Looking Back at One Year can Turn into Five: 2022 → 2017

Emerging from Review Season and heading face-first into Award Season, we are inundated. The surfeit of year-end countdowns is substantial.

There are a lot of them. And though there are admirable attempts to get our obsession with lists, it’s hard to know why they can be so compelling.

For me, it boils down to a public’s need to know which punctuation mark caps the year:

· Exclamation point (what a great year it was!)

· Ellipse (to be continued…)

· Question mark (wtf just happened?)

· Or simply: period (let’s move on.)

But I worry: in a single year, the average consumer (or critic!) can’t possibly absorb the enormity of a year’s content: films, albums, fashion shows, podcasts, oh my.

Let me ask you, dear reader: have you ever made it out of NYE with what anybody would call an “objective perspective?” With so much to distill at the end of the year, we’re still actively living in a moment. Neither removed nor indifferent to it, we are, rather, compelled by it.

I like end-of-the-year retrospectives. I delight in myths of finality.

I also like that there is a public interest in both self- and collective reflection.

One of the tools for understanding memory and for substantively dealing with the recent past, however, is to hold it up to a light — to let a little time pass before passing too much judgment.

In other words: we get better results when we wait.

Wait, think and, with distance, continue to reflect.

In a culture reliant on media- & consumer-driven results, the new/now/next is sutured to content-driven marketing.

Response, debate and conclusion are quickly presented. Then dispatched.

***

I started a little experiment about ten years ago. Every year, I look at pop culture (film or music) from 5 years before. After that much time, I’ve seen and listened to more. I’ve spent more time thinking about things — what’s changed, what matters.

And in film, specifically, I’ve found a reflective tool that allows me to ask: what made — and continues to make — me think, feel and respond? It’s usually a good rule of thumb that, if something sticks with you, it means something to you.

Plus, the process of looking back half a decade (not too far; not too recent) makes me reexamine the context of a year gone by.

I don’t know about you, but I feel better. Removed from the sheer lunacy of 2017, my heart and adrenaline levels have quieted. We may still live in a polarized country, but I remember that year’s particular brand of polarization as immediate…painful. Constant. It was unbearable at times.

Film responded to that moment in a number of ways. It made many escapist sequels (Thor: Ragnarok, Logan and, blessedly, the final installments of Pirates of the Caribbean and Fifty Shades…). Films were also reactionary, riling up liberal/conservative audiences after Donald Trump’s election (11/8/16, The Post, The End: Inside the Last Days of the Obama White House; In Our Hands: The Battle of Jerusalem, Saving Capitalism).

Those films, however “good” or “bad,” seem irrelevant now.

What remains important (cool even) is to see a trajectory of expanding voices (plotlines, filmmakers and actors). Girl’s Trip, Coco, Okja, The Beguiled and A Fantastic Woman don’t necessarily mean filmdom figured anything out in 2017; but glance over the list of films released even two years earlier and it’s obvious: the number helmed by women and people of color shifted.

My own subjective world has changed, too. There are films I loved that I no longer think about (The Darkest Hour, The Last Jedi) and films I disliked that have since won me over (Lady MacBeth, Guardians of the Galaxy 2).

As an exercise in restraint…

As an attempt to reign in the power and mystification of memory…

And with hopes that you will revisit a few strong and relevant voices that have now fallen into the recent past…

I present my little trip back to 2017.

(And if you’re still trying to decide what punctuation mark to affix to 2022, take a break. Come back in a couple years. The question will seem less stressful; it’ll be more practical to answer then. Maybe for now, make your own list from 5, 7, 10 years ago and take note of what’s changed?)

10. Columbus (Dir: Koganada, Running Time: 1:44)

Perhaps since the pandemic, films that show me things have become more impressive. My travel schedule is lighter and my willingness to go to there has waned. Perhaps this is why Columbus hit me as hard as it did. Having recently moved away from a small Midwestern town, this film entirely set in a small town (Columbus, Indiana) seems familiar.

It’s quiet — crickets, the sparsity of car traffic, the slow passage of a riverway dominate the soundtrack. But the film dabbles in explosive feelings. Columbus is an architectural Mecca: home to several mid-century masterpieces. The bigness of those features challenge the “small” lives of its characters. Framed against architectural titans, each character is simultaneously dwarfed and amplified.

9. Lady MacBeth (William Oldroyd, 1:29)

Oppression flows downward. We learn this lesson — again — as we watch a young woman (marginalized by gender and age) escape bondage simply to use her own powers (space and class) to hold dominion over others. A simple axiom is made complex by Amanda Pugh’s knockout performance.

8. I Am Not Your Negro (Raoul Peck, 1:33)

The so-called James Baldwin revival is welcome. And this film had much to do with it. Looking again at IANYN in the wake of George Floyd’s murder, this film helped “introduce” Baldwin to a new generation — and, in particular, a new audience of white viewers/readers. As an “origin point” for the resurgence in Baldwin’s book sales, syllabus inclusions and “general-public” awareness, this film is also an exemplar of the “found footage” documentary (like another favorite of mine: “How to Survive a Plague”).

With a script stitched together entirely from Baldwin quotations, it is a vivid quilt. Always powerful, it is a visual send-up to the passion and ferocity of The Fire Next Time.

7. Lady Bird (Greta Gerwig, 1:34)

A wry and symbolic coming-of-age, Gerwig’s film is best explained as “funny” and “strange.”

And maybe “honest.” Some people find it preposterous; I find the ironic humor and exaggerative personalities completely authentic. (Or, more realistically: I wanted these people to exist, even the overbearing ones which, granted, constitutes most of the cast.)

The film remains a great example of how perspectives shift Film. From the quirky vantage point of its female-led character/director, Lady Bird illuminates the broader capabilities of quiet cinema. It’s a 2017 Juno that’s more “twenty-first century” and, at least for now, has fewer diverging opinions.

6. The Florida Project (Sean Baker, 1:51)

Sean Baker’s slice-of-life filmmaking is subtle. The characters and dialogue, however, are anything but. The tag line of his previous film, Tangerine, best captures the latter part of this Subtlety Equation: “A hooker tears through Tinseltown on Christmas Eve searching for the pimp who broke her heart.” But Baker is more interested in letting his characters speak for themselves — adrift in a world that wants to forget they’re here. The hooker might “tear” through Hollywood, but Baker’s camera doesn’t interfere, content to witness the lives — fears, joys and all — of these trans women of color.

This style is more powerfully and explosively on display in The Florida Project. TFP delves into the sharp class and racial lines that remain strategically and inhumanely drawn to punish the impoverished.

In the “shadow” of DisneyWorld, the residents of a decaying motel continually brace themselves against double heats: the Florida summer and folks who see themselves as better-than. Willem Dafoe gives one of his best performances (in a career of best performances) as the man who understands the precarity of his residents’ fates — and the precarity of his own direct power over them.

5. Phantom Thread (Paul Thomas Anderson, 2:10)

Sumptuous and passionate — the fabrics shot in extremis, angled and tight, the actor’s-actor performances, the delicious score — Thread is more accessible than some of PTA’s other, languorous thought-pieces. It is a tribute to the illustrious and now-ended career of Daniel Day-Louis and the comeuppance in acclaim of Lesley Manfield.

4. Call Me by Your Name (Luca Guadagnino, 2:12)

It’s difficult for me to do justice to this film — at times lurid and intense, at others supple and fluid. It so resolutely transforms a place and time into a love story that I’m tempted to compare it to The English Patient and Titanic. The difference, of course, is that those films created their transformations with buckets full of big, bold — and loud — theatrics (war, icebergs). The loudest Call Me… ever gets is when it cranks up its brash 80s Italian-American pop soundtrack.

I won’t suggest the film is the “best” of anything; but it is a story, passionately rendered. And it resonates with me still as a strong and beautiful articulation of the confusing, fluid and tempestuous world of sexuality — its behaviors, identities and effects.

3. The Square (Ruben Östlund, 2:31)

In the news this year for Triangle of Sadness, Östlund hit big with other big ideas five years ago. His line of sight then was on the Artworld: its corruptions and absurdities; its passions and partisans. Though with a through-line narrative, the excitement of the film comes from its novel vignette structure. The characters (led by the fabulous Claes Bang) navigate strange and provocative scenes, centering one art piece, then another. As the audience travels alongside, we draw our own conclusions about what is (or isn’t) worthy. The film marvelously balances sympathy and critique.

(I’ll never forget the painfully awkward and ultimately showstopping performance art at the film’s center. That, itself, is worth the price of admission.)

2. Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri (Martin McDonagh, 1:55)

Five years ago, this was my pick. It ticked all my boxes: strong central characters, unique narrative, provocative circumstances. Excellently executed. And though I could talk about how much I love this film —how much I appreciated the bonkers unraveling of a tragedy in a small fictional town — the story of Three Billboards is ultimately about how it moved from my top to number two on this list.

This movie is a standout in already-standout careers: McDormand’s and McDonagh’s. But the story of the year is about what may best be remembered as another cultural force from 2017…

1. Get Out (Jordan Peele, 1:44)

The effects — both critical and cultural — that Get Out had for film and beyond is impossible in a space like this. Subverting/inverting the codes and tropes of Horror; rewriting the standards by which we even view “the horrific;” centering black experiences through berserk allegory; using actor credibility as a meta-device to distract audiences from their characters’ nefariousness (Williams, Keener, Whitford); “hiding” social commentary in plain sight to remain a box-office draw; etc. & etc.

This film appealed to a broad audience; it lectured as it entertained. It will be taught in classrooms and entertain audiences for decades. It’s no surprise that it landed on Sight & Sound’s most recent list of the greatest films of all times.

The film grows in power each year. It is an example of how pop culture, in general, and film, in particular, shift over time. As #oscarssowhite evolves into something else (still pretty white; but recognizing a few more folks of Asian descent these past few years), it’s hard to think of a film that has had such a direct impact on (re)shaping Hollywood’s “trust” in black-led films: a racist criterion provoked, examined and excoriated by a brilliant film “about race.”

Happy movie-going in 2023! May we eventually find the right punctuation marks for our lives. But for now, I’ll just grab a refill on my popcorn…