A fair number of these films are famous in one circle or another, but have yet to have the Middlebury Reel Critic stamp of approval. Now they can rest assured that they are truly the best films of 2013.
The Act of Killing
This is a movie that attempts to do no less than change our understanding of history. Its method might also change our understanding of how fact and fiction can be used in film. Director Joshua Oppenheimer says in an interview that the 1960s Indonesian genocide would be like murdering every intellectual in America and then making a national legend out of the murders, celebrating them for the next 50 years. The murderers say they stylize their past killings after Hollywood gangster movies; what Oppenheimer has done is cast those killers, now in their 70s, in a “fictional reenactment” of their murders. We see the murderers write and stage their past killings and then star as themselves, committing the murders again in a strange movie within the documentary. The result is something altogether new in film, something both real and surreal, containing a few of the most interesting and perplexing moments I’ve ever seen in film. Who is acting here, and when? When are these people being honest and can they even know that themselves? Do these people feel guilty? If they do, how in the world could anyone possibly deal with such guilt?
12 Years a Slave
Steve McQueen’s terrible and beautiful depiction of evil and injustice. It’s a movie that has appeared on more top 10 lists of the year than any other, with a big-name cast and a big budget, and it’s a movie that is far better than the moralizing Hollywood History Lesson it might appear. The politics of what it represents will win 12 Years an Oscar, but what makes 12 Years special is its lyrical photography, which allows us to watch Solomon Northup, after a botched hanging, dangle from a rope on a tree, between the earth and the sky, for an unbroken, silent 2 minutes, while Northup chokes and spits in his state of figurative and literal limbo. It’s an apt metaphor for the movie’s method in general, and just one example of McQueen’s conviction and masterful artistic direction.
Stories We Tell
This is another documentary which pushes conventional filmmaking boundaries, and should be categorized in its own genre. Stories We Tell is concerned with the limits of narrative and memory, as applied to the human ability to re-tell (or tell at all) the stories of our lives. It is neither cold nor conceited in its approach to such big ideas; this is about as personal a movie as can be made, with Polley interviewing her entire family about her parents and her childhood. The movie builds layer after layer of intricacy as everyone in the family has a different interpretation of the past. Polley somehow seems to give all of these voices equal credibility. There are many great surprises contained in the film; Stories We Tell remarkably seems to reinvent its entire structure to accommodate them. The film ends up as something like a love letter to Polley’s father, poetic yet immediate and shockingly honest.
Inside Llewyn Davis
A supremely intricate meditation on the life of an artist and death in general, which also happens to be tremendously funny and watchable throughout. Llewyn Davis is one of the Coen Brothers’ best movies. Though I’ve reviewed this film already, it’s worth a second mention. See the full review in the Jan 22 edition of the Campus at middleburycampus.com.
56 Up
I feel a bond with the Up series like with no other films I know, and I suspect that many people who watch the series feel the same. The films’ enormous ambition is to document 14 people’s lives every seven years, beginning when they were seven years old in 1960s London. This is a one-of-a-kind project with a staggering 49-year-scope that seems nearly impossible to replicate. 56 Up continues the experiment in 2013 and finds the characters approaching retirement. Their challenges have changed but, of course, not diminished. These people’s lives resemble my life and the lives of people I know; they face the same challenges and problems, and that is certainly a large appeal of the films. And yet, every entry in the Up series also contains impossible miracles and catastrophes that feel improbable in life – and then happen to all of the characters in all of the entries over and over again. It is impossible to know how close director Michael Aedpt comes to accurately capturing these people’s lives. Surely no one can be totally summarized in a 3 hour film (or even 8 of these 3 hour films), and these people often tell us this on camera. But if Roger Ebert is right, if movies are the greatest empathy machine of any art form, then the Up series must surely be the masterpiece of his maxim and one of the boldest and most powerful projects in film history.
The Best Films of 2013
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