A multiverse at the multiplex in 2022

Cinema's reemergence in 2022 had its most profitable example in Top Gun: Maverick, but maybe its most symbolic example in the Daniels' Everything Everywhere All at Once.

One of two prominent 2022 films that dealt with the multiverse, the film fully mainstreamed a pair of directors whose last film was about a farting corpse. It wasn't just a quirky movie that cinephiles needed to see. Everyone needed to see it -- and did, eventually.

Clearly that's not accurate as the movie grossed only $100 million internationally. But it caught up quite a bit on video, and those "cinema curious" people in your life -- those who usually only see the big hits, but have aspirations to broaden their own horizons -- did seek it out, and usually loved it. In fact it was sort of a revelation for them.

It was a bit of a revelation for all of us. Marvel has been teasing the concept of a multiverse for ages, even going to so far as to include the word in the title of this year's Doctor Strange sequel. It's not a conceptually difficult notion for most of us, of course, and if anyone paved the way for us collectively grappling with it in normal conversation, it was probably Marvel. The Daniels probably just benefitted from the groundwork Marvel already laid, while of course injecting it with their own brand of bracing originality.

But in reflecting on this year, I'm interested in considering the multiverse in a different way. Watching movies is, effectively, a belief in the multiverse. It's a belief that all the worlds depicted in all the movies of a given year can be simultaneously true, are emotionally true for us in the moment in which we watch them. They're all "real" for somebody out there. Like Michelle Yeoh, we visit all these worlds temporarily, two hours at a time, extracting what we need from them to make our real lives better, more informed, and more defined by empathy.

So in 2022, as audiences signalled that movies were not dead, and that the pandemic would not get us after all, they embraced not only the literal multiverse in these movies, but the symbolic multiverse that is the very act of going to the movies. In 2022, everyone was "cinema curious" again.

We start the new year hungry for more. 

Best (and worst) performers of the year

Each year in this piece I consider actors and others behind the camera -- one literally behind the camera this year -- who had multiple good movies or multiple bad ones. This doesn't mean they were better (or worse) than the best (or worst) work done this year, just that they were more prolific. These six people (and their honorable or dishonorable mentions) trended either more good or more bad than the other prolific people working in the film industry in 2022. 

Three who had a good year

Samantha Morton - Samantha Morton has long existed around the peripheries of Hollywood, appearing in big films (Minority Report) and critical favorites (Synecdoche, New York), though really only getting starring roles in independent films or films from her native England. Twenty twenty-two produced two very similar roles in that they both lasted only a single scene -- but what a scene, and what a proof of her abilities when employed in just the right way. In The Whale (#1), Morton's work as Charlie's ex-wife was the first thing to get the waterworks going for me. Her character had already been talked about a fair bit before we meet her, and we've already formed various conclusions: she's a drunk, she doesn't have her life in order, she's a shrew who won't permit her daughter to form a relationship with her own father. Morton explodes all our assumptions during a single scene in which we understand that she was hurt more than anything when Charlie left her for a man -- not specifically because it was a man, though that did complicate things for her. During this scene, in one particular line reading she gives us a moment of such overwhelming emotional generosity that it just left me in pieces, and not for the last time. In She Said (#11) she plays one of two women interviewed in relation to an incident involving Harvey Weinstein back in the 1990s, and she seems as emotionally internalized here as she is emotionally externalized in The Whale. That's obviously not a criticism of the performance; it's an indication of how difficult it was for the character to revisit these events, so much so that she just has to keep her gaze steady and her emotions under control, and baldly repeat what happened 25 years earlier. That the decision to talk to the New York Times reporters involves so much personal risk for her is another measure of the bravery she displays in this wrenching scene, made all the more profound by how little Morton yields to an instinct to be showy. The saying "there are no small parts" was made to describe Samantha Morton's 2022. 

Matthew Libatique - Has one person ever worked on both my #1 and my #2 movie of the same year? Almost certainly not, but that's what cinematographer Matthew Libatique pulled off in 2022. And it's not like The Whale (#1) and Don't Worry Darling (#2) are inherently similar projects, relying on a similar set of skills behind the camera. Don't Worry Darling is opulent and expansive by nature, taking in large desert vistas, geometrically precise neighborhoods and beautiful people in period wardrobes, intermingling with each other and the period set. The Whale, on the other hand, is cramped and claustrophobic, focusing on a man who doesn't conform to any of society's standards for beauty, staged on a single set that is a drab version of a modern apartment. Yet Libatique's camera brings both worlds so fully to life that they resonated with me like no other 2022 films. The cinematography is clearly an essential component to Darling; in fact, there's a defining moment that comes to mind whenever I think of the film, which involves the camera swooping around the sign for the community of Victory as Florence Pugh's character careens off toward Victory HQ in her convertible, followed by a phalanx of pastel vehicles. That shot doesn't sing the way it does without Olivia Wilde there to order it and Libatique there to execute it. You could argue that the camera is more of a technical necessity than an opportunity to demonstrate virtuoso technique in The Whale, an adaptation of a stage play, but then if so, why hire Libatique to do it? I bet if I rewatched The Whale I would appreciate many subtle choices being made by Darren Aronofsky and Libatique that create the conditions for this portrait to have left me a sobbing, blubbering mess. The confluence of the two projects in the same year reminds me that the movies are a consummately collaborative exercise, one in which you sublimate your own ego to the needs of the greater artistic vision. Libatique sublimated exquisitely in 2022, leaving me exalted in the process. 

Colin Farrell - Taking the third spot that almost went to Jordan Peele is Colin Farrell, and he gets there partly on quantity. Farrell made four movies that finished in the top half of my 2022 rankings, and even though one is all the way down at #82, that might be his most technically complicated. You might forget you were even watching Farrell in The Batman (#82); he played the Penguin, in case you never knew that in the first place. All that latex provides a great metaphor for the sort of chameleon Farrell has become in the past decade, ever since he left behind his years as a heartthrob Hollywood had always tried to use in the least surprising ways. (He's basically out-Matthew McConaugheying Matthew McConaughey at this point.) As we get progressively higher up my list, he played an utterly realistic cave diver in Ron Howard's surprisingly straightforward and effective dramatisation of the rescue of 12 Thai soccer players and their coach, Thirteen Lives (#42). It's a performance that requires only total realism, which almost seems like the trick itself given how easily and frequently he changes modes. In After Yang, which I tried to move higher than #29 with a second viewing, he gives us a melancholy dose of world weariness as he tries to fix his daughter's AI sibling and understand its attempted grasp at humanity. That tea speech and Werner Herzog impersonation are great. Finally we get to The Banshees of Inisherin (#5), in which Farrell is at his dim bulb best, moving us with his sorrow and frustration over Brendan Gleeson breaking up with him, without resorting to cheap sentiment. When Padraic breaks down after Colm defends him from the cop, it speaks wordless volumes about a fraternal love that is now going unreciprocated. Farrell should have a great next decade on film and I can't wait to see it. 

Honorable mentions: Jordan Peele (Nope, Wendell & Wild), Angela Bassett (Wendell & Wild, Black Panther: Wakanda Forever), Florence Pugh (Don't Worry Darling, The Wonder), Jenny Slate (I Want You Back, Marcel the Shell With Shoes On)

Three who had a bad year

Mark Wahlberg - Mark Wahlberg tried to do three different sorts of things in his 2022 movies, and none of them were successful. First it was the disappointing Uncharted (#154), in which he plays a character who's grizzled and battle worn in the original video game -- not just a baby faced guy like Wahlberg who happens to have turned 50 and grown a moustache. Wahlberg may not have been a big part of why the movie wasn't very good, but he didn't help things, and learning that he was once pegged to play the younger half of this buddy duo -- now played by an actual baby, Tom Holland -- certainly indicates a lack of considering all the options, if nothing else. He went for something with more prestige, maybe even hopeful of awards contention, with Father Stu (#144), in which he plays a rascally boxer criminal type who unbelievably pressures a nice religious girl into premarital sex, without the charm to back it up, before entering a seminary and ultimately getting diagnosed with a disease that leaves him paralyzed. Yes, there's a lot going on in this movie, and the fact that it didn't work for me, even though I have a friend whose father recently died after living with this disease (inclusion body myositis, or IBM) for years, really tells you how many incorrect turns it takes. Finally you have the worst of the three, Me Time (#168), in which he plays the annoyingly named Huck, opposite Kevin Hart (see my dishonorable mentions below). Huck throws wild birthday celebrations each year that are no longer compatible with Hart's new family man lifestyle. Cue the obnoxious buddy squabbling, and cue me rolling my eyes at Wahlberg for having so many misses in 2022. 

Pat Casey & Josh Miller - Two of this year's worst screenplays were written by the same two people. Pat Casey and Josh Miller actually appear in this photo in front of the poster for the original Sonic the Hedgehog movie from 2020, which I quite liked, but their follow-up left me in a state of squirming, groaning misery. I could not stand Sonic the Hedgehog 2 (#170), and if you want a good example of its utter failure as a movie, look no further than the bizarre Hawaiian wedding sub plot that they wrote when they had no idea what to do with James Marsden and Tika Sumpter. For some reason they thought it was a good idea to have Sumpter's character's sister (Natasha Rothwell) involved in a sham relationship with an undercover agent (Shemar Moore), one she believes to be real. This has nothing to do with the main story and is also typically cruel. The stuff involving actual hedgehogs was a drippy snooze, and even Jim Carrey couldn't save it. Then we can also lay the blame for Violent Night (#166) at their feet. Even if we hadn't maxed out on movies about bad Santa Clauses ten or even 20 years ago, this movie would be a poorly cast misfire that, like Sonic, can't be saved by the one person cast correctly (David Harbour as the big man himself). A shameless Die Hard ripoff that is never funny and rarely clever from an action standpoint, which is a real mystery given the involvement of David Leitch (John Wick, Atomic Blonde), Violent Night left me bored and annoyed even though I'd had a fun evening involving many beers to that point. It has cruelty in common with Sonic 2, too. So much for being ushered into the holiday season with a modicum of good cheer. If we want to go back to that nearly three-year-old photo and draw incorrectly timed conclusions from it, Miller may still be in fighting spirit. But Casey seems to know that something stinks, and maybe it's them.

Anya Taylor-Joy - It started off at the end of last year with the misfire Last Night in Soho (albeit a misfire with a good pedigree), and Anya Taylor-Joy's unsatisfying choices carried over into 2022. Both she and the other actress who was a candidate for this dishonor (see the dishonorable mentions) had three films that didn't really work for me in 2022, but the other escaped this fate by giving a certifiably good performance in one of them. For most people, The Menu (#111) qualified as a hit, but I found its conclusions obvious and easy to telegraph from a distance, taking what should have been smart commentary and rendering it pretty dull to this viewer. To her credit, Taylor-Joy was probably the best part of it. You can't say the same for Amsterdam (#152), an ensemble in the most indulgent sense of that word (the number of name actors who were cast to do nothing in this film is staggering). David O. Russell bit off way more than he could chew with this one, and one of the more obnoxious personalities put forth was by Taylor-Joy, as an aristocratic woman who looks down her nose at everyone. I wonder if this is the sort of role she's going to start playing on a regular basis, though hopefully it was just a one-off. Then I barely remember what she did or didn't do in The Northman (#157), so disappointed was I by Robert Eggers' follow-up to the extremely intriguing duo of The Witch and The Lighthouse. I doubt anyone could have made this exercise in revenge miserablism more watchable, and being watchable should have been its salvaging attribute -- even if the story were tedious and repetitive -- given Eggers' gifts as a visual stylist. Taylor-Joy is one of the brightest young talents we have, so 2022 shouldn't smudge her resume for too long.

Dishonorable mentions: Ana de Armas (Blonde, The Gray Man, Deep Water), Kevin Hart (The Man From Toronto, Me Time), John Bradley (Marry Me, Moonfall), Margot Robbie (Babylon, Amsterdam)

The year of the female protagonist

Hollywood is always talking the talk of greater representation for women in the movies, but in 2022, it also walked the walk.

The number of female directors and other key creative talent behind the camera may not have increased significantly -- that's not what I'm measuring today -- but more stories were about women than I can ever remember. And I've got the stats to prove it.

If I go through all my films and label them as having either a male protagonist (or a movie led by a handful of men), a female protagonist (or a movie led by a handful of women), or an ensemble where however many characters are split equally by gender, I get the following results:

Male protagonist = 77
Female protagonist = 60
Ensemble = 38

I must admit that when I first got the idea to write about this, I actually thought that the number of stories with a female protagonist would be more than the number with a male protagonist. I guess that just goes to show the depth of my male privilege; I think I'm seeing stories with female protagonists everywhere, but that's just because I notice them, while stories about men strike me as status quo and I don't notice them. Still, the fact that the combination of the ensemble movies with genders equally represented and stories fronted by a female protagonist far eclipse the stories about men strikes me as noteworthy progress.

I've known for a number of years that Hollywood had sort of this mentality: "If all else is equal, and the gender of the protagonist doesn't really play into the story, make it about a woman/girl rather than a man/boy. You'll get the women in the audience plus you'll steer clear of accusations that you don't pass the Bechdel test."

Now, movies with female protagonists may not pass the test created by writer Alison Bechdel anyway, and we don't use that as a metric the way we once did, even as we are getting better at passing it. And if something is done primarily out of cynicism/pragmatism -- as I am suggesting this might be -- then you'd be right to question how much progress it's actually symbolizing.

However, the end result is that more women are being presented as aspirational figures for young audience goers than ever before, and this is certain to have positive ripple effects -- maybe causing more young girls to see themselves in the movies, and to pursue careers involving cinematic storytelling of one sort or another. 

The year's best opening credits

A second viewing may not have been able to move After Yang up to where I am convinced it should probably be -- somewhere in my top 20 -- but at least I can give it some love here for how it greets us.

In a choice that is utterly out of sync with the somber tone of the rest of the movie, Kogonada decides to start things off with a hypnotic dance competition that involves all the movie's characters, even though we haven't met most of them yet. The movie is set, I don't know, maybe 60 years in the future, when families gather on a nightly basis to see how they fare in what appears to be a nationwide -- worldwide? -- game of Dance Dance Revolution, where how long you last depends on how much in sync you are with the rest of your teammates, and how many of the moves you hit. 

In addition to there being something so entrancing about watching these characters complete these dance moves, especially since most of these characters don't strike you as this sort of person, the background also changes color with each group of three through five characters who appear on screen. You kind of wish it would last the whole running time.

My only complaint is that the actual names appearing on screen prevented me from getting quite the unfettered view of them I wanted. 

All hail King Darren

I've been waiting for as long as I can remember to see if someone would ever repeat as director of a film I named #1 for the year. It was starting to seem like it would never happen, as my 26 previous #1s had been directed by 26 different people -- or actually 27, considering that there was one pair in there.

Charlie Kaufman has gotten close. As you may know from previous discussions on the matter, he's written three of my #1s. He just only happens to have been the director on one of them, and the other two were directed by two different people. 

And it's no easy task. A decent number of my #1 films have been made by relatively obscure people -- your Michael Almereyda's, your Craig Brewer's, your Gabriela Cowperthwaite's -- who have only really made one or two other movies that have even finished in the top half of my rankings, assuming I even got to them in time to rank them. And then there are the directors who have no chance to pull it off due to being -- well, deceased. (There's only one in this last category, assuming I haven't missed any news, and that's Robert Altman.)

But in 2022, Darren Aronofsky has finally done it. 

He's not the only person I'm adding to my multi-time #1s this year. His cinematographer on The Whale, Matthew Libatique -- praised earlier in this very post -- has now also joined the list, having shot Ruby Sparks in 2012. 

But we all know, by long-time cinematic convention, that the director is considered the "author" of a film, to the extent that any one person can receive such a designation in such a collaborative medium. And King Darren is the first "author" to make two films that I considered my best of the year.

(And as a bonus, he and I share the same initials.)

I'll have more to say about Mr. Aronofsky on this blog in the coming weeks. Today, I'll just bestow this unprecedented honor, and move along to the next section of this wrap-up post. 

Note: After initially publishing this post I noticed three other repeat-time #1 performers: composer Rob Simonsen, who also composed the music to last year's #1, Our Friend; Andrew Weisblum, who was also Aronofsky's editor on The Wrestler; and Mary Vernieu, who also cast The Wrestler. Well done Rob, Andrew and Mary! 

Best non-2022

The titles below are the ten best movies I saw in 2022, listed alphabetically, that were not released in 2022. 

Brothers' Nest (2018, Clayton Jacobson) - This Australian black comedy about two brothers' plan to kill their stepfather really surprised me with the directions it took, and the meaty conversations it featured in getting us there. 

Burden of Dreams (1982, Les Blank) - The documentary about the making of Fitzcarraldo was everything everyone has always said it was, capturing Werner Herzog in peak madman form, pontificating about the sounds of murder among animals in the jungle. 

CODA (2021, Sian Heder) - The 2021 best picture winner had to make it on this list when I missed seeing it in time to rank it last year due to not realizing it was streaming on AppleTV+.

The Death of Dick Long (2019, Daniel Scheinert) - In a year when Daniel Scheinert was winning huge praise for Everything Everywhere All at Once, I found his previous solo film, involving a death by misadventure that the film takes quite seriously, so intriguing that I watched the first third of it again immediately after finishing. 

Fandango (1985, Kevin Reynolds) - I came across this quite unsuspectingly as a random assignment in Flickchart Friends Favorites Fiesta, and ended up finding it a moving contemplation of the transition to adulthood among rascally college friends in the Vietnam era. 

Knife in the Water (1962, Roman Polanski) - Early Polanski doesn't always do it for me, but this one totally did when I watched it in conjunction with 2022's Windfall, another film that deals with the uncomfortable dynamics between two men and a woman in a claustrophobic environment.

Lagaan: Once Upon a Time in India (2001, Ashutosh Gowariker) - The best movie in my Audient Bollywood series is also the best movie about cricket I have ever seen. Okay, it's the only movie about cricket I have ever seen. 

Ponyo (2008, Hayao Miyazaki) - Whenever I think I've already seen Miyazaki's best film, another film seems to come along to challenge that assumption. (My Neighbor Totoro still claims that honor, but this was great.) 

Pyaasa (1957, Guru Dutt) - The oldest film I watched for Audient Bollywood steadily increased in resonance throughout until I finally ended up floored by it. 

3 Idiots (2009, Rajkumar Hirani) - The Audient Bollywood film I assumed would be the most frivolous, based solely on its title and the tone I perceived that title to indicate, surprised me with its thematic depths and serious considerations of the pressures of academia. 

2022 by the numbers

Movies by star rating on Letterboxd: 5 stars (2), 4.5 stars (10), 4 stars (42), 3.5 stars (46), 3 stars (20), 2.5 stars (21), 2 stars (21), 1.5 stars (8), 1 star (3), 0.5 stars (2)

A big change I noted this year was my hesitancy to give out 4.5 stars. I dropped from 15 to 10 this year, as I checked my swing on a number of movies I would have given 4.5 stars in the past, perhaps in a largely futile effort to use more of the available range of star ratings. And the usual parabolic shape got a little messy this year as there were actually more 2.5-star and 2-star ratings this year than 3-star ratings. Overall the middle was larger as there were only a total of 17 movies in the highest two and lowest two ratings. 

Movies by source - Theater (47) (3 by advanced screening), Netflix (46), iTunes rental (31), Amazon Prime (10), Disney+ (10), Airplane (10), AppleTV+ (8), MIFF (5), Amazon Rental (3), Screener (3), Stan (2). Will this be the last year that movies in the theater exceed movies on Netflix? (I guess they did each of the past two years but those were pandemic years)

Total new movies watched in the calendar year: 285
Total rewatches: 83
2022 movies watched more than once: 3 (Don't Worry Darling, Prey, After Yang)

Another name for ...

The Man from Toronto is ... The Northman
The Sea Beast is ... The Whale
Elvis is ... The Lost King
After Yang is ... Aftersun
Sundown is ... Aftersun
Raymond & Ray is ... Our Father
"Sr." is ... I Love My Dad
Women Talking is ... She Said
Nope is ... The Sky is Everywhere
Bodies Bodies Bodies is ... Violent Night
Hit the Road is ... Decision to Leave
The Banshees of Inisherin is ... I Want You Back

Discoveries

Danielle Deadwyler, Till
Amber Midthunder, Prey
Madeleine McGraw, The Black Phone
Austin Butler, Elvis
Ram Charan, RRR

Happy returns

Ke Huy Quan, Everything Everywhere All at Once
Brendan Fraser, The Whale
Ashley Judd, She Said
Michael Wincott, Nope
Julia Roberts, Ticket to Paradise

Lightning round

Highest ranked best picture nominee: Everything Everywhere All at Once (#4)
Lowest ranked best picture nominee: The Fabelmans (#147)
Best picture nominee I didn't see: Women Talking
Most surprised I loved: Prey (#6)
Most surprised I did not love: Marcel the Shell With Shoes On (#43)
Director who may have won me over: Joanna Hogg, The Eternal Daughter (#31)
Director who may have driven me away: David O. Russell, Amsterdam (#152)
Worst performance by a great actor: Michelle Williams, The Fabelmans
Best performance by a not so great actor: Dave Grohl, Studio 666
Best coming-of-age as a filmmaker: Apollo 10 1/2: A Space Age Childhood (#13)
Worst coming-of-age as a filmmaker: The Fabelmans (#147)
Best movie I didn't really want to see: Thirteen Lives (#42)
Worst movie I really wanted to see: The Northman (#157)
Best Christmas movie: Spirited (#18)
Worst Christmas movie: Violent Night (#166)
Most uses of the word Christmas in the title of a Christmas movie: A Christmas Story Christmas
Best Pixar: Turning Red (#3)
Most depressing Pixar: Lightyear (#146)
Best Pinocchio movie: Guillermo del Toro's Pinocchio (#24)
Worst Pinocchio movie: Pinocchio (#173)
Best use of three hours of film: RRR (#15)
Worst use of three hours of film: Babylon (#129)
Best sequel: Black Panther: Wakanda Forever (#25)
Worst sequel: Sonic the Hedgehog 2 (#170) 
Best conclusion of a trilogy (one would assume): The Eternal Daughter (#31)
Worst conclusion of a trilogy: Jurassic World: Dominion (#153)
Worst idea to push beyond a trilogy: Thor: Love and Thunder (#142)
Best ending: Dual (#10)
Worst ending: Babylon (#129)
Most confusing ending (the very last shot, anyway): Triangle of Sadness (#27) 
Most discussed ending: Tar (#88)
Most satisfying/righteous ending: She Said (#11)
Just glad it was over: Moonfall (#175)

Thank you for reading. I have one more official 2022 reflection post (followed possibly by an unofficial reflection post) tomorrow in the form of my annual portmanteaus post. Do tune in.