Homes Are Where You Find Them By A. O. SCOTT

December 20, 2009
FILM
Homes Are Where You Find Them By A. O. SCOTT

WHEN times are hard, people go to the movies to escape. Like most truisms, this sturdy kernel of Hollywood ideology turns out, on closer examination, not to be entirely true. The urge to escape is powerful, but it also has a way of subverting itself. We may flee to the multiplex or the Netflix queue hoping to escape troubles at home or out there in the world, but those troubles have a habit of following us on our adventures, popping up in our fantasies and haunting our bedtime stories.

That happens at the movies — where action extravaganzas and animated spectacles mutate into allegories of imperial war, social injustice or ecological catastrophe — and also, on notable occasions this year, in the movies, where escape hatches and psychic emergency exits are frequently blocked, and the repressed returns as if on cue. Our heroes and heroines strike out in search of a different reality, and filmmakers are increasingly able to oblige them, building far-flung new universes and worlds inside of worlds. But though our movie avatars can travel freely through time and space, skipping over metaphysical borders with digitally enabled ease, they are more often than not trapped in uncomfortable circumstances, perilous predicaments or their own heads.

Max runs away from his mother and sails to an island full of monsters, who hail him as their king. Coraline, slipping away from her distracted parents, passes through the looking glass into an enchanted realm presided over by a magically attentive mom. But "Where the Wild Things are" and "Coraline," drawn from children's literature, are hardly parables of wish fulfillment. Rather, they are sobering reminders that the imagination is a zone of terror as well as delight, and that, as Dorothy learned at the end of "The Wizard of Oz," there's no place like home.

"The Wizard of Oz" turned 70 this year. Its moral, echoing in some of the best films of 2009, has never sounded more ambiguous. What if home is no place at all? That question surely haunts Ryan Bingham, the corporate nowhere man played by George Clooney in "Up in the Air," whose gravity-defying life is a beguiling illusion of freedom. Ryan has given up the bonds and tethers that hold more earthbound souls (including the people it is his job to fire) in place, realizing only too late that he has sacrificed security and continuity.

A similar sacrifice is imposed on old Carl Fredricksen in "Up," who must let go of the home he has tried to take with him, and on the French family in Olivier Assayas's "Summer Hours," who give up cherished family property because the logic of modern life demands it. For Staff Sgt. Will James, the Army demolitions expert in Kathryn Bigelow's "Hurt Locker," the home front is a place where he feels alienated and adrift, divorced from his true self. He is most himself, most at home, in a far-away land, where the risk of death makes him feel alive.

Will's identity, like those of so many screen soldiers — fighting in fictionalized real wars or the imaginary conflicts that stand in for them — is splintered and volatile, an internal division that mirrors larger, deeper schisms. Sometimes it seems as if the only way to resolve this kind of split is to run so far that you end up on the other side, turned into something or someone else entirely. In the year's two most startling scenarios of intergalactic warfare — Neill Blomkamp's "District 9" and James Cameron's "Avatar" — a protagonist realizes his humanity by becoming something other than human, a literal alienation with disturbing and fascinating implications. Since there's no place like home, we might find comfort only in some place as utterly unlike it as we can imagine.

Which is another version of the longing for escape. But there is no escape. "District 9" situates its extraterrestrials in a grim earthly setting of shantytowns and racial intolerance, while "Avatar" dreams up an entirely new world in astonishingly naturalistic detail. Such feats of computer-generated conjuring may not be easy, but audiences have still come to expect them. A three-dimensional virtual environment, seamlessly blending the familiar with the impossible, has become a moviegoer's entitlement, and thus a familiar feature of the landscape. Where do we go from there? How do we escape from all this escapism?

Sometimes by coming down to earth in smaller movies, which continue to proliferate in the shadow of the big commercial entertainments. The middle-sized films that flourished in the past decade have fallen on hard times, with financing drying up and studio specialty divisions dying off. But an undergrowth of hardy, realistic stories is thickening, movies that can surprise us with glimpses of the world as it is. No place else is home.

Ten is the hardest number for a movie critic. But since this year ends in a nine and saw the release of two movies called "Nine," I've taken the liberty of making a 10-best list of 19 films. One stands alone, while the rest are presented in loose thematic pairs. And then there are nine more that will be worth revisiting in the years to come.

THE 19 BEST MOVIES OF 2009

1. WHERE THE WILD THINGS ARE Spike Jonze and Dave Eggers took Maurice Sendak's restless and surpassingly simple picture book and turned it into a dark and complicated fable, one of the most piercingly realistic cinematic treatments of childhood ever made. The film's technical brilliance is almost casual — quietly seductive rather than dazzling — and its high spirits are colored by a melancholy that grownups may find too sad to bear.

2. THE HURT LOCKER/IN THE LOOP The Iraq war, two ways: as action spectacle and as farce. Ms. Bigelow's film is a tour de force of high tension and directorial pyrotechnics wrapped around an astute and wrenching psychological drama. Its deep subject, embodied in the character of Sergeant James, is professionalism — the irrational, passionate devotion to a job of work. Careerism, the comic underside of professionalism, is the superficial subject of Armando Iannucci's verbally explosive satire on affairs of state. Dissimilar in style and mood, these two movies nonetheless add up to a cracked, sad, infuriating and glorious epic of our time.

3. SUMMER HOURS/OF TIME AND THE CITY These distinctive, highly personal meditations on home and its loss are also meditations on memory and history. Mr. Assayas takes what might have been an anecdotal family drama about antiques and gives it Chekhovian weight and pathos. Terence Davies, ruminating on his hometown, Liverpool, in the years of his youth, uses archival footage and the sound of his own sardonic, melancholy voice to animate the almost imperceptible passing of a life and a way of life.

4. UP IN THE AIR/ FUNNY PEOPLE Nothing fails like success, and sometimes nothing is sadder than comedy. These two movies, with likable stars (Mr. Clooney and Adam Sandler) and audience-pleasing directors (Jason Reitman and Judd Apatow), seem almost designed to be misunderstood. They laugh at the abyss, and encourage audiences to do the same. But the abyss is still there.

5. BRIGHT STAR/MEDICINE FOR MELANCHOLY Two love stories, centuries apart. "Bright Star," Jane Campion's rapturous rendering of the impossible passion of John Keats and Fanny Brawne is a romantic, literate, noncampy variation on the "Twilight" theme. Barry Jenkins's walking tour of San Francisco is the year's most surprising treatment of the ubiquitous theme of post-whatever racial identity. Both are bracing examples of filmmaking intelligence applied to matters of the heart.

6. PRECIOUS/CORALINE These films, named for their young heroines, are about girls who initially embrace fantasy as an antidote to the disappointments of reality — horrific in the first case, merely stultifying in the other. Both of them prove to be tenacious, resilient and smart. "Precious" in particular will outlast the complaints of its doubters, who somehow mistake its volcanic melodramatic energy for literalism.

7. AVATAR/DISTRICT 9 We have met the enemy, and it is us.

8. A SERIOUS MAN/ANVIL: THE STORY OF ANVIL A heterogeneous pairing only because the first is a Coen Brothers shaggy-dog puzzle and the other is a heavy-metal documentary about a band that never quite made it. On closer inspection, though, the connection should be obvious. Both movies examine the glories and tribulations of Jewish life in suburban North America — far north, as in Minneapolis and Toronto — in the second half of the 20th Century. The bar mitzvah double feature of the year.

9. GOODBYE, SOLO/SUGAR Ramin Bahrani's tale of a Senegalese taxi driver in North Carolina and Ryan Fleck and Anna Boden's chronicle of a Dominican baseball player in Iowa (and elsewhere) offer insightful, surprising glimpses of American reality. And the two films, the first composed in an almost spiritual key of humanism, the other an unassuming piece of social criticism, are glowing examples of a new American realism.

10. GOMORRAH/THE BAADER MEINHOF COMPLEX European violence, present and past. "Gomorrah," Matteo Garrone's investigation of organized crime in Naples, is a sprawling, vivid rebuttal to Hollywood Mafia fantasies. Uli Edel's painstaking reconstruction of left-wing terrorism in 1970s Germany is a stinging rebuke to those who sentimentalize political extremism of any variety.

RUNNERS UP "La Danse: The Paris Opera Ballet"; "24 City"; "Invictus"; "Extract"; "Tyson"; "The Beaches of Agnes"; "Crazy Heart"; "Still Walking"; "Broken Embraces."
Film - Cinematically, Homes Were Where You Found Them in 2009 - Review - NYTimes.com (27 December 2009)
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/20/movies/20scott.html?pagewanted=print
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