Best of 2013: #8. The Conjuring (James Wan)

#8. The Conjuring. d. James Wan. USA.

Whether planned or not, my best of the year lists always end up encompassing at least one major Hollywood effort, and this year, that distinction goes to this legitimately frightening and engrossing haunted house/exorcism tale that became one of the notable box office hits of 2013. Anchored by two marvelous performances from the leading ladies (Vera Farmiga, who's almost always great, and Lili Taylor, who hasn’t been this good in a long time), The Conjuring molds a number of familiar genre tropes (youthful games, bumps in the night, creepy children, murdered pets, possessed dolls) into a scary, entertaining, and—dare I say, coming from the director of Saw—tasteful bit of horror.

The Conjuring is available on Blu-ray and DVD in the U.S. from Warner Bros., who also released it in the U.K. and France.

With: Vera Farmiga, Lili Taylor, Patrick Wilson, Ron Livingston, Shanley Caswell, Hayley McFarland, Joey King, Mackenzie Foy, Kyla Deaver, Shannon Kook, John Brotherton

Down... on the Ground

This post was intended to analyze the similarities and differences between Up in the Air, Fish Tank and An Education, but unfortunately it proved to be a rather uninteresting exercise in surface observations and difficult prose. So I scrapped the idea, but salvaged the only thing worth taking from it: my disdain for Up in the Air. So apologies for the jumpiness and inconclusive arguments, but I thought it might be of some interest regardless. For those who haven't seen the films, I wouldn't recommend reading as this is infested with “spoilers.”

As we’re nearing the half-way point in 2010, I took a look back at what few ’09 releases I actually saw, and one trend really stood out: marital and parental escapism. In three of the notable award contenders of 2009—Jason Reitman’s Up in the Air, Andrea Arnold’s Fish Tank and Lone Scherfig’s An Education—the very same third act revelation appears as the protagonists make an uninvited visit to the homes of their respective lovers, discovering that their romantic flames are not only frauds, but frauds with spouses and children.

For Up in the Air’s Ryan Bingham (George Clooney), a man whose views of romance are mirrored (of course) by his on-the-go career which keeps him in transit for the majority of his time, a hotel bar encounter with a woman like Alex Goran (Vera Farmiga) leads to the most ideal of no-strings-attached affairs. Alex is a woman, seemingly, like Ryan: professional, mature, horny and uninterested in anything related to our traditional notions of maintaining a romantic relationship with someone. Through several different scenarios where Ryan is forced to interact with people whose notions of relationship stability greatly differ from his own, he undergoes a change of heart and falls for Alex in a way he’s likely never felt for anyone else.

In an attempt to compare/contrast An Education and Fish Tank, I hit a dead end, as they’re almost too similar. Both feature teenage girls as protagonists, their older love interests (Peter Sarsgaard, Michael Fassbender) are deceptively charming and both films happen to be directed by women. The only thing truly dividing them from a narrative perspective is their place in time and the issue of class. An Education’s Jenny (Carey Mulligan) comes from a typical middle class English family in the early 1960s, while Fish Tank’s Mia (Katie Jarvis) lives in the outskirts with her young, hot, single mother (Kierston Wareing) and little sister (Rebecca Griffiths). Their differences in quality, which is a steep one, can best be chalked up to the flatness and dryness of Scherfig’s images against the vividness and vibrancy of Arnold’s.

With surprising consistency, Jenny, Mia and Ryan’s worlds are all crushed through uninvited visits to their respective lovers’ homes. It was, after all, too good to be true for each of them, but the lessons aren’t all the same. For Up in the Air, Alex’s “other life” becomes just one of the film’s infuriatingly heavy-handed views of the traditional family structure. Alex is not only villainized through the revelation but all of the refreshing qualities that Ryan found in her morph into the traits of an unhappy wife and mother acting out. While it seemed relatively clear that Ryan’s young co-worker/traveling companion Natalie Keener’s (Anna Kendrick) function in the film was to give (false) validation to Ryan’s beliefs, Natalie’s purpose changes when the film places its scarlet letter upon Alex, as she starts to work as a defense for the screenwriters (and novelist, I suppose, though I haven’t read the book) in showing us that all women aren’t cruel, manipulative, heart-stomping adulteresses. It’s hard to determine whether the simple, vile justification of Alex’s away-from-home behavior or the nauseating placement of the interview footage of the real people laid off from their jobs where they all emphasize the importance of family is what ultimately destroys Up in the Air, but both elements certainly succeed in ridiculing the protagonist… or maybe we should have never trusted a filmmaker who tried to garner sympathy for a character who crushes other people’s lives as a trade.

All three films are available on Blu-ray and DVD in the UK. Up in the Air and An Education are available on Blu-ray and DVD in the US, and Fish Tank will be released by Criterion later in the year.

Papa, don't preach

Joshua - dir. George Ratliff - 2007 - USA

The truth is scarier than fiction, as they say, and director George Ratliff truly exemplified that with his first film, Hell House, a documentary about a sect of Christians who, infamously, design a haunted house with real-life terrors (abortion! homosexuality! the horror!) as the spooky attraction. Though told with a surprisingly unbiased eye, his subject is the sort of sick shit than not even John Waters would have thought up. With Joshua, Ratliff directs his first narrative feature, a pseudo-horror film that fronts as an all-too-familiar tale of a possibly demonic child. Creepy kids have been a staple in horror films for decades, and in the post-Sixth Sense arena of horror, a whispery child who sees ghosts really feels tired. Joshua, however, revels in preconceived horror notions to dissect the fears of parenting as seen through Brad (Sam Rockwell) and Abby (Vera Farmiga) Cairn, the not-so-proud parents of a new baby girl.

Ratliff opens Joshua with an overload of the familiar: young couple, expecting child, in beautiful Manhattan apartment (Rosemary’s Baby) with a stoic, creepy nine-year-old (The Omen) who vomits all over the floor during one of the early scenes (The Exorcist). The set-up might have been annoying if Ratliff didn’t pack this and subsequent scenes with so much tension and aggravation that you can’t help but squirm in your seat. The unveiling of the new baby to Brad’s parents (Celia Weston, Tom Bloom) and Abby’s brother Ned (Dallas Roberts) proves awkward, to say the least, in a sequence that overshadows the most irritating, overlapped-dialogue moment in Gosford Park. The characters vie for the attention of one another from Brad’s mother’s desire to hold the baby, her suggestion of baptism to the organized-religion-fearing couple, the interruptions of Joshua’s (Jacob Kogan) showboat piano-playing, and Brad and Ned’s desire to keep everyone on level ground. Instead of vying for the camera, Ratliff overlaps each family members’ self-importance, creating a swirling, almost repellent depiction of a family that cannot escape their own selves to relate with anyone else in the room. Like one of the final scenes in Neil Marshall’s The Descent, when Joshua vomits on the ground at the end of the scene, it’s hard not to share in his nausea and exasperation (though this is probably the only moment in the film where Joshua is the sympathetic one). This scene truly lays out the themes of the film in retrospect, painting the fears of each individual succinctly as they all crash into one another.

Joshua is a wholly contemporary horror film unlike any of its recent peers. Instead of bothering us with demons and ghosts, Ratliff attacks the almost palpable fears of modern parenting, raising questions so few people dare to ask, like “what happens if you can’t relate to your child?“ or even “what if you hate your child?” When Brad and Abby look at Joshua, they see a stranger, someone so fundamentally different from them that they almost question whether or not he came from their loins. Every point of dialogue between Joshua and parent resonates with confusion and the fear of not saying “the right thing.” When Abby becomes overwhelmed with the baby and Joshua to the point of psychosis, we see post-partum depression amplified on full volume. When Brad and Abby attend a school recital for Joshua, we see the empty bourgeoisie so alarmingly. And when Brad converses with his boss (Michael McKean), office life is reduced to painful inhumanity. In some ways, Ratliff puts too much on his plate (not to mention Kogan as the title character being quite bad), as the film becomes wearisome near the end, but Joshua never ceases to be unnerving in ways wholly realistic. Shine your shoes and pick a double-feature of this and William Friedkin’s Bug if you want truly unsettling depictions of contemporary fear in cinema.

Note: Some discussion has been brought up via the Internet (though I doubt the Internet Movie Database message boards qualify as worthy examination of cinema) about whether or not Joshua is both homophobic and sexist. Sexuality is never presented directly in the film, and all accusations of a homophobic read of the film are from mere implication (does liking classical music and hating sports make you gay? I really can’t say). As for the sexism, I think the claim is completely unfounded. People often forget that characters in film are seldom meant to be looked at as a paradigms of society as a whole. Even if we are to interpret Brad and Abby’s disconnection with their son as a result of his latent homosexuality, I can hardly accuse them or the filmmaker of any ulterior motives that are barely present in the film itself.

And PS: (spoiler alert!) try to find a more deliciously perverse scene in a film this year than Vera Farmiga's recollection to Joshua of how a pair of knee-high red boots made her feel sexy whilst rubbing blood up her leg.

Considerations

The Oscar nominations are coming soon, so I thought I'd run down a few of my dark horses -- likely none of which will get nominated. I'm not mentioning some of the more probable nominations that would please me, like Abigail Breslin and Steve Carell for Little Miss Sunshine, Mark Wahlberg for The Departed, Jackie Earle Haley for Little Children, Penélope Cruz for Volver, Sergi López for Pan's Labyrinth, etc.

Best Picture & Director
Alfonso Cuarón - Children of MenPaul Greengrass - United 93Best Actor
Nick Nolte - CleanMelvil Poupaud - Time to Leave (Le temps qui reste)Nolte reminded us that he was a good actor and perfectly complimented Maggie Cheung's instability with a surprising tenderness. Clean wouldn't have worked without him or Cheung. Le Temps qui reste also owes its success to Poupaud, who wonderfully expresses the confusion and denial of a man diagnosed with terminal cancer. It would have been easy for Ozon to cast someone just as attractive, but likely with lesser results.

Best Actress
Maggie Cheung - CleanAbbie Cornish - SomersaultBryce Dallas Howard - ManderlayCheung already won the Best Actress prize at Cannes two years ago (yes, that's how long it took Clean to come stateside), so an Academy Award nomination would probably mean less. Cornish is dazzling as a runaway teenage girl, and Howard made the difficult decision to fill Nicole Kidman's shoes as Grace in Lars von Trier's sequel to Dogville.

Best Supporting Actor
William Hurt - The KingDanny Huston - The PropositionHurt's performance in The King is probably his finest to date, a direct counter to last year's Oscar nomination for his tongue-in-cheek role in A History of Violence. When the plot of The King takes a turn from expectations, it's really Hurt that allows you to stick with the film. Huston, as Guy Pearce's outlaw brother, gives one of the more haunting performances I've seen this year.

Best Supporting Actress
Vera Farmiga - The DepartedGong Li - Miami ViceFarmiga, also wonderful in Down to the Bone, somehow emerges as the most fascinating character in The Departed. As the sole female in the main cast, she's fully believable as a professional woman on the exterior with a taste for bad boys outside of the office. Gong Li, despite not knowing how to speak English or Spanish, is both sexy as hell and genuinely effective. Both Farmiga and Li redeem their unnecessary love interest characters by proving more interesting than their male counterparts.