O, Dreamland: 2009 in Review

1. Coraline (Selick)

2. Two Lovers (Gray)

3. Inglourious Basterds (Tarantino)

4. Vicky Cristina Barcelona (Allen)

5. Genova (Winterbottom)

6. Prodigal Sons (K. Reed)

7. Seraphine (Provost)

8. Star Trek (Abrams)

9. Man on Wire (Marsh)

10. Let It Rain (Jaoui)

Best Director:

Neill Blomkamp (District 9)

Best Screenplay:

Quentin Tarantino (Inglourious Basterds)

Best Actor:

Sharlto Copley (District 9)

Best Actress:

Gwyneth Paltrow (Two Lovers)

Best Acting Ensemble:

Le Petit Nicolas (Tirard)

Best Polish Film:

The Reverse (Lankosz)

If anything, this passing year belonged to dreamers and their reckless fantasies. Tarantino got away with shooting Hitler point-blank; J.J. Abrams restarted Star Trek to a great, suitably breezy effect; and Philippe Petit minced his tiny steps between the WTC towers without mentioning anywhere in Man on Wire what he felt when they went down (in fact, the director James Marsh seals off this information from his documentary entirely – a single stroke that elevates this superbly executed suspense-doc to a higher level of film art).

Every now and then, fantasies and realities collided, and the ensuing showdown was something to behold. Clever little Coraline Jones learned the hard way that – contrary to what she believed to be the case – “dreams are dangerous”. Séraphine Louis (a sensational performance by Yolande Moreau) is Coraline’s twin sister: she, too, sinks into her own narcissistic world of unlimited creativity, just to end up locked into a destructive solipsism. And Kimberly Reed had to cope with Orson Welles quite literally entering her world – already conflicted to begin with.

Stylistically, all the movies I cherished most this year were quite classical; even conservative. No Paranoid Park (2008) to be found, but I don’t mind – that is, as long as we have such stunning examples of old-fashioned craftsmanship as James Gray’s Two Lovers! Joaquín Bac-Asay’s camerawork, slipping comfortably from gold to brown to steely gray, with occasional strokes of blue (so rare in Gray’s work they almost always mean something special) – conveys a world of Leonard’s (Joaquin Phoenix) solitude and his ever-simmering fantasies in a painful, tactile way.

The single flight of fancy Leonard allows himself goes stale almost immediately upon execution. Ultimately, the movie is not so much about a dreamer’s failure, but about the dream as a mistake. Real, unchecked melancholy rarely makes its way to the screen – sentimentality intervenes too often – but Gray pulled it off. His film hurts so beautifully and quietly, I would rank it with the works of this passing decade’s true poets of sadness. James Gray, say hello to Tsai Ming-Liang and Nuri Bilge Ceylan!