The Best Films of 2004

Reunited and it feels so good: Julie Delpy and Ethan Hawke in Richard Linklater's Before Sunset. Courtesy Warner Independent

Before Sunset
Almost a decade after their Eurail Passers’ one-night-stand, an American man (Ethan Hawke) and a French woman (Julie Delpy) meet again for 80 minutes of walking, talking, talking and more walking – and then…? Richard Linklater’s deceptively simple sequel to Before Sunrise is a romantic meditation on the slow-fast passage of time and the compromises we make along the creep towards middle age. Infused with the sadness of missed love and the exhilaration of reconnection, Before Sunset is a “romantic comedy” that rescues the term, showing how pain can enrich a relationship rather than end it.

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
Almost a companion piece to Before Sunset, Eternal Sunshine is about what happens when one refuses to endure the pain of romance; the yin-yang goes off balance, and the love rush is erased, too – literally. Joel (Jim Carrey) undertakes a procedure at a dubious medical facility called Lacuna to remove his memories of flaming-haired, flaming-tempered Clementine (Kate Winslet). Writer Charlie Kaufman (Adaptation) is a master of absurd invention – Joel’s head, i.e. his inner life, is like a funhouse refraction – but he’s actually restrained here; the movie is never so clever as to forget that it’s really a gut-wrenching elegy for a relationship gone bad, and an optimistic paean to love’s fortitude.

Touching the Void
An astonishing portrait of the glory and folly of man in nature, and one jaw-slackening piece of filmmaking: a docu-drama for thrill-seekers. The “reenactment” is usually the kiss of cinematic death, but the actors who play climbing legends Joe Simpson and Simon Yates are so bearded and frost-covered that you can’t see their faces long enough to be annoyed by any lack of resemblance to the real guys. In 1985, the young maverick climbers were thwarted by killer weather in the Peruvian Andes, and Yates made the decision to “cut the rope” – the one holding Simpson above a hell-deep crevice – and save himself instead of waiting for the cold to kill both of them. The repercussions rocked the climbing community, and in contemporary interviews told directly to the camera, Yates is still defensive, Simpson still completely on his side. The latter’s miraculous survival is ridiculously tense; you wouldn’t believe this story if it weren’t true.

I’m Not Scared
Young Michele (Giuseppe Cristiano) is as golden brown as the Southern Italian wheat fields where he spends his summer days. During his boyhood investigations, he pulls back a piece of corrugated tin covering the ground near an abandoned farmhouse to find a creature in a hole; half-ghost, half-human, it lets out a spine-grabbing cry that we later identify as the sound of Michele’s childhood ending. A beautiful film and a suspenseful noir – around every corner, a twist – that director Gabriel Salvatores lights like a Terrence Malick landscape. Perfectly captures a child’s foreboding sense that the world around him is not as safe as it once seemed.

Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter…and Spring
Serene and then shocking, South Korean writer-director Kim Ki Duk extracts the fundamental spirit of Buddhism from this tale of a monk and his child disciple. They live alone on an island in the middle of a still, empty lake where the little boy is first seen gleefully tying rocks to small animals; a frog and a snake struggle as he laughs. Lesson one: the monk ties a stone to the boy, bidding him to set free all the animals. If any have died, he tells him, “you will carry a stone in your heart for the rest of your life.” Episodic, with the consistency of a fable, each season tests the boy. A meditative tale about the cycle of life, natural and human, that speaks to the profound connectedness of all things.

Sideways
Yes, the hype is annoying, and yes, it’s deserved. Sideways is the kind of funny, literate American film that everyone complains doesn’t get made anymore. Miserable oenophile and failing novelist Miles (Paul Giamatti) and unflappable C-actor Jack (Thomas Haden Church) hit the road in the Santa Ynez Valley for a wine-and-golf-week bachelor celebration. Jack’s getting married, but he’s still determined to get laid and to help Miles do the same, though their prospects – a “pour girl” (Sandra Oh) and a grad student-cum-waitress (Virginia Madsen), respectively – are far too sharp to be used. Co-writer and director Alexander Payne (About Schmidt) lets his misguided characters wade through the tragic muck and out the other side with something like dignity. That we like these men at all is remarkable, but we do so because Payne lets us see in their endless mistakes something universal: striving and neediness, and a desire for companionship, whether in the form of dying friendships, or new love.

Birth
Okay, so no one liked this but me. I’m right, though, and the world is wrong, as usual. Nicole Kidman plays Anna, a patrician New Yorker whose dead husband returns in the form of a ten-year-old boy. Neither horror film nor body-swapping comedy, Birth is that rare thing: a deeply considered film about the limits (are there any?) of love (yes, there are). Director Jonathan Glazer proved himself a great creator of worlds in the fabulous gangster film Sexy Beast. This time, he gives us a family of New York WASPs – headed by a fierce Lauren Bacall, playing Anna’s mother – whose emotions are as impenetrable as the heavy doors of the well-appointed apartment that can’t contain this improbable, unearthly event.

Maria Full of Grace
The snarl on the pretty face of Maria Alvarez (Catalina Sandino Moreno) isn’t mere adolescent snarkiness. She’s poor, Columbian and recently walked away (or stormed off) from a demeaning job pruning flowers, her family’s main financial support. She becomes a drug mule, swallowing thumb-sized capsules of heroin and taking her first flight to New York. Made in Spanish by an unknown first-time American director, Joshua Marston, Maria Full of Grace has the tenor and meticulous detail of a documentary, but the title character is so strong-willed, such a fleshy, flawed person – so much not a Third-World victim – that the film never feels like pat social tragedy.

The Saddest Music in the World
Because it labels Winnipeg, 1933, the “World Capital of Sorrow.” Because Guy Maddin’s imagination is humungous. Because he creates worlds that could only exist in the movies. Because it’s a black-and-white movie that’s not black and white. Because it’s a silent movie that’s not silent. Because Isabella Rossellini plays a beer heiress balancing on glass legs filled with lager. Because Saddest is joyful, exuberant and achingly beautiful.

Million Dollar Baby
Clint Eastwood seems utterly oblivious to the fact that we’re living in the age of irony, and thank God. His films are throwbacks: old-fashioned stories told carefully, slowly, and without trickery. After directing last year’s stellar Mystic River, he proves again that at 74, he’s one of the most vibrant filmmakers around. Playing a crusty gym owner and fight manager dragging a cartload of Catholic guilt, he reluctantly agrees to train a determined woman boxer from the poorest corner of Arkansas (Hilary Swank). A great sports movie that’s also a great father-daughter movie, overlaid on Eastwood’s favourite theme – redemption – with a surprise turn that challenges that most athletic, and religious, idea: sacrifice.

Katrina Onstad writes about the arts for CBC.ca.