Best Films of 2019
5. The Souvenir
“We don’t know what the inner machinations of their mind are, or their heart,” Anthony (Tom Burke) says during Joanna Hogg’s wondrous The Souvenir. “We don’t know. But that’s what we want to know when we go and see a film. We don’t want to just see life played out as is. We want to see life as it is experienced, within this soft machine.” It’s a thought that could easily apply to plenty of films on this list but feels all the more pertinent when said here.
Hogg’s somewhat autobiographical account of a young film student, Julie (Honor Swinton Byrne), weaving through the wake and life of a crushing and passionate relationship from long ago is as intimate as any film released this year. Unfolding, as David Ehrlich put it, “like someone desperately trying to thread together the logic of a dream they once had,” Hogg approaches her own story with darkness and truth only made possible when a filmmaker tackles their own life.
As the credits rolled at my screening in June, not a creature was stirring, nor was there a dry eye in the house.
4. Ad Astra
If I could respect James Gray more as a filmmaker than I already did following 2017’s brilliant though underrated The Lost City of Z, such a level of respect has since been handily achieved.
He uses the idea of a lauded astronaut (Brad Pitt in his best performance this year, even though it might be considered a mite understated) being sent off on a journey to find his estranged and possibly deranged father (Tommy Lee Jones) as a way to tackle our inabilities to connect with our own. He’s evidently perplexed by our strained attentions and our doomed futures as a result and uses a design that multiplex frequenters are interested in to explore such conundrums.
The film’s tagline reads, “the answers we seek are just outside our reach.” It’s a nuanced, ambiguous phrase that I think we grapple with far more often than we care to expose. Where do we turn in the face of certain mystery? These are psychological theories far beyond my pay-grade. But Gray and crew do something here that scratches the surface of the previously unscratched.
The conundrum at the center of his tale is exactly what spurs it into the immediate canon of classic and intimate film. It’s near-perfect cinema, the kind that isn’t made anymore, yet can only be made today.
3. Little Women
How is a debut filmmaker supposed to follow up on the genius and originality that Lady Bird possessed? By adapting a 150-year-old classic novel to film, of course, though Greta Gerwig’s approach isn’t completely faithful to its source. But leave it to Gerwig and a perfect cast (Saoirse Ronan, Florence Pugh, Timothée Chalamet, Emma Watson, Eliza Scanlen, Laura Dern, Chris Cooper, and Meryl Streep, among others) to reinvent and revitalize one of our most well-known, widely adored tales in her own, magical way.
She takes moments that are faithful to the novel and its characters and constructs them in a way that sees them unfold in parallel time, though different times in the March sisters’ lives. Her liberties help the story, frankly, not that the book is regarded as something needing a drastic number of alterations. Gerwig, though, is uninterested in the idea of a word for word adaptation.
We have the same original story aided by some original, contemporary ideas from the writer-director, a budding force in cinema that promises to deliver time and again, no matter whether or not the project is “original.” Her version of Little Women might just be more timeless and tangible than the novel itself.
2. Portrait of a Lady on Fire
Set on a French island in the 18th century, Céline Sciamma’s romance is a restrained and luscious tale of forbidden love that is anything but mere aesthetics. A painter (Noémie Merlant) and her subject (Adèle Haenel) are drawn together with an obvious endgame: once the portrait of the soon-to-be-married Héloïse is finished, so is their connection. But with time forms an irreversible bond, one that will resonant with viewers for months after the film’s emotional wallop of an ending unfolds. Hell, each moment and shot packs an emotional wallop.
Brilliance extends beyond luxury here, though, as you all-but-immediately form a connection with the film and its characters. You’ll never want to look away.
1. Waves
Calling your film Waves is as genuine as you can be if you’re Trey Edward Shults and your third feature film – and undoubtedly most personal – is everything that Waves is, has everything that it has. Shults’s first two films, Krisha and It Comes at Night, were so unique and varied in scope that they were criminally underseen and missed elementally by many of those who actually did see them.
Waves is a rare film in its distinctive touch and unresolved air, even though it’s easily the most universal of the three. It’s a film about the ebb and flow of family life; it’s a film about being better to one another; at its core, it’s a film about suffering and finding solace, even as it feels so ineradicably far out of our reach.
The story of the Williams family reeling in the wake of tragedy – Kelvin Harrison Jr., Taylor Russell, and Sterling K. Brown give three of the year’s best performances – isn’t just resonant in its universality. It’s the film’s strained love and regard for its characters and for people; the pain at its core; the wounded beauty it radiates.
Though I’ve seen Waves twice and written about it once, I find more and more to say with every day. Never has a film made me feel like this one; never have I hurt so much watching a film; never have I thought about a film as much as I’ve thought about this one since the second time I saw it.
There’s a certain power that precious few filmmakers have. They can make the people who regularly discuss film and the medium’s powers at length shut up. Trey Edward Shults has it. The ability to get me to let his film crash over me and settle as nature intended without a peep. Waves is the kind of film that warrants such silence. It beckons you to wade in the pool it leaves behind. The aftermath, if you will. It’s a film you don’t merely watch; you ponder and savor.