Control (2007)

Ian Curtis, the lead singer of Joy Division, killed himself in 1980. If you’re not a fan of Joy Division’s music this fact most likely doesn’t mean anything to you and, subsequently, the movie which tells Curtis’s story, Control, probably won’t have a lasting effect. Sure, it’s a tragic tale, and due to the fine acting of Sam Riley (as Curtis) and Samantha Morton (as his young wife, Deborah) you will walk out of the theater saddened by Curtis’ final, fatal, action. But this is a movie for fans who already know the story (and all its macabre details) and have invested countless hours listening to the band’s now-classic albums, Unknown Pleasures and Closer. But, if you happen to be a fan of Joy Division watching Anton Corbijn’s pitch perfect film is truly a heartbreaking experience.

Few film subjects lend themselves to being captured in moody black and white like the story of Ian Curtis. (It really is just the story of Curtis. The rest of the band members play minor roles.) The combination of the gloomy post-industrial landscape of Macclesfield, England (Curtis’ hometown), Curtis’ bouts with depression and epilepsy as well as the existentialist doom of the Joy Division sound could not be filmed any other way. To film this in color would have been insulting to Curtis’ (and the band’s) legacy. And that’s all the film is about, the legacy of Curtis and his glum band, plain and simple. All in all, the film is an elegant, melancholy monument to a delicate soul tortured by the bleakness of modern life.

No Country for Old Men (2007)

“Let me ask you something,” Javier Bardem’s character asks Woody Harrelson, who he is about to shoot with a sawed-off shotgun. “If the road you followed brought you to this, what was the point of the road?” In other words, if every choice you ever made culminated in your destruction, was every choice you ever made unnecessary? And if every choice was unnecessary, does that invalidate your reason for living? These, I believe, are some of the conundrums Joel and Ethan Coen were trying to ponder in their bleak, ultra-violent new film No Country for Old Men. If our lives are dictated by a fate we cannot control, or are too powerless to control, what’s the point? I found myself asking the same question when I left the theater. What was the point of the last two hours? What does this film have to say about fate, chance and free will?

The meat and potatoes of this film are simple on the surface. It’s 1980 and the U.S.-Mexico border is a hot spot for drug smuggling and all the bloodshed that necessitates. While out hunting antelope, Llewellyn Moss (played strong and silent by Josh Brolin), stumbles upon the aftermath of a drug deal gone wrong. The scattered dead bodies stain the desert sand blood red. Amid the carnage he discovers a suitcase containing $2 million in cash, which he promptly makes his own.

Predictably so, the rightful owner of the money dispatches merciless bounty hunter Anton Chigurh (a creepy Javier Bardem invoking a homicidal Johnny Cash with a page-boy haircut amidst an existential crisis) to track down Llewellyn and return the cash. Chigurh proceeds to slaughter his way across the state towards Llewellyn like the personification of all things unstoppably evil.

Tommy Lee Jones plays Ed Tom Bell, an aging sheriff who feels the times have changed so rapidly and regrettably that the tide is irreversible. He sees the wickedness spilling across the boarder infecting all that was once innocent and realizes he is incapable of stopping it. However, in a last ditch effort to save the final shreds of his optimism, he tries to save Llewellyn before Chigurh has the chance to destroy him.

No Country for Old Men is a million miles away from the Coen brother’s movies most people are familiar with. The comedy of Raising Arizona and The Big Lebowski is no where to be seen. Even Fargo seems hilarious compared to this, and Fargo was pretty damn violent. This movie is a straight philosophic drama - think of a Sam Shepard play penned by Samuel Beckett.

However, in the end, the movie feels incomplete. There are no easy answers and really no resolution. Like Ed Tom Bell realizes, you just have to fight through each day and hope that there is someone out there preparing a warm, safe place for you to sleep because there are bad men out there with existential crises on their minds and sawed-off shotguns in their hands.

Le Scaphandre et le Papillon (The Diving Bell and the Butterfly) (2007)

In less capable hands, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly could be dreadful. It has sentimental tearjerker written all over it. The film is about the true-life story of Jean-Dominique Bauby, the former fashion editor of French Elle, who had a massive stroke and woke up three weeks later paralyzed from head to toe with a condition known as “Locked-In Syndrome”. His mind is completely lucid but he is unable to move a single part of his body except for his left eye. With this eye, he learns a method of blinking that allows him to spell out words so he can communicate with the outside world.

The story could easily lend itself to a director’s most maudlin weaknesses (Bauby’s unbreakable spirit, the dedication of his therapists, the undying love of Bauby’s family, etc), but director Julian Schnabel (who also directed the beautiful and affectionate films Basquiat and Before Night Falls), with the help of visionary cinematographer Janusz Kaminski, (Munich, Schindler's List) resists the feel-good clichés and piles on the memorable images of a man isolated in his own body. The shot of Mathieu Amalric (who plays Bauby) struggling frantically in a submerged diving bell which hovers hauntingly in gauzy, sea-foam green water particularly sticks with me.

Another key reason The Diving Bell and the Butterfly doesn’t sink into soapy melodrama is the strength of the performances. Amalric is selfless in his portrayal of Bauby, totally giving himself to the role, drool and stroke-induced facial distortions included. But the performance that really left me close to tears was Max von Sydow’s portrayal of Bauby’s father, who suffered from Alzheimer’s disease. The agony von Sydow brings to the role of a father trying to communicate paternal love through two practically unbreachable illnesses is heart-wrenching to experience.

The combination of an imaginative director, a cinematographer with a gift for evocative shots and a cast (which also includes Emmanuelle Seigner and Jean-Pierre Cassel) with gobs of talent and altruistic drive create a beautiful movie that has all the emotions of a tearjerker, but with the pedigree of high art rather then the sickly-sweet aftertaste of Hollywood dreck.