The films of 2015 that defined the times in the minds of audiences
The best films echo through our times. They are the sum of our fears, desires and sins. They summon grand and singular narratives about crime, social upheaval, politics, racial injustice and anxieties over fragile resources on a warming planet. These stories permeate our news feeds and gadget-humming lives, but movies, like whispers in the dark, afford context and emotional force beyond the headlines.
A year of outlandish aplomb and stylized restraint at the cinema brought us provocative tales of forbidden lesbian love, financial chicanery, imploding housing markets, child sex abuse scandals, racist gunmen and, in case you weren’t paying attention, one wild ride across the desert with a brutally efficient Charlize Theron, a muscled, shaved-headed, glistening feminist sprung from the apocalypse.
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Most films are pleasant or unpleasant diversions that are communally shared and universally forgotten. But when a movie strikes the vortex of public consciousness, such as “Spotlight,” which follows Boston Globe reporters as they expose the cover-up of pedophile priests in the Roman Catholic Church, it evokes clarity and reflection. The same way that “Mad Max: Fury Road” called attention to environmental dangers as Theron, hounded by crazed men, drove her battered machine through desperation and drought.
The success of such films is to resonate somewhere between the photographs in a scrapbook and your latest tweet.
“There are images right now on Google of Sahara desert sand being blown like that in that state all through [Africa],” Theron said at the Cannes Film Festival. “And it’s absolutely frightening ... and it’s in a world that I think makes it even scarier because it is something that is not that far off if we don’t pull it together.” She added that the film spoke to global warming, drought “leadership becoming completely out of hand.”
The arrival of “Mad Max” coincided with renewed efforts in recent years to limit global warming, culminating in a landmark Paris summit this month where 195 nations to vowed to limit greenhouse gas emissions. It was a moment when real-life cinematic images of dissolving ice caps and rising sea levels took precedence over the Darwinian designs of global politics. President Obama said of the historic pact: “We’ve shown that the world has both the will and the ability to take on this challenge.”
Directed by George Miller, who has been nominated for a Golden Globe, “Mad Max” emerged from and spoke to the zeitgeist. The same can be said of “The Danish Girl,” a story based on Lili Elbe, who early last century underwent experimental sexual reassignment surgery. Starring Eddie Redmayne, the movie was released amid the buzz around the debut of Caitlyn Jenner, increasing calls for transgender rights and the popularity of streaming television shows such as “Orange Is the New Black” and “Transparent.”
Other films in contention for awards this season include “Carol,” a tale of illicit lesbian love set in the nostalgic glow of the 1950s when the veneer was pretty but the social constraints harsh. Starring Cate Blanchett and Rooney Mara, “Carol” arrived months after the Supreme Court legalized same-sex marriage and further hardened the divides among Republican and Democratic presidential candidates.
Director Spike Lee’s “Chi-Raq” is a satire on gang violence in Chicago, which in recent years has been one of the nation’s deadliest cities. The film refashions the ancient Greek play “Lysistrata” — women withholding sex to stop their men from fighting — into a modern parable about how young black men are endangering one another. It preceded Quentin Tarantino’s “The Hateful Eight,” about the travails of a black bounty hunter, played by Samuel L. Jackson, navigating racism in the brutal, immediate aftermath of the Civil War.
“Chi-Raq” and “The Hateful Eight” played alongside Ta-Nehisi Coates’ “Between the World and Me,” a memoir written as a letter to his son about growing up black in America where police “have been endowed with the authority to destroy your body.” The book, on virtually everyone’s “best books of the year” list, was a prayer for a child to emerge as a man unscathed in an era when unarmed young blacks, such as Freddie Gray and Michael Brown, were killed by police.
It’s a lesson African American men learn early.
“I was taught those very same things to survive in Tennessee,” said Jackson, 67, who in “The Hateful Eight” relies on wits and cunning. “If a cop pulls me over, I’m not going to roll down the window and say, ‘Hey, (expletive). I’m Samuel L. Jackson.’ I’m going to say, ‘I’m sorry, officer, what’s the problem?’ I want to disarm him quickly. I’m not going to jump in his face or come at him like some hip-hop rapper.”
Movies like “99 Homes” and “The Big Short” explored the systemic abuses in the financial industry and what they wrought on the middle class and the poor. Both deal with the 2008 financial crisis: “99 Homes,” starring Michael Shannon, is about opportunists flipping foreclosed houses in Florida. “The Big Short,” directed by Adam McKay, is an indelible look at the greed, hubris and incompetence that propel and threaten world markets.
Both films are cautionary tales with biting insights into the perils of unchecked capitalism and a political class beholden to the wealthy. They are the stuff of headlines and broken lives, and their sentiments reverberate through a presidential campaign that at once vilifies and courts Wall Street. The movies are funny, searing and all too real, carrying the glint of instruction and the hint that it could happen again.
Their time, like that of “Spotlight,” is set in the recent past as events slide from the tremors of news deeper into our psyches for reflection and perspective. The passing of years has given them gravity so that they stand as testaments to individual and collective sins, much like the movies emanating from the post-Vietnam era, such as “Coming Home” and “Apocalypse Now.”
“We wanted the audience to feel the excitement the reporters felt as they cracked the case and then the horror they felt at the depravity they found. That was a fine line to walk,” said “Spotlight” director Tom McCarthy. “It shows there’s an audience for real, compelling drama. If you build it and you build it well, audiences will come.”
Twitter: JeffreyLAT
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