when it flowers. Everyone in the superb supporting cast (Liam Neeson, Jeremy Irons, Eva Green, and David Thewlis) gets more screen time. Even the moderate political statement is strengthened, outlining how intolerant religious extremism has caused bloodshed all over human history. This is a grandiose film with enough brains and epic battle scenes to entertain any viewer.
8. The Constant Gardener
Director Fernando Meirelles’ The Constant Gardener is bred with the same earthy realism as his 2002 success City of God. Each deals with its own set of horrors, the former’s case being atrocities carried out by pharmaceutical companies, specifically in relation to political commerce. Ralph Fiennes, one of the best actors working today, plays Justin, quiet compared to his activist wife Tessa, Rachel Weisz, one of the best actresses working today. When Tessa is murdered early on in the film, we realize Justin and Tessa, though they were married, barely knew each other. Fiennes flawlessly captures Justin’s saddening obsession with discovering who exactly his wife was and why she was killed. Told primarily in flashback, the film employs the structure of John Le Carre’s novel, which indicates cynical truths about the world while not relying on linear storytelling. Rarely is a mystery so emotionally involving while also having something important to say.
7. Lady Vengeance (Kind geum-ja)
The third in a trilogy of revenge stories from Korean filmmaker Park Chan-Wook, Lady Vengence follows Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance and Oldboy’s examples, by making the execution of revenge into something more damaging to the avenger than the events prompting it. Starring Lee Yeong-ae (from Park’s great J.S.A.: Joint Security Area) as Lee Geum-ja, the film follows a woman released after a 13-year prison sentence for kidnapping and murdering a young boy. Wrongly imprisoned, after her discharge her cold demeanor surprises those close to her; ruined by her prison time and obsession with payback, she sets out to kill the man responsible for the boy’s death, only to find that she’s lost herself in her pursuit. Park adorns the film with his visual signature, bringing beauty to an incredibly violent subject.
6. Sin City
Robert Rodriguez co-directed, along with author Frank Miller and “guest director” Quentin Tarantino, an assemblage of three of Miller’s Sin City graphic novels, making a sumptuous visual production out of the postmodern and indefensibly chauvinistic source material. Problematic depiction of females aside (nearly every woman is a prostitute, a stripper, or at the very least a sleazy waitress), the result combines atmospheric elements of film noir with the embellishment of bloody comic book realism. Characters are colorful, even in their black and white state, occasionally splashed with a splatter of red or yellow. The impressive cast members (including Clive Owen, Bruce Willis, Mickey Rourke, and Rosario Dawson among many others) vanish into their respective roles. Wholly innovative in art design (images can be followed page-by-page from Miller’s books) and unique in concept, this is a truly original film, but the faint of heart shouldn’t be asked to tolerate it.
5. Brokeback Mountain
Observing the emotions of two lovers forced to stay apart, yet inescapably drawn together, Brokeback Mountain offers one of the most emotional theatrical experiences of 2005. Unfortunately, close-mindedness and bigotry met the film with homophobic backlash, making a joke out of the intense relationship described by director Ang Lee. A storyteller of vast talents, from Sense and Sensibility to Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, Lee has worked in a number of genres, each handled with attention to a particular character and his or her emotions. Heath Ledger gives an impressive performance as Ennis, an introverted man refusing to accept his homosexuality. Jack, played by Jake Gyllenhaal, recognizes his sexuality, but is tortured by societal prejudices against his hidden lifestyle. The two meet occasionally, shedding the skin of an intolerant culture to become their true selves, always in danger of being discovered. Universally romantic and tragic for any viewer, this is the best original love story told in years.
4. The Squid and the Whale
Previous to his artistic success The Squid and the Whale, writer-director Noah Baumbach was a little known figure in Hollywood who gained minor popularity with his debut feature Kicking and Screaming during the burgeoning independent film scene of the 1990s. After working with Wes Anderson co-writing The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, here Baumbach’s use of dialogue and quirky-but-truthful characters greatly improved, making the literate The Squid and the Whale bitingly observant of family life. Based on his own experiences dealing with his parents’ separation, a perceived egocentric father, and sexual confusion, this look at divorce is filled with wit and heart and tears. Jeff Daniels and Laura Linney give shockingly good performances, reminding us that Daniels is a much better actor than he receives credit for. Owen Kline (son of actor Kevin Kline) and Jesse Eisenberg play the children, and really, it’s their movie. Their reactions, however candid or disturbing, make this picture honest, perhaps self-consciously so, but honest nonetheless. It’s a cultured, clever drama, somehow infusing humor into the unfunny subject of a broken family.
3. King Kong
Only Peter Jackson could retell this classic story without reminding us of the original. This Kong-of-a-movie runs 3-hours long but doesn’t bore, not even for a moment. Naomi Watts plays Ann Darrow, an actress and eventual damsel, truncated from performing comedy by a Depression-punished economy. She’s saved by Jack Black’s Carl Denham, a madman director obsessed with exposing Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness,” capturing it, and returning with it to New York to turn a profit. Along the way, the surrounding images are so well-crafted that if you’re like me, your jaw spends half the picture in your lap. King Kong is less a remake of the 1933 classic than a fleshing-out of the relationship primarily assumed in the original. (In fact, I still can’t decide which film I love more.) Jackson’s vision makes the CGI-driven Kong into the film’s main character, as it should be, with enough personality (provided by Andy Serkis, aka Gollum) to evoke tears at moments of joy and pain throughout. It never stops showing us amazing sights, from a foggy port in New York City to the insect pit on Skull Island, while simultaneously keeping us in check with the emotions of its characters. Master director of bold, smart films, Jackson knows when to lighten his entertainment and when to inscribe it with heavy drama and meaning. Rarely does a film of this size satisfy its audience’s emotional and entertainment needs, but here you have it.
2. Batman Begins
Possibly creating the best superhero movie ever made, Christopher Nolan (Memento) elevates traditional man-in-tights storytelling with a more “realistic” approach to DC Comics’ Dark Knight. For the first 45-minutes, we don’t see the Caped Crusader, but instead his complicated birth. Rather than show us young Bruce Wayne’s parents shot down in an alley, we see a twenty-something Wayne confused, hungry for revenge, and needing an outlet for his fear and anger. Constructing a mythology appropriately dark given the character, Batman is treated as a tormented soul, burdened by an unquenchable longing for revenge and an all-encompassing responsibility to do good. This isn’t Burton or Schumacher’s Batman figure, not the colorful dark that is assumed disturbed because he says so; these aren’t flamboyant villains, but literal madmen who kill for psychotic or truly criminal reasons. Aside from top-drawer actors like Michael Caine, Morgan Freeman, Liam Neeson, Cillian Murphy, Tom Wilkinson, and Rutger Hauer supporting him, Christian Bale alone adds credibility to the character, otherwise made comic-booky by previous Batmans in the worst possible way. This is a serious, mature superhero film, directed with all the class we’ve come to expect from Nolan (and look forward to embracing again when its sequel, The Dark Knight, opens in 2008).
1. A History of Violence
Director David Cronenberg’s second outwardly commercial film (after his brilliant The Fly) nevertheless holds undercurrents of a historical trend: how conflict's victor writes off the past in self-deception in order to live with itself. Ultimately though, violence begets violence and we are unable to forget. While many detractors claim Cronenberg’s film is nothing more than solid entertainment—that the title refers to a single history—humankind too can have such a history, and this brilliant film plays as an allegory to it. Viggo Mortensen stars in a pensive, deliberately calm performance as a seemingly normal small-town man whose past is dripping with unimaginable bloody violence. Forgotten for the sake of his wife (Maria Bello, in an Oscar-caliber performance) and children, his past is boarded up. When the wood begins to rot, gangsters from his past show up for retribution and suggest his sordid history. He must accept that he is the sum of his actions, however respectable now and however terrible then, and attempt to do whatever is necessary to maintain his current life—all while facing his past. Featuring exceptional performances by William Hurt, Ed Harris, Bello, and Mortensen that only Cronenberg could draw out, this film once again proves why Cronenberg’s reveling in unease makes him one of today’s best directors. And though his past output has been notably antithetical to mainstream film, this proves Cronenberg is capable of bringing his own brooding masterpieces to a wider audience.
Honorable mentions:
The Aristocrats, Capote, Duma, Good Night and Good Luck, Grizzly Man, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, Land of the Dead, The Matador, Millions, Walk the Line, Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit, and The World's Fastest Indian