THE BEST OF 2005 MOVIES

The heart of the matter is that films from Capote’ to King Kong’ touched ours

BY JAN STUART | STAFF WRITER; Gene Seymour

December 25, 2005

The heart of the matter is that films from 'Capote’ to 'King Kong’ touched ours.

At first glance, 2005 was looking very business-as-usual. You had your prequels ("Batman Begins" and "Star Wars III: Revenge of the Sith") and your sequels ("Miss Congeniality 2" et al).

You had your remakes ("Bad News Bears" and "Yours, Mine and Ours") and your TV- sitcom rethinks ("The Honeymooners" and "Bewitched").

You had your Harry Potter, Brit-lit Cliff's Notes pictures ("Pride and Prejudice" and "Oliver Twist"), periodic Broadway-musical renaissance ("Rent" and "The Producers"), call-of-the-wild documentaries ("March of the Penguins" and "Grizzly Man") and obligatory strange performance by Johnny Depp ("Charlie and the Chocolate Factory").

But every now and then, a picture struck a nerve. The flash of authenticity would elevate the formula biopic. A spark of genuine human emotion would pierce the digitalized armor of the expensive blockbuster. We shed a lot of tears at the movies, which offered a haven to work through our anxiety and sadness in the face of an increasingly chaotic-seeming world.

Catharsis came via meticulously constructed thrillers that confronted the current global malaise through a transparent gauze of fiction ("Syriana" and "The Constant Gardener") or the therapeutic remove of the past ("Munich" and "Good Night, and Good Luck").

Not surprisingly, however, the movies that most successfully pressed our lachrymal buttons were the ones that made the most direct appeal to our hearts: 2005 was awash in movies that refreshed that creakiest of genres - the thwarted love story - with sincerity, wit and the occasional new wrinkle.

Among the would-be lovers kept apart by circumstances beyond their control were two Wyoming ranch hands ("Brokeback Mountain"), a pair of country western stars ("Walk the Line"), an English settler and a Native American princess ("The New World"), a blind American ex-pat and a Russian countess ("The White Countess") and a Saks Fifth Avenue salesclerk and a geeky guitar amp technician ("Shopgirl").

The most hyped thwarted-love story of the year involved an actress and a giant gorilla. The intimacy and separation anxiety experienced by Naomi Watts and King Kong could best be appreciated by those who have ever knocked themselves out to please a pet: most poignantly, those who were compelled to leave behind their four-pawed creatures to ride out Hurricane Katrina on their own.

For all of Watts' many emotive ops, 2005 was another showcase year for actors. In the crowded biopic field, Philip Seymour Hoffman, David Strathairn and Joaquin Phoenix turned in tour-de-force impersonations of Truman Capote, Edward R. Murrow and Johnny Cash in, respectively, "Capote," "Good Night, and Good Luck" and "Walk the Line."

Terrence Howard fulfilled his longtime promise with stunningly contrasting work in "Hustle & Flow" and "Crash," Joseph Gordon-Levitt was a revelation as a teenage hustler in "Mysterious Skin," Jeff Daniels was memorably unctuous in "The Squid and the Whale," Bill Murray pushed his performance-by-eyebrow technique to new heights in "Broken Flowers," and the chameleonic Ralph Fiennes reinvented himself three times over in "The White Countess," "The Constant Gardener" and "Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire."

If 2006 exhibits a fraction of the variety and skill represented by the above-listed performances and the following 10-best lists, we're in for a heady year.

TOP 10 MOVIES
Gene Seymour

1. A History of Violence. There was heartening evidence throughout the year that the western genre, once believed deader than John Ford, was finding intriguing ways to revitalize its conventions. Exhibit A is submitted in the unlikely form of this masterly, unsettling David Cronenberg thriller, set in a present-day small town where a quiet man (Viggo Mortensen) finds himself and his family cornered by bad men from his shady past. As in older, dustier movies with Stetsons and sagebrush, our hero ends up having to do what he's got to do. But there's a lot of nastier-than-usual stuff to get through beforehand.

2. Brokeback Mountain. After seeing Ang Lee's adaptation of Annie Proulx's novella, its offhand description, "The gay cowboy movie," sounds like a reductive taunt. This is an epochal movie romance that steeps in your consciousness so thoroughly that you're too busy being moved to acknowledge how groundbreaking it is. Put it another way: Whatever direction you think this movie is going in, you're going to think a whole lot differently after it's over.

3. Darwin's Nightmare. Once again, there were so many admirable documentaries in theaters this year that they deserved a 10-best list of their own. The one that keeps coming back to haunt me is Austrian director Hubert Sauper's harrowing chronicle of a Tanzanian fishing village's slow death from economic exploitation. It's so painful to watch, it's almost unbearable. But it's too accomplished, mesmerizing and vital to ignore.

4. Capote. Some have claimed that Philip Seymour Hoffman's portrayal of the eponymous novelist is so incandescent and consummate that it overpowers everything else in the movie. Hoffman's a wonder, but so is Catherine Keener's shrewd, understated take on Harper Lee. And what about Chris Cooper, Clifton Collins Jr., Amy Ryan and Bruce Greenwood, along with Bennett Miller's direction and Dan Futterman's script? They all glow in this sad, gray story. Rarely has the thin, jagged line between being an artist and being human been isolated and captured so poignantly.

5. The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada. Speaking of sad stories, Tommy Lee Jones' directorial debut offers further proof that a contemporary western can stand tall with the roughest, toughest classics of the past. This revenge-and-pursuit saga is at one with the best of Sam Peckinpah. But there's poetry in the movie's depiction of loneliness and dread that, one can argue, belongs to Jones, who also delivers one of his scariest, most magisterial performances.

6. Howl's Moving Castle. The great Japanese animator Hayao Miyazaki conjures a dream about a lonely teenager transformed by a jealous witch into an old woman. And that doesn't take into account blob men that can hide in sidewalks, the coolest, bravest scarecrow since Dorothy Gale was blown over the rainbow and a dashing hero who's just too neurotic to always come through when needed. Grousing flames, airships, climate you can control with a dial - ay caramba! Who would want to wake up from all this?