Rachel Getting Married (Jonathan Demme, 2008)
Virtually any film by the great Jonathan Demme could have made this list. In movies like Handle With Care, Melvin and Howard and Philadelphia (not to mention his exceptional documentary work), his love for the people he documents is as broad as it is deep. Rachel Get Married is perhaps the most expansive of his works, a tale of a wedding that contains dozens (hundreds?) of characters and honors them all. The movie focuses on Kym (Anne Hathaway), a recovering addict who is the sister of the title character and gets out of rehab on a day pass to attend her sibling’s wedding. While Kym and a handful of other characters (not only Rachel but their parents, their father’s new wife, etc.) are central, Demme’s fluid camera takes us in and out of a wide array of conversations, musical interludes and isolated moments of solitude to share the perspectives of a diverse selection of characters. The implication is that every person of every background has a story equally worth telling, and that if Demme and screenwriter Jenny Lumet wanted to, they could drop Kym and Rachel entirely and follow anyone else at the wedding. Yet the story that Demme does follow is one of the most beautiful—and sometimes painfully unsentimental—tales of reconciliation in the history of American movies.
Things Behind the Sun (Allison Anders, 2001)
Allison Anders is one of the great personal filmmakers to emerge in the last 30 years, and she’s also hands-down the best director in the history of movies when it comes to depicting the influence and impact of music on the daily lives of her characters. Things Behind the Sun is her masterpiece, a semi-autobiographical drama about rape that is as compassionate as it is angry and as healing as it is bruised and aggressive. The movie follows Sherry (Kim Dickens in one of the best performances of the decade), a singer-songwriter who was raped as a young girl and continues to suffer from addiction. As her profile rises thanks to college radio, a rock journalist (Gabriel Mann, also excellent) who knew Sherry when they were kids and was witness to her rape reconnects with her for a story. To give away what happens between the two characters would be to rob Things Behind the Sun of its intense sense of discovery, so I’ll just say that Anders takes these characters—and the audience—to places completely unexpected, yet totally honest and almost unbearably affecting. The manner in which Anders’ film contains both rage and forgiveness without compromising either is a wonder to behold, and her study of the way in which music triggers our memories and can act as both a comfort and a curse is brilliant.
Waking the Dead (Keith Gordon, 2000)
In films like Mother Night and his television work on series such as The Killing, Keith Gordon has explored the question of whether it’s possible to truly know others—and whether it’s possible to even know ourselves—more profoundly than any other American director. Waking the Dead is his masterpiece in this regard, a love story about an idealistic aspiring politician (Billy Crudup) who is haunted by the apparent death of his activist girlfriend (Jennifer Connelly). When he starts to see his lost love around the city, he doesn’t know if it’s a ghost or a hallucination, or if her death was faked. Through subtle literary and visual strategies Gordon asks whether his hero really knows his lover at all or has created an idealized version of her in his mind. All of this ties in with Gordon’s obsession with the impossibility of certainty, which is inextricably bound to his exploratory nature as a filmmaker—he’s saying that no matter how well we think we know people, there are always new layers to uncover. His ultimate thesis? That we can never attain complete understanding or absolute knowledge, but that we should never stop trying—a message that takes on increased urgency in our current day and age.
The Films That Changed You: Responses From Our Readers
Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (Rainer Werner Fassbinder, 1974)
“Ali: Fear Eats the Soul is Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s unflinching look at German attitudes to their guest worker community, as told through the poignant love affair between an elderly woman and a Moroccan immigrant 25 years her junior. I saw it in around 1979/80 in Vienna where, as a young punk, I was the object of widespread suspicion and hostility. It captured so perfectly the claustrophobic narrow-mindedness of the Germanic petit bourgeoisie that I knew only too well, and helped me not to worry about the disapproval of others, and to guard against intolerance wherever I found it, including in my own behavior.” – Simon Witter, London, U.K.
All About My Mother (Pedro Almodóvar, 1999)
Cecilia Roth in All About My Mother
“All About My Mother was the first film that opened up my eyes about the LGBT community. I was never bigoted toward the community; I just didn’t think much about it growing up as a white, straight, cisgender male. I might have had some friends that were gay but most of them didn’t talk about it or hadn’t come out. After seeing AAMM (and most of Almodóvar’s films) I understood that the LGBT community is no different than me and my family and friends. Soon after I made some friends that were out and proud and I witnessed what a loving and supportive community they are. Since then, it’s helped me make my own films that include LGBT characters and don’t follow stereotypes. Overall, the film helped me decide that it doesn’t matter who you love, how you dress or how you talk, it just matters that you have love in you. And that, to me, is fabulous!” – Nate Locklear, Austin, Texas
The Hunchback of Notre Dame (William Dieterle, 1939)
“The anxieties of childhood and adolescence echoed for me in Charles Laughton’s heart-wrenching performance as Quasimodo. Girls I desired only at a distance echoed in Maureen O’Hara’s steamy Esmeralda. Cedric Hardwick’s Frollo was the timeless bully I would forever resist, while the bravura of Thomas Mitchell’s Trouillefou awakened the nascent actor in me. Alfred Newman’s swirling score wrapped me in a reverie. The yearning for love, the feeling of being an outsider… injustice, corrupt political and religious institutions… these were themes that leaked into my developing brain. I was a happy child but the film secured a skepticism I felt toward the authority of institutions. More importantly, the film instilled a lifelong sense of empathy for others made concrete when, in the last shot, the camera pulls back to an extreme long shot from atop the cathedral. There the hunchback hugs a gargoyle as he implores the universe with a question for which there will be no answer: ‘Why wasn’t I made of stone like thee?’” – Tim Jackson, Somerville, Massachusetts
Malcolm X (Spike Lee, 1992)
“A film about a spiritual journey forged by perpetual enlightenment, Spike Lee’s bio-epic walks miles and then some in the shoes of a man in the throes of oppression, ideology and idealism. That I watched Malcolm X right at the moment when I first became active in anti-establishment political protests has seared the experience in my memory as one during which I embraced the revolutionary ethos, the power, and the common sense of righteous anger.”
– Alix Becq, Los Angeles, California
You Can Count on Me (Kenneth Lonergan, 2000)
Laura Linney and Mark Ruffalo in You Can Count on Me
“A good movie makes you feel that what’s happening on screen is happening to you. Not in reality, of course, but in the emotional space of all good art forms where creativity meets belief. If a director, cast and crew have made an audience believe in the world of the film, then a character study of two siblings can feel as epic as any fight between good and evil. The characters played by Laura Linney, Mark Ruffalo and Matthew Broderick feel like people I knew or people I could meet. The drama that happens between them and other characters is not dissimilar from the drama I experience in my own life. But when that drama is unfolding, it feels pretty epic to me.”
– Patrick Maxwell, Los Angeles, California MM
This article appears in MovieMaker‘s Winter 2017 issue. Reader responses collected from this survey.
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