More 2018 Film Winners: The Women and the Weirdos

In these films, the women spoke some truth and the world exploded. The spirit of defiance was everywhere this year — in little kids fighting for a future, in men and women and gender-fluid folks honouring the need for love, in people of every stripe and hue demanding justice.

Filmmakers of colour also made great work this year. I lost track of how many films used a police shooting as an inciting incident. The Hate U Give, Blindspotting and Widows all featured police killing young men of colour to examine race and bigotry, as violent and volatile as a burst water main.

But just because it was ubiquitous doesn’t mean it wasn’t effective. The Hate U Give, a film aimed at teenagers, was blunt about the reality of doing anything (driving, walking, talking back) while being black in America. The opening scene where a father gives his kids the talk about what to do when dealing with the cops was as brutal as anything I’ve seen in a mainstream film. It put to shame to pandering mush that was Green Book. Even a somewhat goofy film like Blindspotting did a better job of calling out systemic and embedded racism.

This was also a great year for new filmmakers to make a deep and abiding mark. I watched good portions of Eighth Grade between my fingers. And there wasn’t anything quite as fun as Boots Riley’s zonked-out acid bath Sorry to Bother You in cinemas this year. Established directors spread out a little and tried some wacky shit. Spike Lee’s BlacKkKlansman was a feral savaging of racism and hypocrisy. So too, Vice, Adam McKay’s biopic of Dick Cheney, took aim and fired at the U.S. political establishment. Vice doesn’t open until Christmas Day, but it is a perfect present to be opened and shared. Take any family members or friends who still harbour sympathy for the GOP.

Most of the big titles that grabbed the limelight were underwhelming in extremis. I still don’t get what all the fuss was about with A Star Is Born. Same with First Man, Boy Erased and Beautiful Boy. Sometimes the payoff of a particular film seemed in inverse proportion to the amount of hype it received.

Other good ‘n weird stuff

Madeline’s Madeline achieved a quicksilver trick, mostly from the remarkable trio of women (Miranda July, Molly Parker and newcomer Helena Howard) at its centre. Director Josephine Decker stacks the deck in the triangular power struggle between a troubled young thespian (Howard), a manipulative theatre director (Parker) and a dishrag of a mother (July). As the story traces the contours of love and control that shade these relationships, moments of surrealism bop you gently on the nose. I held my breath to see where the heck this film was going even as it tugged me along with it.

It was the weirder stuff, the bumpy, scabby stories that ended up being more compelling than films that were burnished and slick to the touch. I will do a lot for surprise. It doesn’t matter which direction it comes from. Tom Hardy channeling a sticky black parasitical alien? Sure! If it comes with insane dialogue and a genuine love of tater tots.

Violence and grace also loped along like a team of pitch-black horses in Lynn Ramsay’s You Were Never Really Here, wherein Joaquin Phoenix dispatches pedophiles with a hammer. This was one tight little number, but buried amidst the carnage were moments of almost unbearable tenderness. A lock of a dead woman’s hair unfurling like a last goodbye. Dappled streetlights daubing smears of colour across car windows. These random visitations, strange and lovely, imbued the film with unexpected emotional gravitas. Suddenly it wasn’t just the story of a sad hitman, his elderly mother, and an abused girl, it was a brutally beautiful poem of blood and love.

If we are indeed on the edge of a changing paradigm, a radical shift in thinking and action, who else can offer a better road forward than artists, writers and filmmakers. Those weirdoes out on the edges of the world, sniffing the wind, and saying, “Here’s a story for you.”