Over Christmas I was showed my daughter the index of David Thomson’s “Have You Seen…, his list of 1,000 films worth seeing. I had checked those I had seen, though I would jettison some of Thomson’s picks and substitute some of mine. I had checked around 75%. Many of those I’d missed were either hard to find foreign films or even harder to unearth artifacts from the silent era. Film critics and professors like Thomson have an edge.
“So,” my daughter said when I showed her the check marks. “So, this is either evidence of a life well-spent or completely frittered away,” I said. She laughed because we both believe the first answer is the correct one.
As Randall Jarrell said, “Art matters not merely because it is the most magnificent ornament and the most nearly unfailing occupation of our lives, but because it is life itself.” How poor are people who never discover this simple truth.
All of which is by way of introducing my lists of best films, TV, and books from 2018. Some of them were made earlier and I was just catching up. Others demanded I see or read them again.
Movies:
Some list-worthy 2017 films didn’t arrive in Podunk until 2018 — “Phantom Thread” and “I, Tonya.” Similarly, I’ve heard for years that Japanese director Yasujiro Ozu was a master, and I finally caught up with him and saw “Early Summer,” “Tokyo Story,” “Tokyo Twilight.” I was not misinformed. His films are patient, grave, touching, humane. Life itself.
Best new films were “Green Book,” “Vice,” “The Wife,” “Juliet, Naked,” “The Death of Stalin,” “Sicario 2,” “The Party,” “A Private War,” “A Simple Favor,” “The Sisters Brothers.’
Almost as good were “Can You Ever Forgive Me?” “Tully,” “The Puzzle,” “The Spy Who Dumped Me,” “Ideal Home,” “Chasing the Blues.”
Aside from the Ozu, I saw relatively few foreign films, but “Roma” is quite fine and several from the local film festival and a course on Chinese film since Mao include “Angles Wear White,” “Bye, Bye Germany,” “Not One Less,” “Shower,” and “Mountains May Depart.” Unfortunately, your odds of discovering them may be slim.
Television:
New shows I enjoyed were “Killing Eve,” Counterpart,” “Barry,” Succession,” “The Alienist,” “The Kominsky Method,” and “Homecoming.”
Shows not new, but new to me include a pair recommended by my fellow fanboy Charlie Elkins for which I am grateful — “Ozark,” and “The Sinner.” Others include “Collateral,” “Babylon Berlin,” “Riphagen,” “The Split,”and “Get Shorty.”
Continuing shows, or those which finished their run were “”The Americans,” “The Tunnel,” “Bosch,” “Goliath,” “Elementary,” and “Shameless.” Documentaries included “Joan Didion: The Center Will Not Hold,” “The Fourth Estate,” and “The Family Business: Trump and Taxes,”
Books:
Books new to me I recommend are the biographies “A Life of Barbara Stanwyck: Steel-True,” “Something Wonderful,” about Rodgers and Hammerstein,” Alan Bennett’s Diaries, “Keeping On, Keeping On” (as well as an NTLive simulcast of his play about the decline of the National Health Service “Allelujah”), memoirs by Michael Dirda, “Avid Reader” and Bill Bryson, “The Road to Little Dribbling.”
I recommend two histories, “Persian Fire,” and The Darkening Age,” the Pulitzer novel “Less,” and two more novels by Ward Just, “Exiles in the Garden,” and “An Unfinished Season.”
Finally, a reread of Joan Didion’s classic musing on the myths of her native California (and by implication America), “Where I Was From,” and “Ulysses Found,” a sailor’s attempt to discover the real ports of call described in the Odyssey.”
And, best for last, I rewatched Ingmar Bergman’s, “Fanny and Alexander,” over Christmas. The aforementioned David Thomson called it “the gentlest of his great films.” It is a late masterpiece akin to Shakespeare’s “The Tempest.” It concerns two children of actors in a theatrical family who endure a nightmare when their father dies and their mother remarries in haste to an austere, autocratic, sadistic minister. Eventually all is rather magically set right. The tale is bookended by two speeches at an annual holiday dinner.
In the first, the kind, ineffectual father, Oscar Ekdahl, addresses the players…”I love this little world inside the thick wars of this playhouse…Outside is the big world, and sometimes the little world succeeds for a moment in reflecting the big world, so that we understand it better. Or is it perhaps that we give the people who come here the chance of forgetting for a while the harsh world outside?”
Shortly afterward, playing the ghost of Hamlet, he has the heart attack that kills him. After storms and travails, the family is reunited, Fanny, Alexander and their mother are freed from her nightmare marriage, and it is another Christmastide. Oscar’s philandering, endearing, restaurateur older brother, Gustav Ekdahl delivers the year’s benediction, which echoes that of his dead brother.
“We Ekdahls have not come into the world to see through it.. We might as well ignore the big things. We must live in the little world. We shall be content and cultivate it and make the best of it. Suddenly death strikes, suddenly the abyss opens, suddenly the storm howls and disaster is upon us… The world is a den of thieves and night is falling. Soon it will be the hour for robbers and murderers, evil is breaking its chains and goes through the world like a mad dog. The poisoning affects us all, without exception…So it shall be.
“Therefore let us be happy while we are happy, let us be kind, generous, affectionate, and good. Therefore it is necessary, and not in the least shameful, to take pleasure in the little world, good food, gentle smiles, fruit-trees in bloom, waltzes.”
He lifts his baby daughter high, kisses her and says they may regard his remarks as “the pitiful babbling of an old man,” but he doesn’t care. “I am holding a little empress in my arms. It is intangible, yet immeasurable. One day she will prove me wrong, one day she will rule over not only the little world, but over — everything!”
And so for a moment in Bergman’s dark Swedish imagination, the darkness lifts, comedy replaces tragedy, Prospero is restored to his place, order conquers confusion, Tiny Tim is saved, Candide cultivates his garden, Fanny and Alexander are rescued and returned to the safe, little world of their family.
I first saw this film when it reached America some thirty-five years ago. As is the case with masterworks, age has not withered, nor custom made stale its infinite variety. If you don’t watch any of the movies or TV shows I recommend above, read any of the books, do yourself a favor and spend a couple hours with “Fanny and Alexander.” I