Film Freak Central’s Top 10 of 2002

10. MORVERN CALLAR (dir. Lynne Ramsay)
Starring the remarkable Samantha Morton (who turns in this year’s best female performance, hands down) as the titular Morvern, Lynne Ramsay’s follow-up to her wonderfully minimalist Ratcatcher is an examination of the ways in which reality is what you make of it. Brave and bleak, Morvern Callar is about the things you’re given and, more importantly, that which can not be taken away–recalling a quote from another top ten film: “It’s what you love, not what loves you.”

10. PANIC ROOM (dir. David Fincher)
Received coolly by the critics at large, a perceived disappointment to fans of director David Fincher, Panic Room is the best “Three Stooges” skit ever made, with Jodie Foster a surprisingly excellent foil in the John McClane mold for a trio of pathetic burglars. (As the nicest of them, Forest Whitaker does career-best work.) It seems to me that if you’re going to trounce a great filmmaker this year for taking a pop vacation, it should be Martin Scorsese.

9. WENDIGO (dir. Larry Fessenden)
And that question of what you love gains some measure of added resonance when the object of affection is a father who is distant and clumsy with his affections but a symbol of strength and constancy all the same. Larry Fessenden’s Wendigo is the third in the New York filmmaker’s trilogy of intimate horror films and his most emotionally affecting by far–judging by the quality of his other work, that’s a statement dangerously approaching hyperbole. The late third act transference of the Wendigo figure into the father as avenger–a metamorphosis represented with ingenious basement and in-camera effects–is a series of tightrope maneuvres that shouldn’t work but work like a bastard.

9. RAIN (dir. Christine Jeffs)
It speaks to the power of this coming-of-womanhood fable that I saw it over a year ago and it resonated into 2002, when the picture was finally picked up for North American theatrical distribution. To watch Alicia Fulford-Wierzbicki’s Janey pick up her mother’s bad habits is to witness the dawn of the next great actress.

8. CONFESSIONS OF A DANGEROUS MIND (dir. George Clooney)
George Clooney’s directorial debut is as ballsy as it is brilliant. Charlie Kaufman’s screenplay hits the right notes in its adaptation of Chuck Barris’s indescribably bizarre autobiography, understanding that the life of an anti-television television showmaker is timed perfectly for the film medium that finds itself at a crossroads where, increasingly, the pictures are approaching their television counterparts in self-reflexivity. An article about meta-watching by David Foster Wallace says more about the topic with more intelligence and passion than I could muster; sufficed to say that Confessions of a Dangerous Mind is a time capsule of the state of film at the dawn of the new millennium.

8. (tie) LOVE LIZA (dir. Todd Louiso)/ABOUT SCHMIDT (dir. Alexander Payne)
A breach of etiquette to call it a draw, I know, but Love Liza and About Schmidt are companion pieces in my mind, flipsides of the grief coin that set their lonely protagonists back at square one. Philip Seymour Hoffman and Jack Nicholson are equally riveting as Wilson Joel and the titular Warren Schmidt, respectively, and Kathy Bates appears in similarly earthy roles in both films. Each picture comes to terms with the hopelessness of living with striking yet organic ingenuity.

7. SOLARIS (dir. Steven Soderbergh)
A coming out party in 2002 for Clooney as not only director but also actor, Steven Soderbergh’s Solaris is a film of substance and a palpable sadness, shirking easy answers (like so many films this year, its ending has been misunderstood as happy) while posing existential questions with a solemn poetry. The best Soderbergh film since sex, lies, and videotape and similar to it in its use of secondary media and discussions of relationships and personal identity, what haunts the most in the weeks following a viewing is something as simple as a line and a photograph on a refrigerator. Aside from Stockwell’s surprising Blue Crush and Walter Hill’s wonderful Undisputed, Solaris is the year’s most underestimated film.

7. TIME OUT (L’Emploi du temps) (dir. Laurent Cantet)
The very definition of a film that gets under your skin, Time Out (L’Emploi du temps) tackles the same theme as American Beauty–unemployment as social protest–but with a thoroughness and quietude unheard of in Hollywood pictures even of the indie kind. One throughline of 2002’s movies seems to be men in over their heads, and Time Out‘s ghostly star Aurélien Recoing (a ringer for stateside comedian Larry Miller) is their poster boy.

6. PUNCH-DRUNK LOVE (dir. Paul Thomas Anderson)
Paul Thomas Anderson’s most focused film by far–mainly because it has a destination and a heart–is also his most misunderstood and controversial. Where Magnolia is a loud three hours about being good to your children and Boogie Nights is an unapologetic Goodfellas rip-off and exercise in empty style, Punch-Drunk Love is a tight ninety minutes of a stalker’s violent love affair with an emotionally arrested sociopath. Adam Sandler proves that the sources he mines for comedy aren’t so funny recast as drama (and here again, the 2002 themes of identity and extra-textual readings), while Emily Watson makes a claim as one of the most adorable actresses in filmdom.

6. ROGER DODGER (dir. Dylan Kidd)
Campbell Scott comes into his own in this electric portrait of a wounded womanizer determined to corrupt his chivalrous nephew (Jesse Eisenberg) in the name of men everywhere. Although the ending is somewhat contradictory, it results in a parting shot of perfection.

5. THE BOURNE IDENTITY (dir. Doug Liman)
Another film that reminds of 1982’s Blade Runner, indie stud Doug Liman’s The Bourne Identity melds the ebullient kineticism of his Go with the adroit handling of charming actors of his Swingers. A film that is essentially about the self and the creation of the self, The Bourne Identity finds a better Ripley for Matt Damon in a sneaky updating of Ludlum’s Cold War creaker. Suggestions abound that Damon’s superspy is a cyborg of some sort while the conventions of genre, presented as they are with a deadpan irony, reveal a certain spy franchise to be the doddering dinosaur that it is.

5. BOWLING FOR COLUMBINE (dir. Michael Moore)
The Leni Riefenstahl of his day, Michael Moore has neither a liberal nor conservative agenda, but one uniquely his own–and damn if it isn’t compelling and at times useful, as is the case with Bowling for Columbine, a documentary that peels back the layers of America’s “culture of fear” with alarming acuity.

4. SPIRITED AWAY (dir. Hayao Miyazaki)
Japanese animé master Hayao Miyazaki’s latest girl’s fable is the magnificent Spirited Away, easily the best animated and foreign film of this year and, without question, the longest of long shots to even be nominated for either category come Oscar time. The continued disrespect of films of this quality will forever remind me of the indelible image of Opie getting the statuette last year while David Lynch and Robert Altman talked to each other in the audience. Its animation above reproach and its story as laden with subtext as it is with valuable life lessons, Spirited Away astounds not only with its own mastery, but by demonstrating again the gulf between Japanese animation and the misogynistic, indistinguishable garbage churned out by Disney every year.

4. PUNCH-DRUNK LOVE (dir. Paul Thomas Anderson)
Audiences voiced the complaint that Adam Sandler’s fans laughed during Punch-Drunk Love out of presumed obligation. But the film is funny–and just a little mad; like the Reese’s peanut butter cup, there’s no wrong way to view this dizzying–punch-drunk–romance, which, lest we forget, features a song from Popeye on its soundtrack. Emily Watson has never been more enchanting.

3. ABOUT SCHMIDT (dir. Alexander Payne)
Alexander Payne tackles life-after-loosely-assigned-purpose with his third film, About Schmidt. Featuring another exceptional late-career performance from Jack Nicholson, the movie pokes fun without feeling mean-spirited, capturing Payne’s native Nebraska and my native Denver with the same kind of unblinking critical affection. Moving at the pace of careful consideration, About Schmidt works towards a finale that is tremendously satisfying both emotionally and narratively. The movie pays off like a sumbitch, in other words, and it earns its satirical blows every step along the way.

3. THE BOURNE IDENTITY (dir. Doug Liman)
Spy thrillers aren’t supposed to be this good. Part The Tenant, part Memento, Doug Liman’s genre debut is as reverential as it is unpredictable and as virile as it is intellectual. Matt Damon, you beat your friend Ben in the action-hero sweepstakes–now make the friggin’ sequel.

2. ADAPTATION. (dir. Spike Jonze)
Spike Jonze and Charlie Kaufman’s collaborative follow-up to Being John Malkovich, Adaptation. is an endlessly rewarding mind trip that, like its predecessor, provides a porthole into the mind of everyman. Nicolas Cage makes the best twins since Jeremy Irons, giving a decidedly non-Cage performance in a picture that wanders around in our collective night, searching for love and the freedom to accept things at face value. There’s a Van Morrison song that has the line “I will be satisfied not to read between the lines,” and by the end of the film it’s clear that the adaptation that our hero Kaufman adopts is to understand what Wallace Stevens saw as the difference between the nothings that are not there and the nothings that are. Beyond its audacity, Adaptation. is a liltingly simple love story and the process a man too smart for his own good undergoes to begin to trust.

2. WENDIGO (dir. Larry Fessenden)
There is a cutaway to a cooing baby late in the myth-laced horror drama Wendigo that shatters any hope we have of escaping the film’s emotional grip. Larry Fessenden is M. Night Shyamalan with a rawer, more personal vision, cloaking as he does piercing societal critique in genre conventions, and that proverbial spoonful of sugar tastes very good indeed. Wendigo is among not only the year’s most moving films, but also its most visually sumptuous.

1. TROUBLE EVERY DAY (dir. Claire Denis)
French master director Claire Denis’s amazing Trouble Every Day is the most insightful film about sex and gender that has perhaps ever been made. Its tale of sexual cannibals locates the literal source for the euphemism “consummate” and, oddly enough, of the Biblical euphemism “know.” Cries of passion and cries of dismay blend into a genuinely disquieting soundtrack against Tindersticks‘ haunted compositions. With Agnes Godard’s breathtaking tableaux the backdrop to Denis’s tender atrocities, Trouble Every Day understands the lie of sexual politics in the bedroom and presents its case with frankness and a vicious intelligence. By getting at the heart of the base desires that comprise a person (hunger and sex), Trouble Every Day leads 2002’s identity quests while understanding that the backbone of all successful relationships is understanding that crystalline moments of connection are the only reward for hours and days of interchangeable normalcy–and enough.