The Best Films of 2017
By Zeke Trautenberg
During this tumultuous year, the movie theater was a site of refuge, introspection, and conflict. The year began with Donald Trump’s travel ban, an executive order which represented a challenge to openness and freedom of exchange. In response, the filmmakers nominated for the Best Foreign-language Film at the Academy Awards released a defiant statement, in which they extolled film as a cosmopolitan remedy to the politics of nativism: “So we’ve asked ourselves: What can cinema do? Although we don’t want to overestimate the power of movies, we do believe that no other medium can offer such deep insight into other people’s circumstances and transform feelings of unfamiliarity into curiosity, empathy and compassion – even for those we have been told are our enemies.”
The second half of 2017 was no less tumultuous. The revelations of dozens of allegations against Harvey Weinstein, first revealed in The New York Times and The New Yorker, ushered in the most significant reshaping of the power dynamics of Hollywood in the industry’s history. Rose McGowan, Ashley Judd, Annabella Sciorra, Salma Hayek, and the hundreds of other brave women and men who have come forward with their stories of abuse at the hands of Weinstein and other men in Hollywood have brought about a sea change in the culture at large. Ultimately, reforming the film industry’s toxic workplace cultures and practices, will require fixing the longstanding discrimination against and lack of opportunities for women and minorities in Hollywood.
Amid the charged partisan atmosphere of the country and the fallout from the Weinstein scandal, the film industry continues to adapt to an increasingly digital world. The proposed merger of Disney and Fox is a response to the growing clout, budget, and subscriber base of Netflix. This mega merger may well as a sign of things to come as studios consolidate to stave off competition from Amazon, Apple, and Netflix.
The list that follows is the product of my year at the cinema (and in front of my TV). I did not have the chance to see every one of the acclaimed or terrible films (here’s looking at you Geostorm) released in American cinemas this year, but all the movies listed here are worthy of your time.
10. Endless Poetry
Director: Alejandro Jodorowsky
Throughout his peripatetic career, Jodorowsky has returned time and again to his favorite subject: himself. Endless Poetry is a filmic memoir, which unfolds in nineteen-fifties Santiago, as a young Jodorowsky (played by the filmmaker’s son, Adán) comes of age as a poet. As occurs in The Dance of Reality (2013)—which is based on Jodorowsky’s youth in a small town in northern Chile—, Endless Poetry features repeat, direct interventions by Jodorowsky himself. In Endless Poetry Jodorowsky conjures imaginative sequences, production design, and characters amid his oppressive home life. One memorable sequence depicts the bedroom walls of fellow poet Enrique Lihn’s bedroom covered from floor to ceiling in scribbling. This three-dimensional page serves as a mirror to the film itself, in which present, past, and future intersect.
9. Ladybird
Director: Greta Gerwig
Greta Gerwig’s first film is a coming-of-age story about a young woman in Sacramento in the early 2000s. The film follows Lady Bird (Saroise Ronan) during her senior year at Catholic school as she takes up theater, loses her virginity, and goes to prom. The film is laugh-out-loud funny and features a stellar cast, which includes Laurie Metcalf, Beanie Feldstein, and Tracy Letts. In addition to portraying the pratfalls of young adulthood, the film depicts the frustrated pursuit of respectability and economic insecurity among middle-class Americans in the years leading up to the Great Recession.
8. I Am Not Your Negro
Director: Raoul Peck
Raoul Peck’s documentary is based on James Baldwin’s unfinished manuscript Remember This House about the civil rights leaders Medgar Evars, Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King, Jr. Like Now (1965), another film about race in America by a director from the Caribbean, Peck’s film is a confrontational call to action. Peck juxtaposes the Black Lives Matter movement and police violence against African Americans with Baldwin’s searing analysis of race in twentieth-century America. The film underscores the connections these two periods by bookending the film with images of recent protests against police brutality, but leaves viewers to draw their own conclusions about where the Civil Rights Movement and Black Lives Matter intersect. In his voice-over narration, Samuel L. Jackson channels the author’s stoicism and resolve and delivers one of the most potent performances of his career.
7. Icarus
Director: Bryan Fogel
There is always a certain lack of control in documentary filmmaking. The limited control filmmakers have over the ways their narrative unfolds is part of what distinguishes documentaries from fiction films. Bryan Fogel’s Icarus is a wonderful example of the ways in which documentary filmmaking is an adaptive art form. What begins as a story about an amateur cyclist who subjects himself to a rigorous doping regimen, transforms mid-way into a geopolitical thriller about a Russian sports scientist at the heart of one of the biggest scandal of modern sports: the systematic, state-sponsored doping of Russian athletes across decades. The scientist in question, Grigory Rodchenkov, is the kind of colorful character— his wardrobe includes bright orange shorts—that documentary filmmakers dream of. As the danger for Rodchenkov increases, Fogel grapples with how to intervene and tell a story that is no longer his own.
6. After the Storm
Director: Hirokazu Kore-eda
After the Storm tells the story of Ryota (Hiroshi Abe), a divorced father and novelist as he grapples with how to be a father after his recent divorce. Ryota works as a private detective, while struggling to write a second novel. However, instead of paying his alimony, the gumshoe spends his salary on his gambling habit. Abe communicates the protagonist’s sense of perpetual exhaustion and weariness with his slouched shoulders and hangdog expression. Ryota loves his son, but struggles to be a good father. The distance between father and son is exemplified by a memorable scene in which the author and detective watches his child play baseball with binoculars while sitting in his car. The film climaxes during a nocturnal summer storm which traps Ryota, his ex-wife, and son in the same apartment. As the rain falls, the fractured family renews the terms of their relationship and Ryota forges a closer bond with his son by sharing memories of his own childhood.
5. Call Me By Your Name
Director: Luca Guadagnino
Luca Gaudagnino is a master of the contemporary melodrama. His previous films I Am Love (2009) and A Bigger Splash (2015) unfold in settings heavy with symbolism—an old house, an island in the Mediterranean—and Call Me By Your Name is no exception. Guadagnino transforms a villa in Northern Italy into the site of first romance for Elio (Timothée Chalamet). The arrival of the handsome Oliver (Armie Hammer), who is there to assist Elio’s father with archaeological research, elicits a potent mixture of self-doubt, shame, and desire from the cosmopolitan teenager. Although the film depicts Elio’s emotional turmoil with an earnestness that may grate on some, its emphasis on naked feeling and passion is all part of its bittersweet fun. And if you need one reason to see Call Me By Your Name, stay for Michael Stuhlbarg’s monologue on life, love, and the loss, which is the single most memorable scene of the year.
4. Frantz
Director: François Ozon
François Ozon’s Frantz follows Adrien (Pierre Niney) and Anna (Paula Beer), two characters who are bound together by the same man, the recently deceased Frantz. Set in the aftermath of World War I, the film is an allegory of Franco-German relations, but also an exploration of guilt and the horrors of war. Shoot in gorgeous black and white, the film’s visuals are a departure for Ozon, who uses color to great effect in Potiche (2010) and The New Girlfriend (2014). Like these earlier films, Frantz features magnificent costumes (designed by Pascaline Chavanne), and a healthy dose of melodrama. And, as in In the House (2012), Frantz revels in the slippery nature of fiction. Ozon challenges viewers to discern the reason for Frantz’s visit to Germany and the meaning of the sentimental stories the interloper tells Anna’s grieving family.
3. The Shape of Water
Director: Guillermo Del Toro
The Shape of Water had been swimming around in Guillermo Del Toro’s head for years, before he got the idea that made it all click: the story had to pass “through the service entrance.” Set in the 1960s, the film follows the mute Elisa (Sally Hawkins) works as a janitor at a top-secret research facility—a recurring setting in Del Toro’s films—where scientists study a creature they captured from a river in the Amazon. Elisa falls in love with the creature, who like her cannot speak. Together with her gay artist neighbor (Richard Jenkins) and black co-worker (Octavia Spencer), Elisa sets out to free the creature from the lab and its vicious director of security (Michael Shannon). The film is an allegory of being different in a world built on the principles of order and knowing your place. Working with a budget of under twenty million dollars, Del Toro makes a film that looks many times more expensive. The production design incorporates art deco and modernism, with acute attention to detail. The special effects are also remarkable. For the underwater scenes, Del Toro used the dry-for-wet method, which involves suspending the actors and props on wires, pumping in smoke, using fans to create the illusion of movement, utilizing light caustics (projecting images of light in water), and shooting it all in slow motion.
2. Get Out
Director: Jordan Peele
A horror film and social satire, Get Out is an incisive depiction of race and racism in early-twenty-first century America. The film follows Chris (Daniel Kaluuya) and Rose (Allison Williams) as they embark on a weekend visit to Rose’s parents. As Chris and viewers see more of this WASPy household, which is seemingly haunted by a silent black maid and gardener, the manicured lawn and colonial style house transform into a nightmarish prison. The hypnosis sessions with Rose’s mother (Catherine Keener), in which Chris travels to the “sunken place,” is a frightening and vivid metaphor for black experience in America. The allegorical qualities of the film are enhanced by its pitch-perfect incorporation of the horror genre, from the eerie drive through the woods to the hidden laboratory in the basement.
1. Wormwood
Director: Errol Morris
The genre and medium-bending Wormwood is a film of the streaming age. This documentary-cum-series with a running-time of four hours was produced and released by Netflix in six parts and released in a limited run as a stand-alone film. Wormwood centers on the death of Frank Olson (played by Peter Sarsgaard in the fictional scenes), an Army doctor who died after falling to his death from his New York City hotel room in 1953. Errol Morris interviews Olson’s son, Eric who has dedicated much of his life to finding out what happened to his father. The Cold War, biological weapons, Hamlet, the Book of Revelation, and the misdeeds of the CIA intersect in this Russian Doll of a film. Morris offers a masterclass in the juxtaposition of sound and images, the use of split screen (the scenes with Eric Olson were shot with ten cameras), and, as A.O. Scott puts it, dogged cinematic sleuthing. The film’s use of fictional sequences alongside the talking head interviews and archival footage that are standards of the documentary genre, add depth to a film about the nature of truth and the pain of the search for truth. Towards the end of Wormwood, the investigative reporter Seymour Hersh tells Morris: “But don’t you know how wonderful it is not to have an ending?” In lieu of offering closure to the story of Frank Olson, Wormwood douses the viewer in a bitterness for which there is no salve.
Honorable Mentions
Dunkirk – Christopher Nolan
Graduation – Cristian Mungiu
It Comes at Night – Trey Edward Shults
Loveless – Andrey Zvyagintsev
Marjorie Prime – Michael Almereyda
Quest – Jonathan Olshefski
The Florida Project – Sean Baker
The Lost City of Z – James Gray
The Other Side of Hope – Aki Kaurismäki
The Unknown Girl - Jean-Pierre Dardenne and Luc Dardenne
Photos: Warner Bros./ABCKO/A24/Magnolia/Netflix/Gaga/Sony Pictures Classics/Fox Searchlight/Universal/Netflix
