El Norte (Gregory Nava, 1983)

Zaide Silvia Gutiérrez in El Norte

Enrique Xuncax: David Villalpando
Rosa Xuncax: Zaide Silvia Gutiérrez
Arturo Xuncax: Ernesto Gómez Cruz
Lupe Xuncax: Alicia del Lago
Nacha: Lupe Ontiveros
Monte Bravo: Trinidad Silva
Jorge: Enrique Castillo
Carlos: Tony Plana
Alice Harper: Diane Cary
Jaime: Mike Gomez
Raimundo: Abel Franco

Director: Gregory Nava
Screenplay: Gregory Nava, Anna Thomas
Cinematography: James Glennon
Art direction: David Wasco
Film editing: Betsy Blankett Milicevic

Thirty-five years have passed since the release of El Norte, and the problems it depicts seem as intractable as ever, adding the poignancy of ongoing history to the film's bleak ending. As a document of the tragedy wrought by colonialism and the muddle of U.S. immigration policy, Gregory Nava's film is an essential one. Regarded as a work of narrative filmmaking, it has some deep flaws, particularly in the resort to overly "cinematic" devices like suspense. The intercutting between the plane departing for Chicago and Rosa's hospital room feels like textbook filmmaking, making the audience hold its breath to find out whether Enrique will really abandon his sister in hope of getting a green card. We don't need movie suspense fakeouts at this painful moment. But Nava does so much else right in the rest of the film, including the staging of the harrowing border crossing, as well as allowing humor to share screen time with pathos, that it's hard to criticize his lapses. If sincerity were everything, El Norte could be hailed as a masterpiece.

La La Land (Damien Chazelle, 2016)

Sebastian Wilder: Ryan Gosling
Mia Dolan: Emma Stone
Keith: John Legend
Laura Wilder: Rosemarie DeWitt
Greg Earnest: Finn Wittrock
Bill: J.K. Simmons
David: Tom Everett Scott

Director: Damien Chazelle
Screenplay: Damien Chazelle
Cinematography: Linus Sandgren
Production design: David Wasco
Film editing: Tom Cross
Music: Justin Hurwitz
Choreography: Mandy Moore

La La Land is an homage to an homage, which may be why it works so well. The acknowledged inspiration of Jacques Demy's The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964) and The Young Girls of Rochefort (1967), tributes to the Hollywood musicals of Vincente Minnelli and Stanley Donen, helps give Damien Chazelle's film the right ironic distancing. Without the tinge of melancholy that informs Demy's hommages, La La Land could have been just another campy pastiche, tongue-in-cheek nostalgia for a movie era that will never return. Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone were dinged by some critics for not being Fred and Ginger or Gene and Judy, movie stars who could actually sing and dance. But that's very much the point: Just as Gosling's Sebastian wants to be a jazz musician in an age that "hates jazz" and Stone's Mia longs to star in movies like Casablanca (Michael Curtiz, 1952) and Notorious (Alfred Hitchcock, 1946), they are stuck in the musical and cinematic present. There are no record companies or film studios that would cherish and nurture their dreams. Sebastian's jazz club becomes a "salsa/tapas" joint and even the Los Angeles revival house where he and Mia meet to watch Rebel Without a Cause (Nicholas Ray, 1955) closes soon afterward. Chazelle delicately, deftly plays on the frustration of being born out of time, witnessing a past turned rosy by nostalgia-tinted glasses. In this context, the skillfully done "what might have been" montage at the film's end, in which Seb and Mia live out the happy ending to their love affair that might have capped a real 1950s movie musical, brings home the bittersweet message: You can't have your dreams and eat them, too.

The Royal Tenenbaums (Wes Anderson, 2001)

Royal Tenenbaum: Gene Hackman
Etheline Tenenbaum: Anjelica Huston
Chas Tenenbaum: Ben Stiller
Margot Tenenbaum: Gwyneth Paltrow
Richie Tenenbaum: Luke Wilson
Eli Cash: Owen Wilson
Raleigh St. Clair: Bill Murray
Henry Sherman: Danny Glover
Dusty: Seymour Cassel
Pagoda: Kumar Pallana
Ari Tenenbaum: Grant Rosenmeyer
Uzi Tenenbaum: Jonah Meyerson
Narrator (voice): Alec Baldwin

Director: Wes Anderson
Screenplay: Wes Anderson, Owen Wilson
Cinematography: Robert D. Yeoman
Production design: David Wasco
Film editing: Dylan Tichenor
Music: Mark Mothersbaugh

It's hard to be droll for an hour and a half, and The Royal Tenenbaums, which runs about 20 minutes longer than that, shows the strain. Still, I don't have the feeling with it that I sometimes have with Wes Anderson's  first two films, Bottle Rocket (1996) and Rushmore (1998), of not being completely in on the joke. This time it's the wacky family joke, familiar from George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart's You Can't Take It With You and numerous sitcoms. It works in large part because the cast plays it with such beautifully straight faces. And especially because it's such a magnificent cast: Gene Hackman, Anjelica Huston, Ben Stiller, Gwyneth Paltrow, Luke Wilson, Owen Wilson (who co-wrote the screenplay with Anderson), Bill Murray, and Danny Glover. It's also beautifully designed by David Wasco and filmed by Robert D. Yeoman, with Anderson's characteristically meticulous, almost theatrical framing. Hackman, as the paterfamilias in absentia Royal Tenenbaum, is the cast standout, in large part because he gets to play loose while everyone else maintains a morose deadpan, but also because he's an actor who has always been cast as the loose cannon. Even in films in which he's supposed to be reserved and repressed, such as The Conversation (Francis Ford Coppola, 1974), he keeps you waiting for the inevitable moment when he snaps. Here he's loose from the beginning, but he doesn't tire you out with his volatility because he knows how much of it to keep in check at any given moment.

Pulp Fiction (Quentin Tarantino, 1994)

Uma Thurman and John Travolta in Pulp Fiction

Pumpkin: Tim Roth
Honey Bunny: Amanda Plummer
Vincent Vega: John Travolta
Jules Winnfield: Samuel L. Jackson
Butch Coolidge: Bruce Willis
Marsellus Wallace: Ving Rhames
Mia Wallace: Uma Thurman
Capt. Koons: Christopher Walken
Fabienne: Maria de Medeiros
Winston Wolfe: Harvey Keitel
Brett: Frank Whaley
Jody: Rosanna Arquette
Lance: Eric Stoltz

Director: Quentin Tarantino
Screenplay: Quentin Tarantino, Roger Avary
Cinematography: Andrzej Sekula
Production design: David Wasco
Film editing: Sally Menke

Watching Pulp Fiction again -- I don't know how many times I've seen it but it feels like a lot -- I'm struck by how much the film is about language. In a way that's appropriate, given that it was nominated for seven Oscars but won only for the screenplay by Tarantino and Roger Avary. And certainly language comes to the fore in the way the film tramples on taboos like the f-word and the n-word, which are repeated so often that you're numbed to the expected shock. And then there's the great biblical tirade by Jules, extrapolated from a passage in Ezekiel and repeated three times to make sure we get the point that Jules is some kind of prophet. And of course there's the familiar pronouncement by Vincent that the French call a quarter-pounder with cheese a Royale with cheese. But throughout the film characters encounter semantic problems, as when Jules asks Brett what country he's from. The puzzled Brett asks, "What?" thereby provoking Jules's response, "'What' ain't no country I've ever heard of. They speak English in What?" Or when Esmeralda (Angela Jones) asks Butch what his name means, and Butch replies, "I'm American, honey. Our names don't mean shit." Or when Pumpkin calls out, "Garçon! Coffee!" and the waitress (Laura Lovelace) corrects him: "'Garçon' means boy." Pumpkin and Honey Bunny have even decided to give up robbing liquor stores because they're owned by "too many foreigners [who] don't speak fucking English."  For Pulp Fiction's characters language is a means of establishing dominance, as when Winston Wolfe refuses Vincent's request to say "please" when he's giving orders. It's also a way of establishing intimacy: When Vincent brings Mia home after she has overdosed, she finally tells him the silly joke -- a pun on catch up/ketchup -- that she refused to tell him earlier. So maybe Pulp Fiction isn't exactly about language -- it's also about violence and God and a lot of other things -- but I don't know of many other recent films that are so memorable because of it.