The Best Films of 2009 Posted by Anthony Lane

December 4, 2009
The Best Films of 2009 Posted by Anthony Lane

The year is not yet done, and nor, therefore, is the battle for eminence between its finest films. Foolish is the soul who would lay money on the candidates for Best Picture before "Alvin and the Chipmunks 2: The Squeakquel" has even been released. As often, the real challenge is not to sort out the wheat from the chaff but to clear the bundles of chaff out of one's head and remember what the wheat actually looked like. To take the two genres on which filmgoers should, by rights, be able to rely: most of the rom-coms of 2009 were a joke, though not the kind that you laugh at, and the merchant of mass sensation, while growing ever more adept in their capacity to turn the stomach and dazzle the eye, chose to ignore the response of more tender organs. No hearts were reported either to have melted or raced, for instance, when confronted with "Terminator: Salvation." Of the gangrenous "Watchmen," little needs to be said, except that we should pray for oblivion to do its merciful best.

And so to the happy exceptions. Kicks were to be had from the freefall sequence in "Star Trek," and laughs from the celebrated "macaroni-head" exchange at the end of "Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs." Animation, indeed, had another year so fruitful that, as has been widely pointed out, younger viewers are now surfeited with a variety of offerings whose vigorous wit is a rebuke to the dramatic fare dished up to their elders; as a result, "Up" and "Fantastic Mr. Fox" drew an audience of mixed generations, and particular plaudits should go to Henry Selick for stitching "Coraline" with genuine dread, not to mention a fine weave of weirdness.

Elsewhere, the Beatrice and Benedick Award for Couple Most Likely to Have an Argument and Get Off on It goes, uncontested, to George Clooney and Vera Farmiga, for the brainy and desolate "Up in the Air." Slugging it out with Jason Reitman's comedy are three more grounded movies from further afield. One, from Italy, or, rather, from the nation unto itself that is Naples: Matteo Garrone's "Gomorra" was a report from a war zone, yet the crimes and the cowerings of ordinary folk were laid forth without exaggeration and with an artful care that verged, amazingly, on elegance. Then, of course, we have "Anvil! The Story of Anvil," which brought hope to Jewish Canadian heavy-metal artists everywhere. I don't know one human being who did not come out of this movie with the feeling that life seemed more possible—more likely to surprise and nourish us, even in our sloughs and setbacks—than it did at the start of the day. The absence of Sacha Gervasi's film from the longlist of nominations for the Academy Award for Best Documentary is an oversight that will be greeted, I trust, with deafening and guitar-driven protests directly outside, and throughout, the Oscar ceremonies in March.

And so to Germany, and to Michael Haneke's "The White Ribbon," his best and most compassionate work to date; who would have thought that two young people in love could set off for a trip to the countryside, in a Haneke film, and return unharmed? There are three times to consider here: 1913, where the action is set, on the brink of the First World War; 2009, when the movie was released; and the years to come, which might, perhaps, measure this calmest of works as a precise and reliable gauge of what threatens us most, now and forever, without and within. One small village, it turns out, can harbor the sum of all fears.
The Best Films of 2009: The New Yorker Blog : The New Yorker (26 December 2009)
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/tny/2009/12/lane-best-movies-2009.html
http://snipurl.com/tv64m