View The Right Thing

[December 26th, 2007]

So we’ve reached the end of another year of movies, and naturally our thoughts turn to Aristotle. “To enjoy the things we ought and to hate the things we ought has the greatest bearing on excellence of character,” the old Greek wrote. Flash forward 2,357 years to Paul Thomas Anderson’s film There Will Be Blood , and Daniel Plainview (Daniel Day-Lewis), a most excellent character himself, has finally come up with a retort: “There are times when I look at people and I see nothing worth liking.”

There were times, looking at the movies of 2007, when it was easy to share Plainview’s disgust. The year kicked into motion with Michael Moore’s deceptive healthcare screed Sicko , wilted into a summer of disappointing “threequels,” and then announced itself as the moment when Hollywood would make its statement about Iraq—and make it very badly, in a series of hectoring civics lectures. But if you turned your back on the charlatans and the preachers, you were met with a thrilling torrent of uncertainty: movies whose characters confronted moral dilemmas in a spiritually disorienting landscape. In case you’re wondering where to locate this “spiritually disorienting landscape” on a map, two movies filmed it on location in Marfa, Texas.

Those two films—There Will Be Blood and No Country for Old Men —sit at the top of my best-of-2007 list. Like all of the year’s best movies, they were studies in ethics. I’m not talking about morality plays, but films in which men and women tried to make the right choices, and often learned that they had made the wrong ones, or were barred from following through, or never had the resources to make any choices at all.

Yet some of them did the right thing anyway. The horny high-schoolers of Superbad and the bemused stoners of Knocked Up both marshaled previously untapped resources of maturity and commitment. The documentary trio behind King Corn asked hard questions about agriculture and diet—and were wise enough to listen to the answers. The brave Iranian girls of Offside stood up to hidebound old men, while Ryan Phillipe’s young FBI agent in Breach properly weighed personal loyalty against patriotism. But the majority of the year’s most memorable characters never stood a chance: The toxic siblings of Margot at the Wedding and the murderous ones in Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead were doomed by their personalities before they made a single decision. Even Todd’s Haynes’ multifaceted Bob Dylan puzzler I’m Not There was given an emotional ache by Dylan’s need to value artistic freedom over his fans and friends.

I’m making 2007 sound like a bummer crop of movies, which it wasn’t: Any year that offers a giant mutant tadpole (The Host ), elaborate penis drawings, and a psycho with a cattle gun is a great year for entertainment. But a sense of disquiet hung over many of the year’s best films—a feeling that things had gone terribly wrong, and that moral choices would have to be made without any roadmap. Ironically, it was this mood that more accurately reflected the ongoing debacle in Iraq than any of the movies made explicitly about the quagmire. You can hear this feeling in Tommy Lee Jones’ opening voice-over in the Coen brothers’ No Country for Old Men , as he considers the unknown evil he sees coming and concludes that to meet it, “a man would have to put his soul at hazard.” And you can see it in Daniel Day-Lewis’ eyes in There Will Be Blood as his Dan Plainview loses the last of his soul at the moment of his Christian baptism. (Or, at least , you will be able to see it; the movie opens at Cinema 21 on Jan. 11.) The year’s best movies, wrapped as they were in confusion and dread, couldn’t instruct us in what we ought to do. But they gave us plenty we ought to enjoy.

Aaron Mesh’s Top 10 Movies of 2007

2. No Country for Old Men

3. Superbad and Knocked Up (tie)

4. I’m Not There

5. Margot at the Wedding

6.Offside

7. The Host

8. King Corn

9. Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead

10. Breach