The best indie movies of 2007

Andrew O'Hehir picks the most underappreciated, and most amazing, films to come out of indie-land this year

By Andrew O'Hehir

Read more: Andrew O'Hehir, Movies, Arts & Entertainment, Beyond the Multiplex

Dec. 28, 2007 | There must be some kind of human tendency to seek intellectual convergence that kicks in, I suspect, whenever movie critics (or ordinary citizens) start concocting year-end top-10 lists. Maybe pop-science genius Malcolm Gladwell has a name for this phenomenon, but it can be both as subtle and as hard to resist as the flowing current of a river. You might not notice the force of this opinion-suck, even as it sweeps you off your feet and pulls you downstream in a rushing torrent of groupthink. Even if you sense it and nobly struggle against it, that doesn't mean you've escaped its effects.

Maybe the term exists; maybe it's "herd mentality." Or brainwashing. Read enough of the top-10 lists that American movie critics put together, for one thing, and you might wonder whether a single damn film worth watching came out before the first of October. There are exceptions to this rule, naturally enough, but by and large the films that rack up the rave reviews and award nominations, and thereby begin to emanate "Oscar buzz" like some mutant horror-movie bumblebee, are films of a certain kind, released in a certain season.

It's not merely that these swooned-over movies are likely to be fall releases from the specialty divisions of the major studios (e.g., Sony Pictures Classics, Fox Searchlight, Focus Features and so on) or from the shrinking roster of midsize independent distributors. It's not just that they tend to be mid-budget productions packaged around serious-minded intentions, name directors and a handful of well-liked actors. That's all true, and it applies to most of the critical-fave releases of the past few years, from "There Will Be Blood" and "No Country for Old Men" to "The Queen" and "Babel" and "Little Children" and "Brokeback Mountain" and "Good Night, and Good Luck." Beyond that, these are movies that offer a specific kind of cinematic experience, and involve a specific understanding of what movies are supposed to be and how they should make you feel.

While reporting my recent year-end article on the state of the indie business, I had a conversation with Milos Stehlik, the director of Facets Multimedia, a company in Chicago that runs both an art-house theater and an adventurous home-video distributor. Somehow we got onto the topic of "No Country for Old Men." Neither of us actively disliked the film -- although I see it as maybe the third or fourth best of Joel and Ethan Coen's career -- but I confessed that I really wasn't sure why critics' groups across the country were proclaiming it as the be-all and end-all of cinema, circa 2007. "I have no problem with this movie," Stehlik said. "It's a lot of fun, it's wonderfully made, it's very accessible. But it's not the best movie in the world. It's a very complete and satisfying experience. It's a little bit like, 'Here's your burger and here's your fries.' It's a very consumer-driven experience."

OK, comparing a Coen brothers movie, especially one as bloody and fatalistic as this one, to the drive-through window at McDonald's is pretty harsh (even if Javier Bardem's hairdo is nearly as silly as Ronald's McFro). Stehlik's point was more that "No Country for Old Men," whether you find it terrific or sucky or in between, arrives in a familiar package, one that in its own way is just as well defined as the packaging for Hollywood's summer-sequel blockbusters. It's presented with a festival pedigree, rave reviews and tons of advertising as a "complete and satisfying" entertainment product aimed at upper-middlebrow adult viewers. Its aesthetic aims may be to thrill you and disturb you, to provoke pity and terror, perhaps even to spur a certain degree of thoughtfulness or introspection. (All of which are noble aims, by the way.) But it's not trying to uproot anybody's ideas about what movies are for, or how they should behave up there on the screen, or what watching them should feel like. It's not challenging the idea of moviegoing as a "consumer-driven experience."

I'm not arguing that all movies or most movies should be disorienting postmodern experiments or seven-hour contemplative exercises; I get that most people, most of the time, would rather see "Spider-Man 3" than "Our Hitler" (which really is a seven-hour experimental film you can buy from Facets). I am arguing, however, that most critics -- excepting all of my friends in the business, thank you very much -- have become passive receptors who may grumble occasionally about the overall quality of films they see but who accept without question the "Matrix"-like universe of the contemporary movie business, in which expertly packaged fall releases like "No Country" or "There Will Be Blood" are inherently more exciting, more valuable and therefore better than smaller films released earlier in the year. You'll see those two films at or near the top of a kajillion top-10 lists, but you'll have to dig hard and deep to find any mention of, say, Shane Meadows' "This Is England" or Andrea Arnold's "Red Road," both of them complete and satisfying entertainment experiences in their own right.

This may sound hopelessly old-fashioned, but once upon a time a critic's job was supposed to be to challenge received opinions and reject the homogenization of taste. Pauline Kael (with whom I mostly disagree, when it comes to the merits of specific films) built her whole career around angrily rejecting both the elitist self-flattery of the art-house audience taste and the lowest-denominator pandering of Hollywood. Jonathan Rosenbaum, to cite a critic with nearly an opposite orientation, has spent a lifetime championing the most ambitious strains of auteur cinema, where mainstream film brushes against avant-garde aesthetics and postmodern philosophy.

Over the years, veteran Village Voice film critic J. Hoberman has become known for his willfully heterogeneous top-10 lists, which sometimes seem, as one friend of mine jests, "to consist largely of Slovenian films that played one Thursday afternoon at the Museum of Modern Art." (In fairness, his No. 2 film last year was "Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan.") I'm not capable of emulating Hoberman's example, partly because I don't see the mind-boggling range of world cinema he does but mostly because I myself am trapped in the Indiewood matrix, just barely able to perceive the magnetic force of conformist opinion but not quite able to pull free of it.

When you resist one kind of orthodoxy, after all, you fall prey to another. If you're about to write a letter pointing out that most of the movies on my list for 2007 are obscure little indies that only a few snooty big-city intellectuals have even heard of, I'll save you the trouble. I always root for the underdog and grade on a curve in this annual exercise, and this year more than ever I practiced affirmative action on behalf of adventurous, difficult-to-categorize pictures that fared poorly in the marketplace. You could almost describe this as a list of the year's most underappreciated films, except that "The Diving Bell and the Butterfly" (which I adored, but has now been masterfully hyped and packaged) definitely does not fit that description and the fate of the Romanian abortion thriller "4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days" has yet to be determined. (Read Stephanie Zacharek's 2007 top-10 list here.)

I live by my own code, just like Clint Eastwood's Man With No Name in those spaghetti westerns. (I resemble him in many other ways too.) Everything on this list played in an honest-to-God American movie theater for at least a week, so there are no festival-only films or unreleased pictures. ("4 Months, 3 Weeks" qualifies because IFC snuck it into a Los Angeles theater for a one-week run before the holidays, although it won't open widely until next month.) Hey, it may be wrong or it may be right, but it's my code, even if it means that one of the movies on my list this year was on Stephanie Zacharek's list last year. (A prize for the first reader to take the trouble, and yes I'm serious.)

Video: Salon's favorite films of 2007

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