Gareth Higgins

A TRAUMATIZED Iraq War veteran and Oscar Wilde don’t immediately invite comparison, but in two current films they could be scapegoated brothers. The Happy Prince, a labor of love for its writer-director-star Rupert Everett, and Leave No Trace, director and co-writer Debra Granik’s first fiction feature since Winter’s Bone, are both about men in a wilderness, not because they have done anything wrong but because the dominant culture doesn’t want to see them. And I mean truly see them—especially the way they may remind us of discomfort with ourselves.

In Leave No Trace, Ben Foster’s Will has given mind and body for his country and wants to live where he feels safest—in the woods. He handles himself and keeps his daughter (the brilliant Thomasin McKenzie) physically safe, emotionally healthy, and growing in knowledge of the world, but because he doesn’t care for the “system” that harmed him, he must hide or jump through hoops to prove he’s as good as anyone else.

Everett’s Oscar Wilde, in The Happy Prince, is trying to make a life after being imprisoned for love. The first prison was the love itself, love made torment by bigotry; the second a literal jail. He’s broke and broken. He doesn’t always treat others well, but aches to grant the world what he can: amusement at ourselves mingled with compassion for those living “in the gutter,” whether or not they can see the stars. These beautiful films offer hope without cliché, recognizing that our experience of tragedy always coexists with love.

LIFELONG FRIENDSHIP is paradoxical. The person who knows you best can also cause the most pain. Another layer of complexity emerges when one party wants to change their life while the other remains fixed on how things used to be. Spend an evening with high school buddies who haven’t seen each other for 20 years, and you’ll see that unresolved parts of our character tend to appear when old friendships spark off each other.

The utterly thrilling Blindspotting, a likely candidate for both the best and most important film of the year, dramatizes friendship as central to being human, with the unresolved dimensions of wider social relationships the main challenge we face to be happy in this life and to have a life at all. It’s a brilliant examination of one of the smallest facts of life—boy meets boy—and one of the largest: Since your people persecuted my people, how can we ever become the same people?

The plot is simple: A guy has three days before his probation ends, so he must avoid even the hint of trouble. It doesn’t work out, of course.

CONJURING THE VIEW on a mountain hike, the beloved Americana musician David Wilcox sings “Some things you can’t unsee.” The first time I heard the song, I was struck by the surprise: It’s not just the painful, traumatic interruptions that stay with us. The exquisite, tender, spectacular ones can become permanently intertwined with our more practical thoughts, a backdrop for memory, musing about the future, or just living in the ordinary moments of day-to-day living. The magnificent bonus is that traumatic memories can be healed by reframing them with images and thoughts that empower us beyond victimhood.

Some movies, too, sear themselves into the mind. The memory of a scene and the feelings it aroused may become interwoven. It can be difficult to tell the difference between the movie we saw and whatever was going on in our lives at the time. Sometimes the scene is distressing, but other times it is like an old friend or mentor we can visit for comfort, advice, or a reminder of something useful we had forgotten.

I experienced this recently with the new restoration of Women in Love, the 1969 adaptation of D.H. Lawrence’s novel about four people trying and failing to tell each other how they feel and what they need.

I HAVE LOVED movies as long as I’ve loved anything, but these days I don’t love going to the movies. Multiplexes often feel like overpriced and overstimulating factories, in which we pay to be bombarded by advertising for other products. Industrial movie houses are more like planes going through turbulence than spaces for paying attention to art or even merely the pleasure of being entertained. Not an escape, but an ordeal.

This shadow has, however, provoked alternatives. Life-giving ways to watch movies are popping up—new independent theaters, community screenings, and festivals that interrupt the conveyor-belt method of get ’em in, sell ’em stuff, and get ’em out.

THERE'S A crazy-beautiful idea in Paterson, Jim Jarmusch’s film about a bus-driving New Jersey poet (or a poetry-writing bus driver), that makes it honestly inspirational, and perhaps even holy. Inspirational because this story of an ordinary guy in an ordinary town shows us how to see our own ordinariness as full of wonder; holy because this ordinary guy is an icon of integrity—he loves, he lets his yes be yes, and judgmentalism finds no foothold in him.

The crazy-beautiful idea is that everyone is an artist, and that when not subjected to the trappings of academia, the publishing industry, or commerce, creativity can just flow as part of everyday life. Adam Driver is perfectly ordinary enough to be a gift in the lead role (Paterson his name, Paterson his town), containing his tall muscular frame with gentleness, but ready to use it to protect (a military past is invoked through the subtle use of an old photograph). The Iranian actor Golshifteh Farahani brings a lovely, mild eccentricity to the woman he loves. Their kindness and dreaming together makes a blue-collar house a palace.

Paterson unfolds over a week, and I do mean unfolds—the day-by-day account replays the moments that repeat themselves in most of our lives (waking up, the commute, encounters with others, the walk home, dinner, and a beer at the local pub). Each day’s experience reveals more about the people we’re watching.

Someone has called Paterson a “utopian” film, and although it would be easy to read only the surface and see a pleasant tale of a guy and a girl and the music of words, it earns that term. For one thing, the community in Paterson is one of the most racially diverse in movies—there are distinct African-American, Indian-American, and Middle Eastern voices here. The average white guy is in the minority—and utterly satisfied with his life. Not only is he not striving for the public acclaim usually featured in stories of struggling artists, he is so mindful about the world and his place in it that he may not even notice that his poetry isn’t winning him any awards (never mind income).

He also may not notice, nor does the film remark upon, the most idyllic fact of his life: In a movie set 40 minutes from Manhattan, in an era where louder voices are telling us to fear the other, home is a white U.S. veteran and a brown-skinned Middle Eastern free spirit, figuring life out together. Another crazy-beautiful idea. Or maybe not so crazy.

Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 is a strange sequel, both better and worse than the first. Better: It centers characters who in other movies would be marginalized; there’s a large dose of wit and tenderness (sometimes at the same time: such as a wonderful Mary Poppins joke that brings a huge laugh of endearment); a fluid visual imagination; and an actual idea: What happens when Ego rules the universe?

Worse: While in the original, violence was meted out sparingly, in this second Guardians outing, killing solves everything. One of the most brilliantly designed special-effects scenes in the post- Jurassic Park era is also one of the most nihilistic: A lovable rogue liberates a prison by means of a magic arrow that can kill dozens without needing to be re-aimed. He does it whistling a happy tune, accompanied by a wisecracking raccoon and a pop song. It’s cartoonish, of course, but I don’t recall Tom or Jerry ever killing anyone; this scene, in a film that elsewhere exhibits imagination and delight, merely invites us to revel in carnage.

Couldn’t we see the guardians dance their way into something other than annihilating their opponents? Couldn’t the character who can transform suffering by touch have been employed in the service of healing the bad guy’s megalomania? Guardians Vol. 2 gets a lot right, especially in allowing unconventional characters to take the stage. But it also carries on the tradition of family first and last, even if it means destroying everyone else.

David Foster Wallace once wrote, “If ... fiction can allow us ... to identify with a character’s pain, we might then also more easily conceive of others identifying with our own ... We become less alone inside. It might just be that simple.” It might.

There’s no reason why this can’t be true of blockbuster action movies—indeed, I think Marvel is trying to get there. One of the many things to grieve about the recent death of the great filmmaker Jonathan Demme is that he never got to make a Marvel movie. His works always invited empathy: for a young woman investigator targeted by misogyny in The Silence of the Lambs, for the father of the bride at a messy wedding in Rachel Getting Married, for gay characters previously ignored or pathologized in mainstream cinema in Philadelphia. Demme lived as if the purpose of art was to lead us to understand each other, or at least to recognize when we don’t. He knew violence was a part of life and so should be a part of movies. He also had the kind of moral imagination that goes beyond merely playing killing for laughs.

JAPANESE DIRECTOR Hirokazu Koreeda tells delicate, exquisite tales—small stories that invite huge responses. They hold expansive space in which human beings can see what we really are—a little lower than the angels, deciphering what it is to live between the steeple and the gargoyle.

Koreeda’s early film After Life imagines death being followed by a week of decision during which the deceased are invited to choose the memory they wish to live in forever. It takes place mostly in a nondescript office building, in which ghosts and bureaucrats talk over desks and filing cabinets. But magic is at work. After Life is one of the great alchemical films—light and words dance with the viewer’s perception, transforming thoughts we thought were ours alone into a recognition of the universal need for love and our aspirations to live better.

Other Koreeda films—such as Like Father, Like Son; Our Little Sister; and Still Walking—are firmly rooted on earth, but the distance between the characters might be cosmic: a family confronting the discovery that their biological son was accidentally switched with another, three siblings meeting their teenage stepsister after their father’s death, the survivor of a near-drowning unsure what he owes the family of the boy who saved him.

THE LONG TAIL of media availability is one of the great cultural gifts of our time: All the films on year-end “best of” lists are easily accessible to anyone with access to a screen. For me, 2016 was a year that emphasized cinematic empathy—crossing lines of difference, yearning to connect, even while national politics were keeping people apart. There were many highlights, including:

The war-on-terror moral inventory of Eye in the Sky, the consumer critique and diversity-affirming Zootopia, the redemption of old age and delightful provocation to inclusive community in A Man Called Ove, and the powerfully honest portrayal of young gay experience in Being 17. In Life, Animated, the link between the stories we tell and how we treat ourselves was presented to happily moving effect; Morris from America brought new comic life to the single parent-child folktale; Midnight Special did the same from a far more somber, yet no less moving perspective; and Captain Fantastic imagined a way to be family that challenges oppressive cultural norms without staying isolated from the world. The Coen brothers created a brilliant satire of politics and religion in Hollywood, Hail, Caesar!; and the wonderful Pete’s Dragon, The Little Prince, and A Monster Calls each illustrated our internal conversations that either minister to or repress pain.

The unexpected box office failure of Warren Beatty’s Rules Don’t Apply shouldn’t detract from it as a touching, humane drama about healing divisions, and the individual spiritual search went deeper in Knight of Cups and Last Days in the Desert.

My top 10 of the year:
10. Hunt for the Wilderpeople. Maori kid and grumpy Kiwi find their hearts on a bush trek.
9. Hell or High Water. A modern Western that’s serious about power, economics, and race.
8. Arrival. Soulful science fiction inviting us to listen.
7. Loving. The civil rights struggle as the story of just one family.
6. Queen of Katwe. A magical fable that also happens to be true.
5. Manchester by the Sea. Stark tragedy’s aftermath.
4. Lemonade. Beyoncé’s declaration of lament and healing.
3. Rams. Moving and hilarious Icelan-dic call for reconciliation.
2. Embrace of the Serpent. An astonishing journey into Amazonian mysticism, darkness, and light.
1. Moonlight.
Conveying the milieu of high school tensions and romantic longing, a film that aches with trauma yet eventually sketches the possibility of hope.

IT'S A QUARTER of a century since most of us discovered Hannibal Lecter, the iconic serial killer of The Silence of the Lambs—which has just been restored and rereleased for home viewing by Criterion. Lecter had already been played by Brian Cox in 1986’s Manhunter, but Anthony Hopkins made him a household name.

But as directed by the thoughtful Jonathan Demme, the movie’s primary purpose was to feature Jodie Foster as FBI agent Clarice Starling, who Foster described as one young woman trying to save the life of another. I remember being thrilled and terrified watching, but I was always uncomfortable with the fact that I ended up liking the bad guy.

Fictional anti-heroes are popular, I suppose, because they allow us to indulge our shadow sides and may even provide a bit of healthy catharsis. Well-made horror movies can be a bit of fun—and they can say something meaningful, too, especially when they invite us to look at the demons within ourselves, not just in the faces of people we don’t like. However, there’s a fine line between letting off psychological steam and reasserting the scapegoat mechanism that leaves the whole world blind.