Welcome to 5 Favorites. Each week, I will put together a list of my 5 favorites (films, performances, whatever strikes my fancy) along with commentary on a given topic each week, usually in relation to a specific film releasing that week.
The director who brought you Mad Max and Babe: Pig in the City unifies those bleak and fantastical styles into his latest cinematic offering: Three Thousand Years of Longing. Idris Elba plays a Djinn who offers a lonely woman (Tilda Swinton) three wishes if she will free him. While I haven’t seen enough of Idris Elba to form his own list and have tackled his movies in a couple of group lists, I have seen enough of Tilda Swinton to have a challenging time choosing five. Sometimes, she’s in a great film briefly, which made things a bit more difficult. These are the five I ultimately settled on.
Adaptation. (2002)
Tilda Swinton is a very familiar figure these days, but that wasn’t always so. In the 1990s, she’s best remembered for her performance in Orlando, but she had already earned respect for her experimental performances in prior films. As the 2000s began, her ubiquitous presence in mainstream films began to mount. While she’s not an integral character in Adaptation., it was the first film I managed to see her in. The film is about Charlie Kaufman and his fictitious brother as they attempt to adapt Susan Orlean’s novel The Orchid Thief while suffering from writer’s block. The end result is something of a bizarre and twisted narrative that needs to be experienced to be genuinely understood.
The film was highlighted by Nicolas Cage playing dual roles as the twins Kaufman as well as Meryl Streep and Chris Cooper in major roles, Streep as the novel’s author and Cooper as her novel’s eponymous orchid thief and secretly her lover. It’s a rather bonkers premise, but dovetails nicely with the themes of the novel and provided Kaufman with one of his best screenplays just besting Being John Malkovich. With the strong performances and twisted premise, it’s a fitting selection even if it’s not one of the smallest character arcs of Swinton’s career filled with a lot of small, but memorable parts.
No original review available. It was directed by Spike Jonze.
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (2008)
David Fincher wasn’t likely the best director to highlight Swinton’s work, so The Curious Case of Benjamin Button is one of the best films she’s in even if she’s barely in it. She appears in one segment as a British trade minister’s wife who has an affair with the title character, Benjamin Button. As Button, Pitt brings warmth and passion to a character who is born at an advanced age and grows younger as the world around him grows older.
Based on an F. Scott Fitzgerald short story of the same name, the film marks Fincher’s best film to date and features one of Pitt’s best performances. For Cate Blanchett, who plays his primary love interest through most of the latter half of the film, it is one of a large number of strong performances, but fits squarely in the middle of her extensive and impressive filmography. Likewise, it’s a perfectly affectionate performance from Swinton even if she’s given little to work with.
We Need to Talk About Kevin (2011)
Now we come to the most impressive performance I’ve seen Swinton. Directed by Lynne Ramsay, this piercing, contemplative film asks the audience to sympathize with the mother of a teen who has devastated an entire town by shooting up his high school. That teen is played by Ezra Miller. Ramsay adapted Lionel Shriver’s novel of the same name and the end result is a film that’s difficult to watch because of the horrendous nature of the events the film is settled into.
The film spends little time on the incident itself, focusing on Swinton as she’s raising the monster-in-waiting, a mentally troubled teen. The film sets itself after the events that have landed Kevin in prison. Living in a rundown house and attempting to fix it up as a way to occupy her time in between prison visits, Eva looks back on her rearing of a future killer. The audience is swept along in her sorrow and frustration, trying to figure out if and where she went wrong and how she could have raised someone who could be so evil. It’s a fascinating exploration of the devastation wrought by school shooters, not by the shooters themselves, but of the parents who thought they had raised their child better than to act as they had. While it’s not a perfect distillation of all such parents, it’s a fascinating character study on the long-lasting largely personal and sometimes communal effects of tragedy.
Moonrise Kingdom (2012)
Wes Anderson is one of the most distinctive filmmakers working today. His appreciation for bright, defined colors and incisive social commentary manifest almost perfectly in Moonrise Kingdom, a coming-of-age story about a young orphan who forms a relationship with a young girl as the pair attend a church performance together and become pen pals. They agree to meet up once again in the wilderness, both running away to make the rendezvous
In an Anderson film, most of the celebrity actors have minor roles. Yet even in the grand scheme of an Anderson film, Swinton’s character is a major one. Although she has no name, she is the head of social services and intends to find and institutionalize the young Khaki Scout after his current foster family decide to force him to leave. For as light of a tone as Anderson’s comedies are, there’s a thread of misery and darkness in each of them. Moonrise Kingdom for all its vivid and resplendent visuals has at its heart not just a romance, but a grim one where danger lurks around every corner. There is a somewhat happy ending, but it’s the journey we’re pulled along for and that underlying bleakness only makes the finale all the more enthralling.
Snowpiercer (2013)
As we travel farther and farther into the future, the prescience of various science fiction films have become readily apparent. Snowpiercer grows in salience every single day. Not just for its bleak view of a future where climate change is never controlled and much of the earth is plunged into a new ice age, but for how it paints the wide disparity between classes. The rich living in splendor and opulence while the poor are castigated to cramped quarters and an uncertain future. Before Bong Joon-ho won an Oscar for Parasite, another look at class wars, he delivered this insightful and harrowing adventure film set on a bullet train speeding around the planet with the last of civilization aboard.
In one of his best performances, Chris Evans embodies the everyman trapped in the confines of the rear of the train where dozens of humans are jam-packed into tiny spaces, subsisting off the meager assistance of those running the train. As he begins leading a rebellion that intends to take over the train entire, he and his associates begin fighting their way forward with danger and heartbreak laying around every corner. Bong’s film is a fascinating macrocosm of the world. The uber-rich have a vaunted place at the front of the train, the destitute have theirs in the rear with the center set aside for the middle classes who turn a blind eye towards those beneath them in hopes that they can live their nice existence without angering those above them who could send them farther back should they misbehave. Yes, the film is positioned in the not-so-distant future and climate change is a defining element of the setting, but it’s really classism that’s the target of the film’s blistering and perceptive social commentary.
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