Twitch-O-Meter: 10 Films to Cry From Punishment

The War Zone
Often when known actors switch over from acting to directing, they choose emotionally devastating subject matter for their debut film.  Take for instance this list, which has three actor-turned-directors on it.  Here, it is versatile Brit Tim Roth who painstakingly crafts a portrait of family secrets and restrained performances.  It never hurts when you have Ray Winstone and Tilda Swinton as the patron and matron of the family.  And Swinton, as per usual (as recently as sweat and love-handles in Michael Clayton) is not afraid of showing an unflattering side of herself physically, while Winstone gets the occasional burst of rage and is perpetrator of one of the greatest moral crimes or breach of trust one can commit.  Now all of this is filmed against an isolated and gray-grim sky somewhere in the Devonshire countryside.  As an interesting testament to how relentless this film can be, when it screen at TIFF in 1999, one viewer got up half way through the film intending to pull the fire-alarm because he couldn’t take it anymore.  Rumour has it that Roth intercepted him and talked him down.

Grave of the Fireflies
How to turn a room of anime fanboys into blubbering masses of tears?  Just pop in Isao Takahata’s story of Seita and his younger sister Setsuko who end up surviving out in the wilderness after Japan is bombed into starvation by the Americans during WWII.  The only ray of hope coming from the beauty of the titular insects, and their love for one another is crushed in the opening minutes of the film when we know that Seita dies alone and afraid.  It may be fair to say this is the saddest piece of animation out of Japan, or otherwise, and yet interestingly Takahta meant it as a moral fable to punish (to some extent) Seita for his arrogance.  Either way, there are few films as punishingly inevitable as this one.  It is one of the few cult-films that I’m aware of that achieved cult status through melancholy. 

Lilya 4-Ever
Lukas Moodyson certainly has his supporters and detractors, particularly in light of his two recent efforts, the ultra-explicit porno-within-a-film of A Hole in My Heart, and the simply baffling Container.  But that he successfully blended horror, coming-of-age, pathos and death-metal (Rammstein with your kleenex folks?) in a plot that involved child abandonment (Lilya’s mom runs off to America with the promised that Lilya can join her at some unspecified date that never comes) and eventually, the sex trade.  The film is bleak, yet like Grave of the Fireflies is woven through with a thread of mystical uplift that makes the depths and horrors that Lilya is subjected to seem even crazier.  The film is shot down and dirty for extra realism even as it pushes the bounds of what the audience will sit down a watch.

The Sweet Hereafter
The fragmented storytelling only enhances the grief and misery on display (beautifully on display in the Canadian Rockies) in Atom Egoyan’s The Sweet Hereafter.  A story about how to deal with lost children.  Either the bus load of small-town kids that fall into the frozen drink after the bus crashes off the road and onto a snowcovered lake, or in the case of Mitchel Stevens, a preying class-action lawyer who comes to the town looking for profit, but has to constantly deal with his drug-fueled and pathological daughter wandering homeless and out of control on the streets of Toronto.  Much of the elegance and harrowing regret is summed up in a story told about halfway through the film when Stevens talks about when his daughter was only an innocent infant and had a near death experience via a spider-bite at their cottage.  The scene is full of wistful sadness yet simultaneously edge of your seat.  That is no small feat, and only one of many ‘joys’ (infidelity, disappointment, incest) also on display here.  Perhaps it is the kinder, gentler analogue of Blue Velvet which probes the secrets and lies of small town Canada.  And it does so with a light grace.

Nobody Knows
Here is another child abandonment story, which falls somewhere between Grave of the Fireflies and Lilya 4-Ever.  However, director Hirokazu Kore-Eda cut his teeth in the documentary world, and his power of quiet, simple observation is powerful due to the sparse nature of the narrative.  As much as sad things happen, the film comes into very poignant focus when we realize that oldest son Akira essentially loses his childhood to keeps his siblings all in one place after their mother just runs off.  The scene I’m referring to involves 12 year old Akira playing a quick game of baseball.  There is a longing, joy and sense of innocence completely lost.  Yes, you hate that absent Mom in the film.  Not surprisingly both Nobody Knows and Lilya 4-Ever both came about from inspiration on true events.  Kore-Eda’s film should be required viewing in film schools for its natural, textured filmmaking.

Dancer in the Dark
Lars Von Trier is a blessed is some circles, and cursed with angry fist-raising in others.  While his masterpiece of misery and elevation onto the world stage of filmmaking may be Breaking The Waves, I’m pointing the finger at Dancer in the Dark for audacity.  And while Lars should remove the fake ‘von’ from his name and replace it with the word ‘audacity’ (if for no other reason than it is simply second nature to him), Dancer in the Dark has a particularly fiery sense of the word.  First off, half the film is shot gritty and naturalistic in the vein of the Dogme manifesto, but then to underscore the misery of each moment of slowly-going-blind and very poor American immigrant Selma Jezkova (Björk in a rare and fantastic performance) von Trier has large musical numbers (shot using significantly more professional techniques).  The whole film is a work of extreme artifice, and von Trier keeps piling on more terrible things such that it is almost comic.  Yet, much like Michael Hanke’s Funny Games, von Trier manages to pull the audience back into the story time and time again via great performances from his actors (also David Morse, Peter Storemare and the great Catherine Deneuve).  So the film is an often ugly anti-musical that succeeds in spades despite itself.  It transcends mockery by being viciously mocking things.  I can’t explain it further.  It’s a film experience very much worth having though.

Romulus, My Father
Cleaning up awards in its home down under, this film is not so much to be enjoyed as it is marveled at.  Like The War Zone above and Away From Her below, this is an actor putting on the director’s cap.  Richard Roxburgh offers up a tribute to one of Australia’s national treasures with Romulus, My Father.  Opening and closing with a beautiful sequence involving awakening bees, and wall to wall with warm and sunny cinematography, the look of the film is totally at odds with the brutal coming of age story.  Raimond Gaita, who ended up a novelist and philosopher, got there the hard way through neglect, violence, sorrow, and two parents that fought with mental instability.  Eric Bana and Franka Potente are both solid in the film, but a rascally Marton Csokas tries to break the misery of the dry and brutal Australian landscapes.  While this film may be the weakest film on the list, I’ll stand by that it is indeed a challenge to get through all the hardship thrust on Rai over the course of the film, despite the pretty scenery.

Away From Her
Sarah Polley’s adaptation of Alice Munro’s short story has gotten a lot of attention, including a couple recent Oscar nominations.  Rightfully so.  The tale of life slipping away in an institution, and more importantly, memories of that life is hard to watch.  Even harder is the loyal husband that endures watching his Alzheimer’s strike wife of decades strike up a relationship with another institutionalized man because she has completely forgotten her husband.  While the radiant Julie Christie and the young director, Sarah Polley have gotten much of the praise throughout the past year and a half, personally, I found Gordon Pinsent’s character and performance to be what gets me choking up every time.  Everyone should aspire to what Pinsent’s manages to do with forgiveness, compassion and love.  There is much pain and guilt along the way though, not the least of which from the same admirable man.  A challenging story that fully transcends the movie-of-the-week high-concept and approaches the sublime in visualizing the human condition.

All or Nothing
Mike Leigh is one of the few directors that successfully lets his actors fully collaborate in the writing process from start to finish.  While best known for the poignant and amusing Secrets & Lies, or the savage world-view of Naked, I found Leigh’s overlooked All or Nothing to be the most emotionally raw.  It never hurts to have Timothy Spall at the center of your ensemble.  His characters poverty enforced lifestyle, eking out a living as a London Cab driver, includes often digging through his own couch for pence to afford a pint.  He lives with his sad and timid grocery clerk wife and their two kids, both dysfunctional in their own way.  Co-workers and neighbors all get in on the ensemble and have characters that weave and bounce off on another in their miserably poor South London apartment building.  While Leigh manages to end his chronicle of dreary existence for the sake of existence on the slightest of high-notes, the film is a shambling and sad beast full of honest human moments.  It creeps up on you like the ending.

Happiness
Ahhh, Todd Solodnz.  His brief 4 film oeuvre is an exercise is misery as a vessel for his unique brand of bleak comedy.  But all said and told, there are so many moments of truth (ugly truth) buried in his particular style.  Like All or Nothing, Happiness is a large ensemble film, connected by a single family, but extending across a host of other characters, all essayed with unguarded performances from a cornucopia of character actors including Philip Seymour Hoffman, Ben Gazzara, Jane Adams, Lara Flynn Boyle, Camryn Manheim, Dylan Baker and even a fabulous piece of acting from Jon Lovitz.  Nothing is taboo for this film which vilifies the innocent wallflower, humanizes the pedophile and peaks into many corners of dysfunctional family life in an off-kilter manner that is both hilarious and painfully raw.  My old VHS copy of this film was returned to me more times than I can count with only a third of its tape spooled.  As much as it was painful to rewind the darn things, try to get that little tidbit of info from DVD.