I usually don’t do Top Ten lists. I tried it once, and it didn’t work out. Granted, I was trying to do my own personal Sight and Sound Top Ten Best Films Of All Time, and quite frankly, the scope ensures its impossibility (has anyone seen every movie ever made? No. Not even Quentin Tarantino). I get paralyzed by all of the things I know I haven’t seen. Then J. Hoberman astutely noted in his preface to his Top Ten of 2006 that any such list is mutable and essentially a piece of personal history. Nobody can see everything, and what one chooses to see or not see has a lot to do with the person doing the selecting as well as the inherent qualities (or lack thereof) of the movies in question. When faced with the choice some weeks ago between Volver and Happy Feet, yep, I picked the penguins. Then I opted for Casino Royale. On the other hand, I decided to ring in the New Year with a viewing of that fun spousal abuse flick Once Were Warriors on DVD. Par-tay. Anyway, creating such a list demands limits and an acknowledgment that it’s subject to change and incomplete. This column’s name mercifully provides a limit and an alibi. I loved The Queen, but that’s not exactly a “guy movie.” Ditto Marie Antoinette (I do not care if it’s bad history or questionably cast—that soundtrack and those shoes rocked). Volver? Passionate, moving, funny, and all those other woman’s picture adjectives. If I were to do an all-inclusive top ten, there they might all be (along with the dancing penguins). The others on that list? Not so girly and fuzzy. Here, then, are my Top Six Manly Movies of 2006. Except for number one, the order is subject to change at any given moment.
1. Children of Men. No, I’m not including it just for the title. It’s here for all the reasons Hoberman and his admiring critical brethren have cited. Alfonso Cuarón and his cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki choreographed two of the most viscerally excited action sequences of the year. Cuarón’s gift for visual storytelling through camera movement and that oh-so-fancy term mise-en-scène adds layer upon disturbing layer to the basic story of one man protecting the first woman to become pregnant in an infertile too-close future world that’s going to hell in a hand basket. Nevertheless, Clive Owen also has a bit to do with Children of Men’s exalted Guy Movies position. Owen’s Theo is both a quintessential hard-boiled hero, complete with cynical attitude, gallows humor, and cigarette addiction, and a rebuke to the notion that the saviors of humankind must always inevitably be (powerful) men. He’s running around in flip-flops, for crying out loud. This is not the usual picture of male strength. In fact, Cuarón and his cohorts don’t have a very high opinion of the male will to power through violence. Theo’s ex-wife Julian is the one rebel who decided to do away with violent terrorism as a means to the anti-government, pro-immigrant Fishes’ ends. The male Fish leaders, however, disagree. Julian, ex-midwife Miriam, “fugee” camp resident Marichka: they all grasp the importance of illegal alien Kee’s pregnancy in itself, as opposed to its use as a political tool. Yes, all of the heavily armed men stop shooting when they see a baby in their midst, but once the baby’s out of the way, they go right back to killing each other. Theo also delivers the glorious punch line to the men (and Kee) who are so convinced the new baby is their personal Jesus that they repeatedly call the child “he”: “It’s a girl.” And Theo does all he can to protect her and her mother so he can be true to his ex-wife’s idea of how life on earth might in fact be preserved. Theo sides with the Human Project’s foggy promise of non-violent nurture because if he goes with the rebels, well, the whole world will end up sleeping with the fishes.
2. The Departed. Speaking of sleeping with the fishes…yeah, I know, they’re Irish mobsters, not Italian. Anyway, what’s not to like? Martin Scorsese—good. Leonardo DiCaprio—good. Matt Damon—good. Mark Wahlberg—good (!). Martin Sheen—good. Alec Baldwin—good. Jack Nicholson—well, seven out of eight ain’t bad. Of course it’s no Goodfellas. Nothing is Goodfellas, except Goodfellas. And of course it’s not its Hong Kong source Infernal Affairs. But here’s a radical idea: if you want to see Infernal Affairs, rent Infernal Affairs. Instead of whining about what The Departed isn’t, be happy that Scorsese and company produced that very rare Hollywood bird: a smart, kick-ass genre movie about mentally anguished men with guns.
3. Letters From Iwo Jima. Here’s an even rarer Hollywood bird: an empathetic movie about the “enemy” in a foreign language with subtitles (what? we have to read? perish the thought). That Clint Eastwood’s Japanese film about Iwo Jima is better than his American one is actually not surprising at all. He’s hailed as a quintessentially American filmmaker for his old-fashioned classical narrative style and his on-going concern with the violence that’s so embedded in American foundation myths that it’s easy to forget there are plenty of other countries with their own mythologies of violence (until it’s inflicted on the U.S.—then it’s all about how our violence is “righteous” and the Other’s isn’t). Yet Eastwood’s career and vision have always been marked by a rather more international sensibility. By his account, he agreed to make a cheapo Italian western with a director who didn’t speak English way back in the early 1960s because he recognized that it was an adaptation of a Japanese movie he liked: Akira Kurosawa’s Yojimbo. No wonder he’s at home artistically with the doomed Japanese soldiers in Iwo Jima’s caves. And the dilemma he explores with his affecting low-key candor is a familiar one: the waste of life perpetrated by too many platitudes about patriotic honor, and too many small-minded men who are too afraid to question the system that kills them. It’s just a different system.
4. Casino Royale. I’ve already said my piece about the new, brutally appealing James Bond. Long may Daniel Craig reign.
5. The Proposition. I’d like to say that no list of top man movies is complete without a western, but they are released so seldom these days that this would leave too many unfinished lists. Happily, that is not the case this year, courtesy of Australia. Look, another instance of ostensibly American violent mythology going international. Forget George W. and his Texas bullshit. Uglified Guy Pearce is this year’s best man of the “West,” alongside his rueful nemesis Ray Winstone. Winstone asks Pearce to do a Cain-and-Abel number in return for his other brother’s life, and Winstone, being a man of relative morality in a morally relative frontier, means to keep his promise. Pearce, another man of relative morality, understands why such an errand needs to be done regardless of whether he likes it. But leave it to music’s resident dark poet of love and murder Nick Cave to write a female character with her own inconvenient and hysterical (if comprehensible) thirst for blood. Nobody’s innocent, which is precisely as it should be in a strangely beautiful and rough desert landscape that wasn’t always owned by white westerners.
6. Inside Man. Hm. Western, check. War movie, check. Cops-and-mobsters movie, check. Science fiction, check. James Bond, check. What’s left? Heists. And more cops. And Jodie Foster playing the kind of woman who relishes handing Christopher Plummer his balls on a platter. She can do that, of course, because Inside Man’s smart, no-bull cop Denzel Washington and Clive Owen’s wily robber have jewels to spare. Ah, Clive Owen. That voice, those eyes, that ultra-masculine-without-being-annoying cool. But I digress. Anyway, like Ken Watanabe’s charismatic general Kuribayashi in Iwo Jima, Washington and Owen are men who love their work and relish doing it to the best of their abilities. They have no problem getting creative if that’s what it takes—the more creative, the better. They also will never, ever back down. It almost doesn’t matter who wins. Watching them spar is the reward. And as with The Departed and Lee’s idol Scorsese, it doesn’t matter that this isn’t a radical, formally innovative Spike Lee joint. Let’s just be happy that Lee and company made a smart, kick-ass genre movie about less anguished men with guns.
Because when the world’s going to hell in a hand basket, sometimes you just need a little fun. Especially if Clive Owen’s involved.
Guy Movies is a biweekly analysis of machismo cinema from the perspective of a woman.
