“Taking Chance” (HBO)

Dir. Ross Katz
(2009, Not Rated, 77 min)
★ ★ ★ ★

This is a great film, and not what I expected it to be. I had anticipated a character study of Lt. Col. Michael Strobl, the taciturn man played in a reserved but deeply expressed performance by Kevin Bacon. To some degree it is about him — his journey, why he undertakes it, how it moves him. In the same way, it is also about the fallen marine he escorts, Chance Phelps, who we learn more about the closer we get to his final resting place. But the main character of the film is the death rite itself.

It is a segment of the war experience that is seldom shown and is depicted with great insight by the autobiographical script by Strobl and the direction of Ross Katz (who also co-wrote the screenplay). We too are made Phelps’s escorts, from the processing of his remains and personal effects to his lowering into the ground at the site of his grave. Katz shows us what great care is taken with his body and possessions, shown in tender closeups. He observes military rituals — the careful folding of flags, the loading onto and off of planes — in shots composed with visual symmetry that conveys order and a reverence for the dead. We are shown the subtle and often wordless reactions of civilians whom Strobl encounters along the way; they are demonstrative in their gestures of condolence, or exhibit the uneasy solemnity of wanting to pay respects in some way but not sure what to say or how to say it. There are beautiful scenes in airports that are shot simply but have undercurrents that run deep.

At times, Katz speaks volumes without needing a word of dialogue. Perhaps the film’s most affecting sequence shows Strobl driving behind the hearse carrying Phelps to the funeral home. They drive slowly, and other cars are shown passing on their left. But then the scene cuts to a wide shot of the road and shows that the two-car procession has grown into a multi-car caravan. It is a spontaneous act of shared grief, of communal mourning — a nation of the bereaved on a lonely desert road to carry a soldier home.

“Rachel Getting Married”

Dir. Jonathan Demme
(R) ★ ★ ★ ★

Rachel Getting Married is so authentic, from its performances to its place settings, that we don’t question it for a second. Shot with a handheld camera, its shaky photography is at first irritating, but as I settled in I began to feel like I was holding the camera, shooting a documentary. It’s written by Jenny Lumet (daughter of Sidney) and directed by Jonathan Demme, who are so acutely perceptive of human behavior that it doesn’t play like fiction.

The film is ostensibly about Kym Buchman (Anne Hathaway, rightly nominated for a Best Actress Oscar), who in the opening scene is picked up from a nine-month stint in a drug treatment facility and taken directly into the heart of family dysfunction. As per the title, her sister Rachel (Rosemarie DeWitt) is getting married, and the house is crowded with bridesmaids, stepparents, and future in-laws — sensory overload, and methinks not the most hospitable environment for a woman fresh out of rehab.

But the film is really about the entire Buchman clan and the problems that can be traced back to a tragedy that took place roughly ten years earlier, problems of which Kym’s addiction is only one of many. When she was a teenager and already abusing drugs, Kym was left to care for her younger brother, Ethan. There was a car accident; Kym survived, but Ethan did not. The event represents a turning point for the family, or rather a stopping point — their relationships to each other have stalled and splintered since then.

Ethan died a decade ago, but the nerves are still raw. There is a moment of tension where Kym and Rachel’s father, Paul (Bill Irwin), competes with Rachel’s fiancé, Sidney (Tunde Adebimpe), to find out who can better load a dishwasher, but when a paper plate with Ethan’s name is discovered among the dishes the air seems to rush out of the room. And when Kym asks her mother, Abby (Debra Winger), sensitive questions, the confrontation turns violent. The wounds have not healed; they are festering. The Buchmans blame themselves or each other, or both, and for all their fighting they never break through to each other. They are always reacting, never dealing.

The trauma also manifests itself in smaller, subtler ways, and I marvel at how Lumet’s screenplay demonstrates such a clear understanding of so many buried layers of neurosis. Consider a scene between Rachel and Abby: Abby is in charge of flowers for the reception, and Rachel asks if she would like to contribute more to the wedding. I watched this scene thinking it was about one thing and only later realized it was about the opposite. From the dialogue, it seems that Rachel wants her mother not to feel neglected, but eventually we realize that it’s Rachel who feels neglected; since the tragedy, Abby seems to have receded from her daughters’ lives.

I would describe more, but I would bore you with my interpretations; better to be immersed in this remarkable film. It has a quality like The Savages, Junebug, and other great films about the intricacies of family relationships in that it knows its characters down to their cores. We could reconstruct the Buchmans’ entire history from the evidence of this microcosmic wedding, and we feel great sympathy for them.

The acting is uniformly brilliant. Hathaway, Irwin, DeWitt, and Winger each play multiple layers of love, yearning, resentment, and isolation; their characters are full of contradictions, but the performances feel direct — they cut right to the heart. The Buchmans, each lost to their own grief, long for the intimacy of family, but the ties that bind don’t bind quite as tightly as they used to.

On DVD: “Snow Angels”

Dir. David Gordon Green
(R) ★ ★ ★ ★

We’re hooked from the opening scene. During winter in an unspecified small town, a marching band listens to what is meant to be an inspiring speech from their band leader (Tom Noonan). “Will you be my sledgehammer?” he asks them, with an improbably straight face. Band members Arthur (Michael Angarano) and Warren (Connor Paolo) snicker to each other. Then BLAM! BLAM! Two loud noises in the distance. Gunshots? Yes, gunshots. In a town this small the sound likely reverberates all the way to the city limits. The remainder of the film will recount the events that lead inexorably to those shots.

I rented Snow Angels on a whim. I read an offhand recommendation and added it to my queue. I didn’t even read the synopsis. Written and directed by David Gordon Green (George Washington, All the Real Girls), based on a novel by Stewart O’Nan, it’s just about perfect in how it shows us the small details of its characters’ lives and then pulls back gradually to show us more and more, until we know them so well it breaks our hearts. The seemingly isolated stories reveal surprising connections, but this isn’t a hyperlink movie like Crash or Babel. It’s just a fact of life in a small town where everyone knows each other; it’s so tightly knit that when there’s a local family crisis they cancel school so the students can help.

We meet Annie and Glenn Marchand separately. She is a waitress at a Chinese food restaurant. He lives with his parents, who wish he would move out already. We learn they have a five-year-old daughter together, Tara (Gracie Hudson), and are estranged in their marriage. The more time we spend with them, the better we understand how deep that estrangement goes. She’s having an affair with a married man; he drinks too much and thinks he’s found Jesus, but she’s afraid to let him spend time with their daughter. Maybe she’s right.

Arthur works in the Chinese restaurant with Annie. She used to babysit him when he was younger, and he still harbors an adolescent crush. What does his story have to do with hers? Not much. He makes a discovery in the ice that is a turning point in both their lives, but he has his own story that’s just as interesting. His mother (Jeannetta Arnette) has kicked his father (Griffin Dunne) out of the house; Arthur later sees his dad cavorting with a younger woman, a relationship that probably started before he moved out, and Arthur asks him to make up his mind about what he wants.

I must take a moment to comment on the performance of Arnette as his mother; she’s so expressive she could tell an entire story without a word of dialogue and expresses the nuances of a relationship with a look. I remember her most vividly as Chloe Sevigny’s mom in Boys Don’t Cry, another film where she demonstrated a complex understanding of a small but pivotal character. I long to see what she could do with a lead role.

Green doesn’t take sides. He doesn’t condone or condemn. He extends tremendous sympathy to his characters, fears for them, aches for them. There is a shot of Glenn in a bar. He is one of the last three patrons, and they are all swaying to music in a drunken stupor; this is what comes after last call. The music drops for a prolonged sequence towards the end of the film as we get closer to an explanation of the gunshots. Green’s patience here is grueling, but there’s no going back. He has drawn the characters so meticulously that the end seems inevitable; every moment leads irrevocably to the next, and it hurtles towards tragedy with a momentum no one can stop.

The actors are so good, so intimate and true that I’m at a loss to explain why they’re not contending for Oscars. We feel as though we’re walking into lives in progress; the characters feel fully formed from the moment we meet them. Annie and Glenn are played by Kate Beckinsale and Sam Rockwell in the best performances I’ve seen them give. Angarano demonstrates sensitivity that makes us believe him when he tells his father what time it is. Amy Sedaris, Olivia Thirlby, and Nicky Katt are lived-in and convincing in supporting roles.

Snow Angels is equal in emotional power to Todd Field’s In the Bedroom. I felt these characters in my bones and sat in quiet reflection as the credits rolled. It is a great film.

On DVD: “Generation Kill” (HBO)

Aired in seven parts on HBO. Now available on DVD.
(TV-MA) ★ ★ ★ ★

By now I’ve seen the Iraq War backwards and forwards. We at home are as close to the ground as anyone has ever been during an American conflict. The age of multimedia communications has obliterated the distance between Here and There, which, of course, is not to say that those of us Here can understand what it’s like for those who are There. Over the end credits of episode six we hear the voices of the characters expressing one of the miniseries’s most important truths: Civilians don’t get it, and we can’t get it, because we’re not them.

Generation Kill is the anti-Band of Brothers. That is not to say that the soldiers depicted therein are not brothers, only that we’re a long way away from the Greatest Generation and its depictions of noble sacrifice. And nowhere is Tom Hanks the schoolteacher standing tall and affirming the value of the mission. The volunteer servicemen and servicewomen in today’s military are a different species, and I don’t understand them. There’s a bloodlust in many among them that I find disquieting, and an eagerness that seems better suited to playing Halo than to killing real people in real combat. I believe the characterizations in Generation Kill because I have seen them before, in the documentary I Am an American Soldier, which was not partisan; it observed the 101st Airborne Division of the US Army during a year of their service in Iraq. Of one soldier, I wrote: “He explains that the best way to inspire Iraqi cooperation is to threaten them with arrest. I can’t help but feel his approach is all wrong. We see him bind and blindfold a civilian, asking him to identify insurgents, but I feel more sympathy with the Iraqi than with this particular soldier.”

Consider then Lance Cpl. Trombley (Billy Lush), who grins the most unsettling grin at the prospect of killing — not just enemy combatants. He wants to fire rounds and end lives — of dogs even. He explains after one scene, during which he is fired upon and neglects to seek cover, that he feels at peace in the battlefield and is curious to know what it’s like to be shot. His fellow Marines joke that he’s a psycho — half-joke. I’m not joking at all. He has severe emotional and psychological impairments, and I spent all of his scenes afraid for him and of him. Werner Herzog’s film Encounters at the End of the World showcases the strange personalities who have made Antarctica their home away from home; such a remote place draws philosophical and artistic temperaments. In the same way, a volunteer army will inevitably draw some men and women who get something out of shooting and getting shot at. For its own sake.

Last week, I saw Standard Operating Procedure, Errol Morris’s documentary about the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse scandal of 2003, which showcased men and women like these in a different circumstance, but who are alike in that Iraq has shown them things they’d have been better off not seeing, and if they had it to do over again, they may not have signed up at all. Generation Kill showcases men of remarkable thoughtfulness and clarity of purpose — scratch that, it showcases men of common sense, butting against superiors of persistent stupidity. Executive producer David Simon finds a theme in Iraq much like the one he explored on The Wire: the further up you get on the food chain, the less things make sense. The men given the orders in Generation Kill are up close to the war, and we’re so close to them that we can’t analyze the overarching strategy — or lack thereof — of the War in Iraq; like them, all we can do is observe the mistakes along the way. Like how the entire battalion has one Arabic translator. One translator. In Iraq. And from the looks of him, who knows what he’s actually translating. Like how the battalion is ordered into an ambush instead of rerouted through a demonstrably safer route. Like how ill equipped Humvees are sent into battle scenarios they aren’t prepared for. Like how a commanding officer berates a soldier for losing his helmet, not one day after the officer made a reckless command decision that cost the marines an entire supply truck. Like how a small village contains nothing but women and children but is obliterated in a heartbeat because there were enemy combatants there yesterday.

We identify most strongly with two characters: Sgt. Brad “Iceman” Colbert (Alexander Skarsgard) and Lt. Nathaniel Fick (Stark Sands). They receive their orders with jaws agape, but their careers are built on a catch-22. To disobey an order is to cause dissension and disorder and risks the stability of the unit. But to obey a stupid order risks their lives. They can’t win. How does a subordinate stop Capt. Dave “Captain America” McGraw (Eric Nenninger) from bayonetting a surrendered prisoner? Should he tackle his commanding officer and accept disciplinary action? Or should he permit the fiasco and instead accept the blame for the incident? Captain America gets off with a slap on the wrist. Lt. Col. Stephen “Godfather” Ferrando (Chance Kelly), a reasonable leader, has a valuable speech about the need to put trust in his soldiers, but one doesn’t need special skills of perception to know that Captain America is dangerously incompetent. You don’t even need to be a soldier or know what an army is. All you need is eyes, ears, and the good sense God gave a fruit fly — and you could probably do without the eyes and ears. But the higher up you get in the chain of command, the less you are able to see how things are on ground level. Get all the way to the top, and there’s George W. Bush, who I suspect needs special help to tie his shoes.

I struggled with the first three episodes. I could not locate the film’s point of view. Only a mass of soldiers who talk about killing with relish and exchange racist and homophobic slurs like artillery fire. I thought, I only have so much benefit of the doubt to give these men. (The end of episode six explains this part of military culture as well, but I still don’t get it. I think I’d rather not get it.) Eventually, the film settles into its characters, and we settle into them. There is an embedded reporter for Rolling Stone, Evan Wright (Lee Tergesen), whose book about his experience inspired this miniseries. He is not a well developed character and is not meant to be: the miniseries isn’t about him, it’s about what he sees. He sees a blunt-force military that kills as many civilians as insurgents — probably more. He sees low-level soldiers hung out to dry. He sees erratic tactics, inconsistent orders, and rules of engagement that change with the breeze. The soldiers he’s embedded with don’t know why they’re there; the closer they get to Baghdad, the less they know why they’re there. I’d like to send them a DVD of No End in Sight, the great documentary that explains exactly how little sense it makes, but it hadn’t been made yet. Victory against Saddam was a foregone conclusion, so how could it possibly have been so sloppy, so poorly conceived, so beneath the abilities of those involved?

Generation Kill is shot in an objective, unadorned style and told with a sad bewilderment that sees, like The Wire did, how a broken system has failed its characters a basic human level. I imagine a conversation between these soldiers and the low-level MIs at Abu Ghraib:

“What’s up with all the naked prisoners?”

(Shrug) “They told us to soften them up for interrogation.”

“Is that how it works?”

“Beats me. They were doing this crazy stuff when we got here. How about you? I heard you killed some kids.”

(Shrug) “They told us to consider them hostile.”

“Whatever it takes to keep America safe.”

“Yeah, but this isn’t exactly what I had in mind when I enlisted.”

“Me neither.”

On DVD: “Standard Operating Procedure”

Dir. Errol Morris
(R) ★ ★ ★ ★

Movies like this should explode upon the national consciousness like a hydrogen bomb. They should be rigorously discussed by the public, and the evening news should be taking the ball and running with it, instead of devoting precious hours of their time and ours to finding out what Sasha and Malia are having for lunch today. They should be exhibited in sold-out multiplexes to curious audiences with a hunger to understand who we are as a nation, instead of relegated to art-house theaters for documentary junkies and cineastes while the masses flock to Beverly Hills Chihuahua. They shine a bright light into our eyes and excite the brain; we think more critically, with greater insight and compassion.

Standard Operating Procedure is directed by Errol Morris, who made one of the best documentaries I’ve seen, 1988’s The Thin Blue Line. It details the 2003 prisoner abuse scandal at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. I admit that I did not know very much about the scandal and that it had left my mind along with the media coverage. I know now.

I watched the film twice — the second time with Morris’s DVD commentary; it’s a film that, for me at least, demanded a repeat viewing. The first time around I was distracted by Morris’s excessive use of high-speed video photography, which he uses to present heavy-handed images and re-enactments in extreme slow motion. I struggled to piece together the varying accounts of the dozen or so interview subjects. And I was stricken by the infamous photographs, which show profound acts of humiliation and degradation.

The second time, I knew the players and their stories and the picture became clearer — or as clear as it could be when trying to understand such events. I was stricken even more by the photographs, which are so shocking and graphic that there is no anesthetizing yourself from them. As for the slow-motion, it was still obtrusive, but this time I didn’t so much care. An excess of style can be forgiven in the midst of such searing journalism.

Morris defends but does not excuse the soldiers who posed for and took the photos. During the commentary, he describes critics of the film who accuse him of being too lenient towards them. It had been so long since I had heard about the scandal that I had forgotten I was supposed to hate them. Watching the film, it never crossed my mind.

Lynndie England, more than any other soldier, became the face of the scandal. I remembered that face well: the bright smile set against the suffering of Iraqi prisoners, who were forced to remove their clothing and assume humiliating sexual positions. The snapshots are damning and indefensible, but the Lynndie we see in the film is quite different: her face fuller, more sullen, her voice deep with cynicism and regret. Does she regret posing for the pictures? She regrets a lot of things.

Another notable soldier is Sabrina Harman, who wrote letters to her life partner back home while serving in Iraq, and they are alarming in how greatly they vindicate her. She began to take pictures to document what she considered immoral and unlawful treatment of prisoners, and she smiled for the camera to get along. She participated in the acts of degradation, yes, but she also took photographs that brought to light the murder of a prisoner, who died as the result of torture during interrogation. For those photographs she was accused of evidence tampering, and she served a year in prison; the victim’s killer has not served a day.

Morris’s aim is to examine the nature of photos, which capture moments isolated from their context; they may seem to show us one thing but mean another, and they obscure that which does not appear within the frame. We see Lynndie, smiling gleefully as prisoners are abused. We don’t see the manipulation of her then-boyfriend Charles Graner, who was fourteen years her senior, or the military policies that produced such conditions. We see Sabrina giving a thumbs up while standing over the body of the murdered prisoner. We don’t see the interrogator who killed him.

Morris casts light on the shadows. He gives us a glimpse of the hidden world beyond the pictures and shows that these young soldiers became entwined in a system that was already churning when they got there. Under constant attack from within and without the prison walls and ordered by superiors to do whatever it took to protect American lives, these men and women had their morality reprogrammed and were then thrown under a bus for publicly embarrassing the US military. We don’t see that in the pictures, but it’s there.

Composer Danny Elfman provides the score, which has a driving, propulsive energy that lends the film greater urgency. Morris limits his own exposure and lets his interview subjects — mostly the soldiers who were held responsible for the scandal — speak directly into the camera, which makes the film intensely personal in its effect. The photos are disturbing — that goes without saying — and perhaps more disturbing than one can be prepared for. Standard Operating Procedure is a tough, tough, tough sit, but an elevating experience. I am better for having seen these images; they do not exist in a vacuum, and they document crimes being committed in our name.

On DVD: “The Edge of Heaven”

Dir. Fatih Akin
(NR) ★ ★ ★ ★

The Edge of Heaven is the movie Babel was trying to be. It’s one of those intersecting-stories dramas contingent on coincidences and the hidden connections of its characters. Done well, such a narrative is more than contrivance; it can express an idea of human existence, about how we do not exist in a vacuum and may touch other lives in ways imperceptible to us. Babel’s aim was more specific: It wanted to show us the effects of global culture and tried to shoehorn its stories to fit the theme, but the stories didn’t jibe. Compare that to Heaven, which in two simple, paralleled images says more about the consequences of globalization than all of Babel: the image of a casket being exported from Germany to Turkey, and later another, being exported from Turkey back to Germany — exchanging death across borders.

But it is not a cynical film. Also exchanged across the borders are compassion and forgiveness. Writer-director Fatih Akin, a German-born filmmaker of Turkish descent, is tough but tender in considering his subject, observing that the culturally intermingled world is rife with conflict, but also contains the potential for reconciliation.

The stories are set into motion by two characters, a mother and daughter who do not know the life the other leads. The mother is Yeter (Nursel Köse), a prostitute in Germany whose daughter thinks she works in a shoe shop. The daughter is Ayten (Nurgül Yesilçay), a political radical in Turkey whose mother thinks she is a student.

The film is divided into three sections. The first tells Yeter’s story. An old man hires her for the night and would like to hire her permanently, offering to match her monthly earnings if she will live with him and service him exclusively. It is an advantageous offer for Yeter, a woman of Turkish descent who one day is threatened by two fellow Turks if she does not repent for her sins. The old man, Ali (Tuncel Kurtiz), is a heavy drinker with a lust for life and the father of a college professor, Nejat (Baki Davrak), who does not approve of him. It is not a spoiler to reveal that this story ends in Yeter’s death; the film announces it in the title of the first act. How she dies you should see for yourself.

The second act begins with Ayten. After escaping arrest in Turkey, she travels to Germany illegally and searches for her mother. Along the way she is taken in by Lotte (Patrycia Ziolkowska), whose generosity seems unusual at first, and naive, but then we recognize their mutual attraction; they become lovers. This story too will end in tragedy.

I hesitate to reveal more, not because the film deals in fancy plot mechanics but because it develops in ways you don’t expect and it should be experienced, not summarized. What matters are the characters, whom we observe through the eye of God, knowing better than they do the fateful symmetry of their relationships.

There is a sixth character, Lotte’s mother Susanne, who disapproves of Lotte’s relationship, not because of her daughter’s sexuality, but because she puts herself at risk for someone she barely knows. In the third act, which deals with the consequences of the first two, Susanne becomes a key figure; played by Hanna Schygulla in the film’s most affecting performance, she unites the story’s disparate elements and provides an emotional center. In her face Schygulla articulates ideas about grace and redemption. In her decisions we are surprised. In the connections she makes we are uplifted. All roads converge here, at a place where despair turns to understanding. The film ends with a beautifully composed shot overlooking the ocean; there is such hope in it.

“The Wrestler”

Dir. Darren Aronofsky
(R) ★ ★ ★ ★

Reportedly, Vince McMahon, the chairman of World Wrestling Entertainment, isn’t a fan of The Wrestler. If I were him, I wouldn’t be either. Consider one of the film’s most lacerating scenes: washed up grappler Randy “The Ram” Robinson (Mickey Rourke), who in the ‘80s was a superstar not unlike Hulk Hogan, attends a fan event with his fellow old-timers, and the camera observes them pointedly. They occupy wheelchairs, or wear braces for body parts that don’t work like they used to. One has a colostomy bag on his ankle — Peter O’Toole wore one of those in Venus in 2006; is there a more conspicuous indignity than to have your body fluids drained in such a way, for all to see? This is hardly the retirement plan of champions.

Consider another scene, in which Randy participates in a particularly violent brand of hardcore wrestling that involves shattered window panes, barbed wire, and staple guns. The film cuts between the bout and its aftermath, during which Randy’s wounds are treated; director Darren Aronofsky (Requiem for a Dream) focuses on the physical, rotating the camera around Randy’s battered torso, not shying away from closeups of the minute carnage. An earlier scene compares his battle scars to The Passion of the Christ, and though Aronofsky is as attentive to suffering as Mel Gibson was, Randy ain’t no Christ — he suffers alone in a dingy locker room, and there’s no great redemption to be found there. This is a remarkable sequence, our first indication that we are in the midst of a great film.

I do not believe the WWE is like this; they have too much money. But this is what your career might look like if you don’t make it to the WWE, or if you make it there but don’t last. Vince McMahon doesn’t want you to see this film because you can’t look at wrestling the same way once you’ve seen it, and if you can, you should see it again. Major League Baseball recruits its players from farm teams — pro wrestling gets them from the slaughterhouse.

But The Wrestler isn’t set up as an exposé. That’s just what happens in the process of telling its story. Written by Robert D. Siegel and directed by Aronofsky with gritty realism, it’s a character study about a man at the end of a career he loves and unprepared for the next stage of his life. After an event, he collapses, and when he wakes up the doctors tell him he had a near-fatal heart attack and bypass surgery. He’ll never wrestle again. But what will he do instead?

He frequents a strip club, where one of the dancers, Cassidy (Marisa Tomei), is kind to him. He pays for her company, but he means more to her than the time he pays for. They have something in common: When we first meet her, Cassidy is entertaining a group of twentysomethings who make cruel jokes about her age; like Randy she peddles her flesh, is past her prime, and knows it. There is a touching scene where Cassidy offers a lap dance to the club’s patrons, and upon being rejected she makes a date with Randy. These two characters have found in each other the only person left who’s buying what they’re selling.

Randy has a daughter, Stephanie (Evan Rachel Wood, the fierce young actress from Thirteen), whom he abandoned as a child. She hates him, perhaps rightly so, but he attempts to make amends. It may be his last chance to be a father to her. He has a job stocking a supermarket. One day he is promoted to the deli counter — that may be the limit of his career mobility.

Aronofsky frequently shoots Randy from behind, the way you might follow a prize fighter before he emerges in an arena to thunderous applause. There’s a scene like that here: Randy walks through corridors, while on the soundtrack we hear the distant cheers of the crowd. When he emerges through the plastic curtain leading to a grimy kitchen, instead of applause the cheering dissipates and reality sets in — this is his life now, and Aronofsky subverts the visual language of sports films to underline its sadness.

The film is revealing about the behind-the-scenes workings of wrestling shows. I like the detail of early scenes, where combatants are assigned their matches and then discuss choreography. A funny moment shows the wrestlers from two different matches discussing which team would do the neck move and which would do the leg move. Wrestlers communicate secretly in the ring, choreographing on the spot or just bantering. Randy seems to enjoy the small-circuit camaraderie; he was once like those young up-and-comers and knows their dreams by heart.

I have yet to discuss the performance of Mickey Rourke — saving the best for last. I did not know his personal history before seeing the film, only that it was quite a history. According to Wikipedia, he suffered his share of legal troubles — more than his share, I suppose — including an arrest for spousal abuse in 1994 and DUI as recently as 2007. He was trained as a boxer and left acting in the early 1990s to pursue a career. He suffered myriad injuries and perhaps drew from those experiences for his scenes in the ring and in the locker room, to which he brings great physical authenticity. He carries himself heavily, wearily, expressing the weight of physical and emotional damage through sad, distant eyes and revealing a fragile soul in scenes with Tomei and Wood. Working from Siegel’s deeply penetrating script, he presents Randy as a man on the razor’s edge of self-destruction and never quite sure which way he wants to fall. This is a performance that merits comparisons to Robert De Niro in Raging Bull.

Three years ago, Rourke appeared in the film that set the stage for his comeback: Sin City, in which he played a boozing ex-con seeking vengeance for the death of a prostitute who showed him affection. It was the first in the trend of movies replicating the visual aesthetic of their comic book antecedents, and it remains the gold standard. It takes a strong actor to compete with such aggressive stylization, and Rourke’s performance did just that; he elevated his storyline from comic book pulp to a mournful ode to a man with one thing left to fight for. He won the supporting-actor award from the Chicago Film Critics and Online Film Critics. He’ll get an Oscar nomination for The Wrestler, playing another man fighting to salvage the remains of his life. It’s one of the best performances of the year in one of the best films of the year.

On DVD: “WALL-E”

Dir. Andrew Stanton
(G) ★ ★ ★ ★

WALL-E is a singular achievement in filmmaking, animated or otherwise, and the film to beat as the best of the year. It references 2001: A Space Odyssey and the works of Charlie Chaplin and is worthy of those references. It opened my imagination like Dark City, A.I., and the Lord of the Rings films. It contains ideas expressed with images of stunning eloquence. I was overjoyed by this film. It’s a masterpiece.

The director and co-writer is Andrew Stanton, best known for his previous film, Finding Nemo. This is a hell of a followup. He’s downright brave to borrow from silent film for a kid’s movie, where his target audience will be oblivious to his allusions. His main character has no dialogue at all, except his name (WALL-E, which stands for “Waste Allocation Load Lifter: Earth-Class”) and the name of his love interest EVE. But how expressive he is! With large, sad eyes and a mechanized body — fingers, arms, wheel treads — that quivers with anticipation and wonder. There is a shot of WALL-E with EVE, and his eyes reflect the flame of a pocket lighter; it’s one of the most romantic shots in memory.

WALL-E was built by the Buy-N-Large corporation, which suggests Wal-Mart run amok. Buy-N-Large controls every aspect of life, including government, and now that the human race has abandoned Earth, WALL-E is left to do just what he has been programmed to do: allocate waste. There is virtually no dialogue in the first act, so most of the exposition is accomplished visually. WALL-E compacts garbage into cubes, and we are shown vast skyscrapers he has created out of them; concisely and beautifully, these shots tell us all we need to know about how mass consumption has overwhelmed the planet.

EVE is a probe designed to locate vegetation; if Earth can once again sustain plant life, it will be time for the human race to return. Lonely WALL-E forms a connection to EVE and follows her back to the Axiom, a cruise ship of sorts that is celebrating the 700th anniversary of its five-year voyage. There, we see what has become of the human race: they are fat and virtually formless, floating around in fully automated chairs that do everything from brush their teeth to change their clothes. We don’t need to be told how this lazy, sedentary species is connected to the wasteland Earth; Stanton’s images speak for themselves.

The social commentary is apparent. I am reminded of how very recently I criticized Happy Feet for its failure in approaching the same theme: conservation. I stand by those criticisms, now more than ever, because the poetry of WALL-E’s scenes is a direct rebuttal to the amateurish preaching of Happy Feet’s hapless penguins. Stanton doesn’t preach. He doesn’t set his titular robot on a mission to save the environment or redeem the human race. Rather, Stanton vividly shows us the world, and his images express his ideas with such clarity that we don’t need them explained for us, and with such beauty that we are emotionally enthralled by them. They say a picture is worth a thousand words; any one frame of WALL-E is worth a thousand of Happy Feet.

The film’s best moments are among its simplest. Note the expression of a woman whose communication device is inadvertently damaged by WALL-E. Taking in her surroundings for perhaps the first time, she experiences wonder. A similar scene comes later, when a man and woman touch hands. The look they share is more than just two people meeting — it’s a look of discovery. Momentarily freed from their automated machines, they rediscover what it is like to connect with another person and with the world around them. These moments are brief, but overflowing with wisdom.

I could go on and on, listing scene after wondrous scene, but I can hardly do them justice. They need to be seen to be believed.

On DVD: “Young @ Heart”

Dir. Stephen Walker
(PG) ★ ★ ★ ★

“We seem to have reached the age where life stops giving us things and starts taking them away.”

That is a line from, of all things, this summer’s Indiana Jones sequel, which is undistinguished except for that line. It’s one of the most eloquent I’ve heard on the subject of aging. But Young @ Heart suggests an amendment to it: Life has begun to take things away from its subjects, a group of elderly singers in an unlikely rock chorus, but it hasn’t stopped giving.

Young @ Heart was promoted as a lighthearted entertainment. Emphasized in the ads were comical scenes founded on a simple premise: old people singing edgy songs by Sonic Youth and James Brown are funny. Are they funny? Yes, they are funny. But the film is also poignant and humane. The chorus members are an exuberant bunch, but with advanced age come illness and death, and the film contains those things as well. Most of us are young and stupid; when we are older and hopefully less stupid, we should count ourselves lucky to have weathered the changes as well as those in this film, in mind and in spirit.

Director Stephen Walker follows the Young @ Heart chorus as they prepare new songs for an upcoming performance titled “Alive and Kicking.” One is James Brown’s “I Feel Good,” on which the singers have trouble finding the words or the lyrics, or both. Another is “Yes I Can Can,” a soulful tongue-twister by Alan Touissant, but the chorus struggles with the song’s seventy-one utterances of “can.” The third is Sonic Youth’s “Schizophrenia,” and the group can’t make heads or tails of any of it. The director of the chorus is Bob Cilman, who is warm and affectionate, but a stern taskmaster when it is required. He does not condescend to them, and holds them to high standards.

Walker interviews the performers. They discuss their lives, their relationships to each other, and what the chorus means to them. In good or failing health, they make every effort to attend rehearsals and performances; it is a place of shared vitality, community, and new experience. Among my favorites is Eileen Hall, who was ninety-two years old at the time of the filming and sadly passed away in 2007. She has a moving scene where she explains her show-must-go-on determination following a tragedy.

Along the way, life intrudes. Illness impedes some. Members of the group pass away. The conversations turn from the chorus to matters of health. Cancer scares. Heart attacks. Mortality. There are events in the film that are heartbreaking. During a hospitalization, ailing chorus member Joe Benoit explains that he doesn’t fear for his health. “Have I convinced you?” he asks. “No,” Walker answers.

The film includes Young @ Heart music videos of songs including the Bee Gees’ “Stayin’ Alive” and Talking Heads’ “Road to Nowhere.” What is striking during these performances and others is how the lyrics resonate in ways we haven’t heard before. We discover renewed vigor in the well worn “I Feel Good.” Bob Dylan’s “Forever Young” becomes a tender elegy. And what Fred Knittle does with Coldplay’s lovely “Fix You” is no less than what Johnny Cash did with Nine Inch Nails’ “Hurt” in 2002; Coldplay front man Chris Martin has a pitch-perfect falsetto, but I think it’ll be some decades before he can sing it with the emotional ache in Knittle’s voice.

I sang along to the film. When it was over, I listened to and sang music with more relish. I am more hopeful about the future. Few movies that claim to be life-affirming know what that means. This one does.

On DVD: “The Fall”

Dir. Tarsem Singh
(R) ★ ★ ★ ★

There isn’t a single shot in The Fall that isn’t interesting. The great majority are beautiful. Several are astonishing. Shot in two dozen countries, the film takes advantage of some of the most remarkable locations in the world and redefines the possibilities of the medium. It has Lawrence of Arabia’s sensitivity to physical space, shown in glorious wide shots of deserts, mountains, and architecturally magnificent buildings. It is equally attentive to color, a broad palate showcased in the remarkable costumes and natural landscapes. There are no green screens. This is an easy bet for my list of the year’s best films.

The director is Tarsem Singh — credited only as Tarsem, but we can forgive his indulgence. He reportedly spent seventeen years scouting the locations and, I think, singlehandedly justifies the creation of an Academy Award category for location scouts. From Muslim mosques, to African dunes, to a Brahmin city painted entirely in blue, Tarsem has found the kinds of places that if they didn’t exist you could only have imagined. He previously directed 2000’s The Cell, a grossly underrated film, and before that was a music video director. It is thus no surprise that he has made a film of visual splendor, but he also has a story to match, which brings the film into the same league as Pan’s Labyrinth.

The story proper takes place in a Los Angeles hospital in the 1920s (filmed in South Africa), where a young Romanian immigrant recovers from a broken arm that was the result of a fall while picking oranges. She is Alexandria, and she’s played by Catinca Untaru, a major discovery. She is befriended by a Hollywood stuntman, Roy (Lee Pace), who also suffered a fall, on the set of a movie, and now is paralyzed from the waist down. He entertains her with an epic story, but he has an ulterior motive.

As they shape the story together, it’s shown to us in fantasy sequences set in the beautiful locales. We learn more about Alexandria and Roy. They become closer. And then the stakes are raised. That’s all I’ll describe of the plot, because I don’t want to spoil its secrets. This is a film of discovery for the eyes and the emotions. It’s the kind of film they don’t make anymore, although I don’t think they ever made them quite like this. Special effects have become a crutch for the movie industry. Used unwisely, they deconstruct wonder and piece it back together as empty spectacle. Movies like 300, Speed Racer, and the recent Star Wars films create grandiose images using computers and then parade actors in front of them. At best, we admire the pretty pictures but feel nothing. There is no joy in it. Compare it to the famous scene in Gone with the Wind where the camera pulls back and reveals an entire battlefield full of dead and wounded soldiers. How did they do it? Lots and lots of extras, gathered in real physical space, to make us feel the human reality of the casualties of war.

Special effects have their place, but like all things in film they are tools best employed by artists. Directors like Steven Spielberg, Peter Jackson, and Robert Rodriguez have used effects and green screens with great success. The Fall could have been made with green screens. It would have been cheaper and logistically simpler. I think it might still have been a good film, but it would not have captured my imagination the way it does. In The Bucket List, a good film, the Taj Majal was created with visual effects. In The Fall, they go there for real, and the difference is palpable. The reality of the locations achieves a wonder that effects could not reproduce.

I have been a fan of Lee Pace since the premiere of his television series Pushing Daisies last fall. 2008 has been a breakthrough year for him. He earned Emmy and Golden Globe nominations for the series. He appeared on the big screen in Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day, where he demonstrated a suavity out of old Hollywood. The Fall was filmed before either of those projects and features what may be the best performance of his young career, full of volatile anger directed inwards and outwards.

His co-star Untaru is a revelation. She gives a performance so good I spent much of the film wondering how she was so good. She was six years old when the film was made, but it’s not a precocious performance. She behaves as a six-year-old would behave and speaks as a six-year-old would speak, without affectation and utterly natural, yet the role is also emotionally demanding and she doesn’t miss a beat. How does she do it? It’s a credit to the talent of the young actress, but also to Tarsem’s direction of her. The DVD special features are illuminating: he did not have her memorize lines but rather allowed her some freedom to improvise, and elements of her performance influenced the screenplay. There is a language barrier between the Romanian Untaru and American Lee Pace; rather than work around it, Tarsem uses it, and the actors develop an easy, unforced rapport.

The cinematography is by Colin Watkinson, who remarkably has never photographed another feature film. He previously worked as a focus puller, which proves to be an advantageous skill; during some shots, the actors are on one mountain and the camera is on another. The costumes by Eiko Ishioka are innovative and striking; she’s an Oscar winner for 1992’s Dracula. Robert Duffy’s film editing bridges reality and fantasy and unifies settings from across the globe into a single, mystifying world. Krishna Levy’s score incorporates multiple musical styles and cultures and is at times playful, grand, and solemn. Tarsem is the visionary filmmaker who pulls it all together. This is his first film since 2000. The time was well spent.