Eyes Wide Open 2014: The Year's 25 Greatest Movies (and the 5 Worst)

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INTRODUCTION

* A Most Mediocre Year *

As a thoroughly enjoyable but juvenile piece of new-millennial action-raunch-farce The Interview was never going to contend for anything in 2014, whether in terms of awards or people’s long-term memories. But it nevertheless ranks as one of the year’s most important films. Why? The Sony hacking fiasco swirling around the Seth Rogen and James Franco buddy comedy about a TV host and his producer convinced by the CIA to assassinate Kim Jong-un (just a year ago, writing those words would have read like a drunk screenwriter’s half-remembered dream) that feels highly representative of where the film industry is today.

No, it’s not discovering the (shocking!) fact that Hollywood executives can speak rudely about film stars and even presidents, and occasionally use foul language.¹ The studio acted with brazen attitude in signing on to a toilet-humor buddy comedy about assassinating a living dictator that never would have been contemplated, let alone released, by a major studio 20 years ago. Once The Interview’s Christmas Day release was met with the devastating hacker assault, Sony then folded so swiftly in the face of pressure you could almost feel the breeze. Desperation mixed with an overabundance of caution is not a good combination for any industry. You can see both of those attributes in this year’s mostly pallid offerings. Fortunately, even the worst films on offer in 2014 didn’t involve their studios cravenly bowing to the leaders of a repressive gulag-state.

When asked recently about what films she liked this past year, a friend said immediately, "Boyhood. (Long pause) Maybe … Guardians of the Galaxy?" That response isn’t troubling for the films themselves. If more films grinding off Marvel’s assembly line had even a third of Guardians’ charm, the superhero takeover of our theaters would be less onerous. The problem is that of all the films that came out in 2014 there are a few shining examples of brilliance but then a long drop-off to mediocrity.

What makes this so galling is how many plenty of opportunities there were for it to go the other way. The year saw new work from a pack of normally reliable filmmakers, from George Clooney to Christopher Nolan, Clint Eastwood, Paul Thomas Anderson, and J.C. Chandor. One after the other, their films failed to measure up.

Initially a late 2013 awards contender bumped to the February graveyard, Monuments Men started the year off in poor fashion (see The 5 Worst Films of 2014 later in the book). This was seemingly tailor-made for the sort of middle-brow adult drama studios rarely bother with anymore but Clooney has made a commendable career out of. But the film was also so smug and dull that it couldn’t even find anything for Bill Murray to do. This is the kind of thing Ben Affleck will be making in 20 years if he isn’t careful.

The once-reliable Clint Eastwood ruined not one but two worthwhile projects in the same year. His off-key rendition of Jersey Boys took a hook-heavy musical and turned it a Goodfellas wannabe that didn’t realize the sing-along music was the best thing the show had going for it. That was supposed to be Eastwood’s crowd-pleaser. Later in the year came his long and meandering American Sniper. This was theoretically based on the autobiography of Chris Kyle, who’s credited with more kills than any other American military sniper. But Bradley Cooper has yet to prove that he can do more than charm as a lead. Also, the fantastical script invents so much out of whole cloth that it feels more inspired by than based on a true story.

Whatever else moviegoers think about Paul Thomas Anderson’s work, indifference is not the usual reaction. When Anderson’s adaptation of Thomas Pynchon’s novel Inherent Vice finally hit the screen in December, it was hard to muster any strong feelings about it one way or the other. This is a shocking development for the maker of gratuitously ambitious overachieving jaw-droppers like Magnolia and There Will Be Blood. The possibilities inherent in setting Anderson loose in the loony psychedelic thickets of Pynchon’s 1970-set hippie detective novel should have made for some kind of wooly-haired, stoned mock epic. Despite all the best efforts of Joaquin Phoenix, Owen Wilson, Benicio del Toro, and the great Josh Brolin (whose fame-seeking, hippie-busting LAPD detective is a career high for him), Inherent Vice slinks rather than strides across the screen.

The key to appreciating Christopher Nolan used to be knowing his most interesting work lies outside the Batman trilogy. That changed with Interstellar, in which the normally agile filmmaker was finally overtaken by the pomposity that started creeping into his work with The Dark Knight. Mashing together a climate-collapse setting with a physics-shredding Kubrickian jaunt into the outer reaches of the cosmos, it squandered its potential on a gloomy family drama packed with resolutely uninteresting characters and enough pseudo-scientific blather to fill a couple bad sci-fi paperbacks. There are scattered moments where Nolan recaptures the resonant thrills of a genre-defier like Inception, where his cross-dimensional vision and Hans Zimmer’s operatic score take your breath away. But more often than not it’s a saggy drag that leaves you wishing you could just watch Contact again.

Chandor’s long-hyped A Most Violent Year should have been a crowning achievement for this highly skilled filmmaker. But Chandor’s sluggish story about an ambitious small businessman discovering the true price of capitalism in a point-of-collapse New York circa 1981 is not precisely required viewing. Nor is it the kind of stealthy character drama that delivers rich dividends without the benefit of an easily dramatic story. Oscar Isaac and Jessica Chastain turn in sharp and wiry (if mannered and imitative) performances. But it’s an airless construction that promises more than it comes close to delivering. After two films that one could easily say the same thing about, it might be time to reconsider Chandor’s place in the ranks of promising American filmmakers.

With maybe the exception of Monuments Men, none of these films were awful, precisely. But they were uninspiring efforts from professionals who we expect more from. Then there were the underwritten and one-note bores like Foxcatcher and Whiplash, and the solemnly pandering pseudo-historical melodramas like The Imitation Game. In some ways the tiny number of truly inspiring films is a more distressing trend than all the disasters that slunk into theaters over the year, from the decadent event-flick lassitude of Lucy and Godzilla to more excruciatingly ill-prepared junkheaps like The Gambler and The Judge. Each year gives us pileups of dreck like this one, sometimes more so.

There were certainly films to delight and entertain. Rob Marshall’s Into the Woods did Sondheim proud and then some. Wes Anderson’s The Grand Budapest Hotel showed that it’s still possible for an old pro like Ralph Fiennes to make everyone in attendance think that whatever they paid for their ticket was too little. But films like this are to be expected. We assume Marshall and Anderson can put on a good show.

Also, so many of the films that truly impressed were fantasies, from the fairytale remix of Into the Woods to the gonzo satire of Birdman. Once again, we were faced with a year of feature films that refused to grapple with the world as it is. Ava DuVernay’s excellent and unconventional Selma is one of the few exceptions to this ducking of reality, a historical drama that would have stung with immediacy even if it hadn’t mirrored the year’s unrest over race and police brutality.

The only narrative film to even deal with America’s eternal undeclared drone war was Captain America: The Winter Soldier, which used it primarily as an excuse to feature more cool giant hover-carriers like in The Avengers. Interestingly, The Interview is one of the exceptions here. Between all the butt jokes and exploding heads (it’s almost as blood-soaked a comedy as Rogen’s Pineapple Express), the film’s satirical take on North Korea is fairly spot-on. It’s no exaggeration to open the film with a pretty little North Korean school girl singing Die, America, Die when in reality schoolchildren there are taught songs like Shoot the Yankee Bastards.²

The Interview aside, the job of telling stories that actually resonate with the world around us was once again mostly left to documentaries: The Kill Team, about a thrill-kill massacre of Afghan civilians by American soldiers; and Happy Valley, on the Penn State scandal, being just a couple of the more fearless entries. As ever, none of these efforts merited even a blip on the national movie-viewing consciousness. Excellence was generally not rewarded.

One of the highest-grossing documentaries of the year (after accounting for a Disney nature film called Bears, the feature-length LDS church infomercial Meet the Mormons, and Dinesh D’Souza’s latest right-wing frightener America) was Laura Poitras’s disappointingly self-satisfied Edward Snowden film Citizenfour. But even the entire theatrical run of that headline-ripped story about the one of the great espionage controversies of our age barely earned a tenth of what something like Maleficent pulled down in a single day by casting Angelina Jolie as a mean witch with killer cheekbones.

2014’s ten highest-grossing films were a slew of dystopias, mutants, monsters, hobbits, time warps, robots, and talking apes;³ not a single true-to-life drama among them.