Top Ten Films of 2008 by Tom Nixon

by TOM NIXON

I just love those moments when I’m reading a list and, say, my own top three occupy the 2, 3 and 4 spots below an unknown champion; that number 1 suddenly takes on an inordinate amount of power in my mind, a great potentiality shrouded in mist. In that way, a list can communicate excitement for a movie better than any number of superlatives, and this may be why I enjoy the process of list-making far too much. At the same time of course I recognize that such lists tend to be flippant, or self-indulgent with ridiculous pretensions to objectivity, and that taking them with less than a pinch or two of salt is a kind of madness.

A year from now my own list might drastically differ; even a month from now I’ll no doubt have regrets. But that’s fascinating, too; the way some films dissipate in time whilst others cling on hard, even grow stronger. It’s handy that lists work in this way, because many of the films I’ve chosen here are about just that; time in all its sly, slippery glory. Maybe all great movies are, in a way, but 2008 especially seems to wilt in its shadow, and whilst it may be short on real masterpieces – not many would’ve made last year’s list – it’s a year that’s been kept afloat by strong works from already established filmmakers, further honing their craft in an atmosphere tainted by memory, loss and fear for the future.

Still to see: A Christmas Tale, Synecdoche, New York, Wendy and Lucy, Let the Right One In, The Class, Ballast, Waltz with Bashir, Vicky Christina Barcelona, In the City of Sylvia

10) Redbelt (David Mamet)

A needle-concise demonstration of the price of honor in a dog-eat-dog world, Mamet’s latest is a paragon of understatement, an anti-martial arts movie which uses clichés to its advantage, manipulating you with incisive awareness of its own place in the genre’s philosophical pantheon. Mamet has been guilty in the past of being a tad too smart for his own good, but Redbelt is a muted work of pinpoint emotional pushes and pulls, with a seething bittersweet ending that works against all odds.

9) Burn After Reading (Coen Brothers)

Criticized for being misanthropic, lightweight or just plain unfunny, Burn After Reading clearly has a much narrower target audience than the Coens’ previous masterpiece No Country for Old Men. I found it to be an ideal, if slightly too silly, companion piece; another tragicomic story of little people striving unsuccessfully for order in an absurd world, an often hilarious clusterf*** of ridiculous misunderstandings and tried’n’tested Coen gimmicks masking a vulnerable human core.

8) Wall-E (Andrew Stanton)

I’ve always seen Brad Bird (The Incredibles, Ratatouille) as Pixar’s most mature director, but Andrew Stanton’s previous Finding Nemo touches my softest spot of all, tapping into a childlike wonder to which I’m rarely given a key these days. Wall-E is both more and less than Nemo; the first stanza is pure cinema, rippling with rapture and post-apocalyptic pathos, wordless yet as articulate as anything you could name. Much of the rest is sadly flat in comparison; the satire a little obvious, the thrills childish. Had it been a short it may well be topping this list.

7) Encounters at the End of the World (Werner Herzog)

Nature is for Herzog a fearful thing, an ocean of chaos and darkness over which our every construct and conceit is a sheath; only in the midst of that sublime fear is he truly alive it seems. Beginning his Antarctic documentary at the McMurdo Research Center, he barely contains his disgust concerning his urbanized surroundings (an “abomination”, he grumbles) – he even hates the sunny weather for its… comfort. Moving out into the icy wastes then, themselves thin layers between man and beast, he inevitably comes into his own; it’s the last great unspoiled realm on the backside of the world, the ultimate vantage point for all anomalies, eccentrics and outcasts seeking meaning out on the fringes of human sense, a land of suicidal penguins and sci-fi seal calls. There’s really nothing stranger than watching an oddball make wry, blunt observations about his kin, especially when that oddball has an eye for poetry both wild and morbid, images that seem to externalize the most remote recesses of the human mind. It’s nonsense elevated to divinity.

6) Gran Torino (Clint Eastwood)

Clint Eastwood is the only person in the world who can make films like this; a delightfully gruff caricature of his own badass self takes down bad guys the right way this time, and seems no less heroic for doing so. Wisely, he hasn’t attempted to match the poetry of his other apologia Unforgiven, instead going for brilliantly sly self-satire which despite the occasional bung note serves as a near-perfect swansong, not de-romanticizing his mystique so much as re-casting it in a moral light.

5) My Winnipeg (Guy Maddin)

Guy Maddin fervently, unsuccessfully tries to escape his Winnipeg, the heart of the heart of the continent, ghost town, a sinister dreamscape suspended in memory by an ever-present drape of snow, populated by psychic mothers, sad architecture, a cadre of dead hockey veterans playing on inside a half-demolished stadium. An ode to home both fondly tongue-in-cheek and implicitly sad, its dreamily rendered, singularly bizarre anecdotes and reconstructions universalize its nostalgia as a waking dream we flee and cling to simultaneously.

4) Still Life (Zhang Ke Jia)

Two unsatisfied souls arrive in the increasingly flooded city of Fengjie – an astonishing wrecked setting which writes its own metaphors – looking to confront their past before forging new beginnings. Battered, full of catharsis, Still Life bears the weight of time on its shoulders like no other film this year; Fengjie necessarily bustles ever onward in the growing shadow of what once was, its routines preserved in the mist even as buildings crumble and the water devours from below. Flashes of magic-realism enhance the landscape’s resonance further, speaking of the distant future and the distant past, hope and atrophy bound into one fleeting, fluctuating unity.

3) The Wrestler (Darren Aronofsky)

I’m starting to think The Wrestler isn’t such a major departure for Aronofsky; what could provide better accompaniment for his metaphysical hotchpotch The Fountain than an exhilarating spray of half-real half-fake blood plastering the exhausted steroid-pumped body of a washed up ex-star, a man only in his element when being nailed to his proverbial cross, played with career-resurrecting physicality and pathos by blatant acting analogue Mickey Rourke? Another doom-ridden existential allegory which for all its scars somehow cleanses and liberates.

2) The Dark Knight (Christopher Nolan)

Though this thunderous – nay, operatic – box office smash might have benefited artistically from a little subtlety in the script, there’s a sense that Nolan might fear his own creation too much for that; if there’s hope in the suggestion that goodness can survive in even the worst of jungles, then the manic horror of The Dark Knight’s tone hints of darker truths. The film’s moral core is desperate against the nagging counter-argument that is Ledger’s Joker, lip-licking agent of chaos, somehow more alive, perhaps even more human than Wayne and his Batman. It is after all the Joker’s mad dog visage – not that of Batman – which grins from the t-shirts of every second teenager, and it’s all too easy to find the failure of his experiment unrealistic, Batman’s sacrifice insane. With that in mind, the tragedy of this tale climbs to disturbing heights.

1) Flight of the Red Balloon (Hsiao-hsien Hou)

A masterpiece in gesture which drowsily observes the day-to-day life of an endlessly distracted puppeteer mother (Juliette Binoche, superb) and her quiet son Simon, Flight of the Red Balloon drifts away from its kiddie classic ancestor along with its balloon, existing self-reflexively about that departure, tapping the rhythms of nostalgia and dislocation with simple, almost invisibly subtle impressionist strokes. It softly buffets and ultimately inhabits, touching much like Simon’s nanny’s own remake of The Red Balloon upon “very deep things I thought I’d forgotten.”