2020 in movies

It me. Bill Nighy as Mr Woodhouse in Autumn De Wilde’s ADAPTATION of Emma

I originally had an introduction here in which I surveyed theatre shutdowns and the unwelcome pivot to streaming, but that was windy, pessimistic, and irrelevant. So I scrapped it. Here instead, without further introduction, are are my favorites movies of 2020:

Tenet

The Protagonist (John David Washington) and Neil (Robert Pattinson) in Tenet

Tenet is the biggest what-might-have-been of the year, Christopher Nolan having decided to make the most extreme form of the kind of convoluted brain-melting movie he is reputed to make, only to have the COVID epidemic keep people far, far away from the box office.

It’s a shame, because while Tenet is flawed—too loud, too complicated, and too visually confusing for its own good—it is very, very good, with some great action set pieces and excellent performances by the supporting cast, especially Robert Pattinson, Elizabeth Debicki, and Kenneth Branagh. (How good is the cast? They make you believe all of this “temporal warfare” and “inverted entropy” makes sense. An overlooked accomplishment.) Tenet is also great to look at, with beautiful large-format film cinematography and some great locations. I was fortunate enough to see this, one time, in theatres. I was the only one in the whole place.

Read my full review of Tenet, in which I elaborate on all of these themes, on the blog here.

The Vast of Night

Sierra McCormick as switchboard operator Fay in The Vast of Night

I’m not sure when I first heard of The Vast of Night, but I decided to check it out thanks to RedLetterMedia, who reviewed it some months ago. This was my surprise hit of the year.

Set in a small New Mexico town in 1958, The Vast of Night follows two characters—high school electronics enthusiast and part-time switchboard operator Fay (Sierra McCormick) and smalltown radio DJ Everett (Jake Horovitz)—on the night of the local high school’s biggest game. Fay has received some strange calls at the switchboard and captured some odd radio signals, and with Everett, who plays a recording of the noise on the radio station, thus prompting calls that might provide leads, they set out of investigate the origin of the sounds. The military? The Russians? Something else? Something not of this world?

The Vast of Night entranced me from the beginning. The characters are fun and the dialogue snappy and humorous. And for a low budget independent film it is visually striking, with excellent cinematography (especially Steadicam work, with long shots swooping across the basketball court or down entire city streets), and sets and costumes that evoke the time and place wonderfully well.

But what makes The Vast of Night especially good, and makes it feel so accomplished, is its perfectly calibrated and controlled tone. It captures precisely the strange combination of suspense, tension, and eagerness that comes with listening to a scratchy, staticky radio signal waiting to hear… whatever is out there. The thrill of the encounter with the creepy. Anyone who has hunched over a computer speaker late at night trying to hear a sample of otherworldly audio knows this feeling. The best example comes in a one-shot scene that is a subtle, low-key masterpiece, in which Fay works the switchboard, talking, questioning, listening, trying to check her equipment for problems, trying to connect or reconnect with people, and always, always returning to the mysterious signal to listen—all while the camera, with glacial patience, pushes in to a closeup.

The Vast of Night keys up our anticipation from the beginning and plays it perfectly. It’s wonderfully done, and a lot of fun if you grew up on “Unsolved Mysteries” or “The Twilight Zone,” or if you just enjoy a trip into the uncanny.

Since I imagine fewer people have heard of The Vast of Night, check out the trailer here. For a taste of the film’s slick camerawork and beautiful sets, check out this four and a half minute shot from near the beginning of the film. And here’s an interesting video featuring the film’s director, in which he comments on that scene at Fay’s switchboard and how the film uses sound to build tension.

Greyhound

CDr Krause (Tom Hanks) on the deck of the KeelIng in Greyhound

This is a movie I’d been looking forward to for some years, ever since reading the novel it’s based on: The Good Shepherd, by CS Forester. You can read more about the book in my 2018 year-in-review here.

Greyhound takes place across about forty-eight hours of the life of Commander Ernest Krause, captain of the destroyer USS Keeling, as he strives to protect the merchant vessels of an Allied convoy from U-boat attack. This film offers a stripped down, mostly unromanticized glimpse of life during World War II without a lot of Hollywood exposition or stock characters or cliched plot elements to get in the way. That requires the viewer to pay attention and keep up, something I always appreciate in a movie. Greyhound doesn’t spoonfeed us, but drops us into a situation as it happens and involves us first as witnesses, eventually as participants.

Tom Hanks wrote the script himself and his performance is the centerpiece of the movie. It’s excellent, and it’s a shame Greyhound didn’t get the big-screen release it deserved.

Read my full review of Greyhound on the blog here.

Emma

Anya Taylor-Joy as Emma Woodhouse and JohnnY Flynn as Mr Knightley in Emma

This most recent adaptation of Emma snuck into theatres right ahead of all the shutdowns, but my wife and I didn’t get to watch it until it arrived in Redbox in late Spring. It was worth the wait.

Like previous film adaptations of what is perhaps Jane Austen’s best novel, this Emma has beautiful costumes and cinematography, gorgeous locations in the English countryside, and a bright, energetic color palette, all of which make the film visually stunning from beginning to end. Like other adaptations, this Emma streamlines, condenses, and rearranges things to keep the film a manageable length. Unlike other adaptations—at least the ones I’ve seen—this Emma is an overt comedy, amplifying and exaggerating the comedic elements of the novel, especially the characters and all their foibles. It’s hilarious.

But it’s also quite moving and retains the strong moral core of Austen’s original, since it doesn’t shy away from exaggerating the weaknesses of Emma herself. Anya Taylor-Joy plays Emma as a spoiled but immensely self-assured rich girl, one with some fine qualities but a long way to go toward maturity. The zest with which Taylor-Joy plays Emma—matchmaking with the hapless Harriet (Mia Goth), flirting with Frank Churchill (Callum Turner), and trading zingers with Mr Knightley (Johnny Flynn)—makes her negative qualities, her self-absorption, her obliviousness toward or outright disdain for others, and most famously her cruelty, all the more cutting. Which also makes Mr Knightley all the more attractive, given his earnestness, his sense of honor, and especially his charity toward others.

The litmus test for any adaptation of Emma has to be that scene. You know the one—Emma’s joke at Miss Bates’s expense, and Mr Knightley’s epic chewing out of Emma. This film’s version is perhaps the best I’ve seen. The painfully mixed emotions of everyone involved are expertly portrayed.

The performances are excellent across the board. Taylor-Joy does an excellent job making such a difficult character sympathetic, and Mia Goth’s Harriet is adorably dense and vulnerable. The comedic standouts are Bill Nighy as Mr Woodhouse, who spends half the movie in a wonderful comic ballet of footmen and folding screens and imaginary drafts, and Josh O’Connor as a Nosferatu-like Mr Elton. I laughed every moment he was onscreen. But perhaps my favorite performance was Flynn as Mr Knightley. Flynn is striking in appearance but not classically handsome—in the way the excellent Jeremy Northam’s Knightley was, for instance—and so what attracts us to him is precisely his goodness.

I wondered, when I saw the trailer for this version of Emma, why we needed another one. The last couple years have been crowded with high-profile remakes, often with some faddish social agenda glommed on, usually disappearing fairly quickly. This one should last; it approaches the story respectfully but from a newer angle, making it fresh and fun—a reminder of why people love Jane Austen. I’m glad they made it, and especially glad I saw it. Check it out if and when you can.

The Outpost

Scott EastwooD as ClinTon RoMesha in The Outpost

Based on Jake Tapper’s book, The Outpost tells the stories of Ty Carter (Caleb Landry Jones) and Clinton Romesha (Scott Eastwood), two US Army soldiers who earned the Medal of Honor during the siege of Combat Outpost Keating in 2009.

The army built COP Keating in a mountainous province of Afghanistan but sited it very badly, with virtually the entire interior of the outpost visible from the mountains above. Everyone who entered it became a target—fish in a barrel. We see numerous small Taliban assaults on the outpost early in the film, but when a large force of insurgents, having probed the outpost’s defenses for months, mounts a huge and well coordinated attack, the result is a bloody battle in which COP Keating’s garrison is badly outnumbered and vulnerable from every direction. Not only the heroic efforts of Romesha and Carter but the teamwork of all the men in the outpost and pilots who bring much-needed close air support save the day, though not before eight men have been killed and dozens wounded. The Outpost dramatizes all of this exceptionally well.

Director Rod Lurie stages much of the film in long, unbroken, naturalistic shots that follow the characters around the outpost, giving the viewer a good sense of the geography of the location—always important in this kind of story—as well as subtly involving us in what’s happening. When lulls or mealtime or the boring, routine work around the outpost turns in an instant into combat, the transition is startlingly immediate. Everything feels intensely real.

The performances also help sell what’s happening. Scott Eastwood and Caleb Landry Jones are good in the lead roles, as is Orlando Bloom is a small part near the beginning of the film. The supporting cast is also good, and we get a good sense of the camaraderie of the men in the outpost as they shoot the breeze, rag on each other, and switch—again, instantaneously—into combat mode.

The Outpost is a gritty, unromanticized look at modern combat and well worth checking out.

A Hidden Life

AugUst Diehl as Franz Jägerstätter in A Hidden Life

Though A Hidden Life was screened at some film festivals in 2019, I’m treating it as a 2020 movie since it was not widely available until last year. I’m insisting on this because it was by far the best film I saw in 2020, a movie that made me weep and that I’ve meditated upon ever since.

A Hidden Life tells the story of Franz Jägerstätter (August Diehl), an Austrian farmer who, when called up for military service by the Third Reich during World War II, refused to swear the oath of allegiance to Adolf Hitler. For this he was imprisoned and beaten, his wife and daughters were ostracized from their small, tightly knit rural community, and he was eventually executed for treason.

That’s the outline of the story. What Terence Malick’s film of this story does is bring us into Jägerstätter’s life, allowing us to feel the strength he draws from his relationship with his wife Fani (Valerie Pachner), the love he has for his home and his daughters, and the power of his faith in God. It also lets us experience how, once he has made up his mind to refuse the oath to Hitler, something he, a faithful Catholic, believes he cannot do, first local peer pressure attempts to accomplish what the omnipotent Reich seems too distant to do—force him into line—and then how the authorities themselves come down on him. The slowness with which the process plays out is painful to watch; even more so are the suspicious and finally angry glances that Jägerstätter’s neighbors direct toward him and his family. And then there is the prison, the trial, and the wait for the guillotine.

The film takes its title from a line in George Eliot’s novel Middlemarch:

The growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.

The hiddenness of Jägerstätter’s life and sacrifice are what have stuck with me ever since. We all imagine ourselves, especially in this self-congratulatory age, taking heroic stands, changing minds, changing the world, even if it takes our deaths. But what if our deaths accomplish nothing? Multiple characters, even those sympathetic to Jägerstätter, remind him of this throughout the film. Would we really follow our faith all the way to the guillotine if there were no grand speeches or multitudes of people whose minds were changed? If no one ever knew our names? If it meant the ruin of our families and the orphaning of our children? If it meant losing?

A Hidden Life left me powerfully convicted.

The film is beautifully shot, with gorgeous Alpine scenery, and wonderfully well acted. But one recurring image, with or without actors in it, conveys Jägerstätter’s moral center: the faithfulness of work. The fields around Jägerstätter’s village are the site of constant labor. Agriculture demands constant care and attention no matter what you’re growing, and it is often thankless, those who receive the benefits forgetting immediately what it took to produce it. It is the same, Jägerstätter’s story shows us, with faith. We live in a pragmatic age, where even the faithful strive for purely earthly ends and equate righteousness with success. But we are not, after all, called to “accomplish” anything; we are called to be faithful, to do the work. A Hidden Life is a beautiful, powerful, and much needed reminder of that truth.

The ones that got away

Here’s a handful of movies from 2020 that I missed but still hope to see in the new year:

• Soul and Onward—I have zero interest in jazz, the most precious of all musical genres, and am heartily sick of 80s nostalgia, but I love and trust Pixar and really liked the looks of both of these, especially considering the talent involved.

• Mank—David Fincher’s telling of a (questionable) behind the scenes story of the writing of Citizen Kane, shot in glorious black and white and featuring a great cast.

• Hillbilly Elegy—Shot partly in my home county in Georgia and based on one of the best and most important memoirs I’ve read in the last ten years. Glenn Close looks amazing in this.

• I’m Thinking of Ending Things—This isn’t ordinarily my kind of movie, but I want to see this purely on the strength of its bizarre trailer.

• The Call of the Wild—Distracting CGI dog notwithstanding, this is based on an old favorite by Jack London and I’m up for anything with these kinds of desolately beautiful landscapes.

• Fatman—Mel Gibson as an ornery old Santa defending himself from a contract killer? Reviews were not good but I cannot not see this.

• Mulan—I’m generally against Disney’s live action versions of its animated classics, as the tendency is to make them slavishly faithful, shot-for-shot remakes. This approach loses the magic of the originals—which were conceived of and designed to be cartoons—in the translation from animation. The most successful so far have been the handful that have had enough confidence to depart from the cartoons and develop enough of their own personality, style, and tone to work as independent adaptations of the same stories. Kenneth Branagh’s Cinderella successfully did this. Mulan, based on the trailers, looked like it could. I’ll be interested to find out if it did.

Discoveries

These are films that came out before 2020—one of them over 90 years before—but that I watched for the first time last year. Presented in approximately ascending order, certainly with the best last:

The Hunley

The Hunley is one of the many TNT original movies through which Ted Turner worked out his Civil War obsession during the mid-90s. (Others: Ironclads, The Day Lincoln was Shot, Andersonville, and Gettysburg, which got a theatrical release.) Somehow the film slipped me by until years later. I’m glad to say I’ve finally seen it.

The Hunley tells the story of the Confederate submarine of the same name, famous as the first submarine to sink an enemy ship. The movie does an excellent job conveying the hard work and claustrophobic conditions of manning the sub, and the viewer has to marvel at the effort put into mastering the use and maneuver of the craft by its doomed crew. Despite some tonal missteps in the final scene, some dodgy late-90s CGI, and an obviously lower budget than films like Gettysburg or Andersonville, The Hunley was well acted and gripping throughout, with enough narrative surprises to keep it interesting. Donald Sutherland has an especially good moment as Gen. PGT Beauregard in which he takes this effete Louisiana Frenchman and reveals, however briefly, the man’s hidden depths.

A historical note: The Hunley was produced just before the wreck was excavated and removed from the ocean for preservation, and so twenty years of subsequent research has revealed a lot of things not known at the time the film was made. So while much of what the filmmakers came up with out of necessity has been disproven, it’s still an entertaining imaginative dramatization of an important event in Civil War and naval history.

Last Stand at Saber River

Another late-90s TNT original, this is an adaptation of my favorite of Elmore Leonard’s Western novels. Wounded Confederate veteran Paul Cable (Tom Selleck) returns to Arizona territory with his family to find that unscrupulous Unionist ranchers (David and Keith Carradine) are squatting on his land. The showdown between these two sides is further complicated by a one-armed storekeeper (David Dukes) who is up to more than selling dry goods. The film departs in some regards from Leonard’s excellent short novel, primarily by introducing a lot of marital strife into Paul’s relationship with his wife (Suzy Amis), which shortchanges the strong and sustaining relationship in the book. Nevertheless, this is a beautifully shot Western with a lot of good tension and strong performances and successfully translates the dramatic plot developments of the novel’s final act onto the screen.

The Great Train Robbery

A light-hearted Victorian-flavored heist film starring the late great Sean Connery, Donald Sutherland, and Lesley-Anne Down and written and directed by Michael Crichton, based on his own novel. Very loosely based on a real incident, The Great Train Robbery is the story of a plot hatched by career crooks to steal a shipment of gold bound for the Crimea. This gold being the army’s payroll, the shipment is heavily guarded before and after it’s put on a train for the coast, which means forming a multi-part scheme to get all the access and equipment necessary to steal it. And it will take no small amount of guts, too, as—even with all the other pieces in place—the only moment it is feasible to swipe the gold is on the train as it speeds through the countryside.

The Great Train Robbery is fun throughout, with interesting characters, humorous situations, and a generous helping of wink-wink-nudge-nudge comedy thrown in—a cross between Ocean’s Eleven, The Sting, and one of Blake Edwards’s Pink Panther movies. It’s also very suspenseful, and Connery’s stuntwork aboard the train at the climax was excellent. The Great Train Robbery is a well-crafted heist comedy set in a period one doesn’t often associate with plots of this kind—it’s worth checking out.

9. April

This excellent Danish war film follows a lieutenant (Pilou Asbæk) and his platoon of bicycle infantry through Denmark’s one-day war against the Nazis as they try to halt the German advance into their country. A well-produced and well acted grunt’s-eye-level film about an often forgotten part of the war. You can read my full review on the blog here.

Come and See

The story of a boy who, at the height of the Nazi occupation of Byelorussia during World War II, leaves his family to join Communist partisans and fight the Germans, Come and See is a hallucinatory living nightmare of a film, one I think everyone should watch at least once. You can read my full review on the blog here.

The Passion of Joan of Arc

The best of this batch of “discoveries,” this 1928 silent film depicts the trial and execution of St Joan of Arc (Falconetti). This hypnotic film is told through a series of agonized closeups and energetic tracking shots and follows St Joan through questioning by a kangaroo court, imprisonment and the threat of torture, and her final moments on the scaffold. It’s a haunting and powerfully moving depiction of martyrdom. Like A Hidden Life, I could think about nothing else for hours after I watched it. Highly recommended.

What I’m looking forward to

Daniel Craig as 007 in No Time to Die

To end things on a hopeful note, here are the movies I’m most looking forward to this year. Many of these are actually 2020 movies which have, owing to COVID, been bumped back to 2021. I’m hoping for some return to normalcy and for the survival and revival of theatre-going, and I hope a few good films like these will help.

• No Time to Die—Top of the list for me. Daniel Craig’s final outing as James Bond, with Ralph Fiennes returning as M and some especially stunning visuals in the trailers that have been released so far. Also interested to see Remi Malek as the villain. With Craig stepping away, I hope they’ll hand the series off to Tom Hiddleston or Michael Fassbender while they’re young enough to take a good run at it.

• Top Gun: Maverick—I have almost no sentimental attachment to Top Gun, but I like a couple of Kosinski’s previous films and all the aerial stuff—apparently shot for real as much as possible—looks great.

• Dune—The okayest sci-fi/space fantasy epic in history gets a high-powered filmmaking team for this adaptation.

• Death on the Nile—Kenneth Branagh’s second adaptation of an Agatha Christie mystery, starring himself as Hercule Poirot. I really liked the style of Branagh’s Murder on the Orient Express and its lavish, old-fashioned sensibilities—especially its large format film cinematography—so I’m hopeful that this film will continue in the same vein.

• The King’s Man—I liked Kingsman: The Secret Service quite a bit, so I’m looking forward to this lush World War I-era prequel that makes full use of the elegant leather, canvas, and polished oak aesthetic of the period, not to mention cameos from major real life figures. Brilliant casting: Tom Hollander plays cousins King George V, Czar Nicholas II, and Kaiser Wilhelm II. I’d pay just to see that.

• The Last Duel—Ridley Scott returns to the Middle Ages for a story of grievance-fueled judicial dueling. I’m sure it’ll be visually stunning and historically atrocious, as per usual with Scott, who never met a medieval stereotype he didn’t like, but I’m interested to see Adam Driver in one of the lead roles.

• Mission: Impossible—Libra—My favorite action series is set to return with two more films shot back-to-back and released in consecutive years.

• Sherlock Holmes 3—This film is still in pre-production, but I’m hopeful. I quite liked Robert Downey Jr’s take on Holmes, especially the chemistry of his friendship with Jude Law’s Watson. I could take or leave some elements of the earlier two movies but I enjoyed them throughout and have been wishing for a third. Here’s hoping.

Conclusion

Thanks for reading! I hope you’ll check these movies out if you haven’t seen them, and that you’ll get as much enjoyment out of watching them as I did. And let’s hope we can start returning regularly to theatres soon. While I’m thankful for home media, watching a Blu-ray or streaming to a small screen can never replace the communal experience of old-fashioned filmgoing. Something else to look forward to with hope in the new year.