Nictate

Mike D’Angelo on SHIT YEAR

From his blog

/Shit Year/ (2010, Cam Archer): 77

Not sure a movie could get much more fragmentary and diffuse and still hold together. Obviously it helps to have an actor like Ellen Barkin at the center—her performance is all the more extraordinary when you consider that she has no conventional “arc” to play, just a series of disconnected moments ranging all over the map in tone and intensity. But Archer (whose Wild Tigers I Have Known I didn’t just W/O of but actively fled; seems he just needed a less callow vehicle for his anxieties) provides a stunning free-associative context for her mercurial wandering, constructing a state of mind via jagged shards of pure emotion juxtaposed with shaggy digressions, all of it edited in a clipped, brusque way that catches you continually off guard. I can see how the sci-fi element strikes many as pretentious, but those scenes work for me precisely because they’re given no more emphasis than anything else, just as the ending seems absolutely right in its offhanded playfulness. And I’d think even dissenters (who are actually in the majority, but I’m sick of the word “haters”) would have to concede that this is one of the most gorgeous black-and-white films in recent memory, if largely by virtue of not trying to be ostentatiously gorgeous. In all honesty, I’d expected to be less impressed on second viewing, figuring my low expectations had influenced my judgment, but its amalgam of formal bravado, sardonic humor, refractory inconclusiveness and unapologetic solipsism (which, again, seems way more palatable when transferred to an actress in her mid 50s) knocked me out all over again. Nobody else seems to agree, but that’s okay—given all the wildly acclaimed movies I find disappointing, it’s refreshing to have a beat-up orphan to defend for a change.