Some years just aren’t good to moviegoers. 2004 birthed few movies worth mentioning (Eternal Sunshine for the Spotless Mind, Kill Bill Vol. 2, and Mean Girls practically finish the list). Conversely, some years are great to film--2007 for instance saw There Will Be Blood, No Country for Old Men, Michael Clayton, and The Diving Bell and the Butterfly all grace the silver screen.
Fortunately, the stars aligned, and 2014 was a stellar year in film. We got Boyhood, and Birdman, and Foxcatcher, and Whiplash, and Nightcrawler, AND The Babadook--the list goes on, but I’ll stop there.
Funny enough, the good years seem to come with a theme that stretches across their respective filmographies (coincidence? self-projection?). 2007 saw a type of rejuvenation of the “lonely man” archetype popularized by Paul Schrader’s “Night Worker” series of films. Upon reflection, 2014 saw many of its films measure their ability to be “revolutionary” in hours, and minutes, and seconds; they pushed cinematic boundaries by manipulating how films portray time.
Boyhood seems like the most obvious example of a film representing time in a “new” way, and its deceiving because of it. The film has received widespread acclaim for its portrayal of twelve years in a family’s life, filmed across twelve years real-time. Certainly there is technically no other film like it, simply because no other film was produced over a twelve-year period. And while it is interesting to see Boyhood’s Mason and co. age twelve years throughout the span of three hours (and in the process to relive moments in time like the book release of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows unstaged), beneath the glamour of the movie’s unprecedented production schedule, it’s time trick is just that--a trick. Obviously the movie examines time, but not uniquely, like it wants you to believe; rather, it examines time like anyone else would--like everyone else has to.
Alejandro G. Inarritu’s Birdman stands at the opposite end of the spectrum, presenting time in a highly formalistic way. Whereas time passes in Boyhood it flows in Birdman, making it the truly unique interpretation of the fourth dimension (despite what the former would have you believe). The camera floats continuously not just through space, but time as well, trimming away the “fat” of the narrative and conflating scenes of “artists” producing “art” into a pressure-cooker that eventually reaches its breaking point and bursts into surrealism and absurdity.
Somewhere in the middle lies the lesser-seen Locke, directed by Steven Knight and starring Tom Hardy. The film’s narrative takes place across one single, 84 minute car ride, with the camera never leaving the car. Locke is the only passenger, meaning he is the only character ever on screen, and speaks to other characters only via his car’s speaker phone. By the end of Locke’s hour-and-a-half drive into London he has successfully annihilated his professional and personal lives. While the premise isn’t exactly “cinematic”, by staying with Locke in-real time the film lets the viewer witness every second of the man’s disintegration.
Way back in the third paragraph I mentioned that the “theme” I draw from a given year’s filmography may be self-projected rather than widely felt, but that issue becomes irrelevant the more I think about it. After all, studying the films in 2014 through the lens of time has been fruitful, if only for my sake. Even if it’s “uniqueness” is ultimately glib, by making a spectacle of the objectively mundane maturation process, Boyhood makes everyone’s past seem special, or somehow larger-than-life; a treat to be savored, rather than a given to be endured. Meanwhile, the blurring of time and space in Birdman layers spectacle on spectacle until eventually absurdity replaces reality--not a bad representation of life in a world with increasingly bleaker political and social climates that make it ever-harder to understand. Locke emphasizes that no moment should be wasted, because in every moment lies the potential for life-changing events.
Birdman manipulated time to make art look absurd; 2014, however, used time to make films that were great. Tit for tat, the films produced in 2014 cement it as one of the richest years recent history. Let’s hope for an equally profound (and thematic) 2015.
"2004 birthed few movies worth mentioning." Maybe you should go see some movies:
The Incredibles
Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (the Cuarón one)
Million Dollar Baby
The Machinist
Sideways
The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou
Collateral
Howl's Moving Castle
Before Sunset
Vera Drake
The Motorcycle Diaries
Bad Education
Maria Full of Grace
I Heart Huckabees
Shaun of the Dead
Napoleon Dynamite
Anchorman
Dodgeball
Harold & Kumar
Team America
Kung Fu Hustle
Saved!
District B13
All 2004.
Posted by: 2004 Movies | March 23, 2015 at 01:59 PM