The 10 Best Movies I Saw in 2025

As always, this is my listing of what I think were the best movies I saw in the past calendar year, not necessarily movies that came out during that year.

The Apartment was one of the films Melissa and I saw this year through the Wichita Orpheum's 2025 Anniversary Film Series, a monthly event that we've fallen in love with (and we can't wait for the 2026 series to begin; it's going to be great!). As for the movie itself, what can I say? This 65-year-old film is as funny, as sharp, as observant, as dark, as real a romantic fantasy of adult sex and love and longing as any romantic comedy I can think of. Given its whole mise-en-scène--New York City corporate office culture in the late 1950s--I can't imagine a better way of telling its story, or a better cast to do so. Billy Wilder knocked it out of the park.

Sometimes you want to see a movie that is a stagey one-hander, just a straight-up bit of focused, funny, sad, outrageous story-telling, presented in an enclosed environment within a defined period of time: a play, in other words. Blue Moon is all that; a movie about plays and musicals, about the words that can make performances on the stage truly play and sing, and about one of the greatest writers of such words ever. Ethan Hawke's Lorenz Hart is an amazing character, and carries the whole film.

Dog Day Afternoon is 50 years old this year (yes, another Wichita Orpheum anniversary film viewing), and I wouldn't change a thing about it. Yes, if we wanted to recreate today the story of this ridiculous, tragic, farcical attempted bank robbery from the summer of 1972, the racial, sexual, ethnic, and LGBTQ aspects of the story would be approached very differently. But would doing so had made the film more of a document of its time and place: urban America in the 1970s, as the social democratic aspirations of the New Deal are clearly collapsing under the weight of bureaucracy and diversity, but the homogenizing effects of finance and global capitalism and technology had not yet fully taken root? I don't think so.

Flow was the most beautiful thing I saw on screen this year, hands down. A wordless, apocalyptic fantasy that gives us, through ordinary animals struggling to survive, something fabulously human: heroism, suffering, possessiveness, guilt, suspicion, nobility, and more. A tremendous accomplishment in visual communication, and the sort of thing that shows what animated story-telling really can--and should--be.

As I have argued many, many times over the years on this blog, President James Earl Carter, Jr., was one of a kind. While neither a transformative genius nor someone particularly good at holding onto and wielding the power inherent in being a President of the United States, he was, nonetheless, something of a miracle: a genuinely good man who managed to climb to the top of the greasy pole of artifice, image, and money that is American politics. There is much which explains his ability to get to such a point and still be capable of articulating, in an embarrassingly sincere language, what he understood about peace, decency, fairness, and work--but one part of the explanation has to be that Jimmy Carter, probably unlike almost every other modern occupant of the White House, actually listened to the radio, and could relate, as ordinary radio-listeners do, to what he heard. He loved the radio, and the folk, pop, country, blues, jazz, and rock-n-roll stars he loved returned this appreciation. Jimmy Carter: Rock & Roll President isn't a deeply critical work, but it tells an essential story: a story about a man who came along at a time when America's cultural exhaustion hadn't yet been commodified, and who enabled artists as diverse as Gregg Allman, Paul Simon, Willie Nelson, Dizzy Gillespie, Bob Dylan, and more to feel something new about their country. And that's just beautiful.

Judas and the Black Messiah is a terrific, depressing story, told in ways that sometimes veer into biopic conventionality, but that other times becomes janglingly real. The creepy scenes with Martin Sheen's J. Edgar Hoover, oozing a frightening racist pretension, and the powerful scenes between Daniel Kaluuya's Fred Hampton and Dominic Fishback's Deborah Johnson, negotiating their relationship as violence and fate weigh them down--all of them, and more, are absolutely brilliant, so much so that sometimes LaKeith Stanfield's William O'Neal, the "Judas" of the title, is overshadowed. But that lack of balance doesn't stop it from being an utterly compelling drama.

Once Upon a Time in Hollywood is delightfully cast, beautifully shot, full of sequences that charmed (Sharon Tate watching herself on the screen in the movie theater) and deeply unnerved (Cliff Booth exploring the cult-occupied Spahn Ranch) and completely satisfied (Rick Dalton improvising and pulling off a great scene as a bad guy in a cheap television Western pilot). For all that, I realized about halfway through that it was something I'm not sure I'd seen before--an actually small Tarantino movie, a Tarantino story that wasn't sprawling out of control with themes and subplots and hints and pretensions. I need to re-watch Jackie Brown, which I've told everyone for years was my favorite Tarantino movie, and it was--but maybe its contained narrative was matched, or even improved upon, by this one? Anyway, a great, fun, even kind of humble fantasy of a cinematic story.

I wasn't a particularly big fan of Pee-Wee Herman; Paul Reubens's comic creation was absolutely capable of tickling my funny bone (I remember watching his 1985 appearance as host on Saturday Night Live, something touched upon briefly--and somewhat bitterly--in this documentary, and laughing my ass off as he minced through the studio audience, re-naming everyone in such a weird manner), but his shtick just wasn't my own. Still, it was a great shtick, and worth honoring. Pee-Wee As Himself does that incisively. Paul Reubens was always trying to exercise control over his image, and variations on the theme of control--his intense friendships and resentments with other actors and artists in his circle, his devotion to his mostly hidden nature retreat in the Hollywood Hills, his willingness to exit and then return to the closet as a gay man as his career demanded, and most of all the incredible work and detail that went into shaping his artistic vehicles--define the whole movie. Overall, a delightful document of the comedy, punk, and avant-garde art scenes in LA in the 1970s and 80s, and one of the most distinctive members they ever produced.

Sing Sing is a heartfelt, thoughtful, honest, and delightfully--meaning painfully--realized story. At first I thought that perhaps I was watching some kind of tone poem, a film about something desperately sad that people live through and find moments of joy and triumph in nonetheless, like the early films of David Gordon Green. But developments later in the film made it more conventional, though no less affecting for all that. A wonderful, tear-jerking--but organically realized--celebration of art and humanity.

This comic-book Gen X geek has no notes, folks; Superman is straight-up one of the best super-hero movies I've ever seen. James Gunn's DC cinematic universe is, on the basis of this one film, going to dispense with many of the science-fiction and espionage thriller tropes that shaped, so successfully, Marvel movies for more than a decade, and in the place of a lot of that earnest attention to the dramatic, simply stipulating that aliens and meta-humans and super-heroes and everything else is part of the fabric of the world, and has been for centuries. This is not the comic book sensibility made real; this is reality made comic booky, and it delights me. Nearly 50 years ago--back when the character of Superman was barely 40 years old, as oppose to nearly a century now--writers, performers, and filmmakers cinematically realized this hero in a way that drew upon a sense of continuity from throughout the twentieth century; this Superman is part of a 21st-century reinvention, and so long as Gunn keeps his passionate, moralistic, geekily funny version of Clark Kent at the center of his movie universe, I will absolutely be along for the ride.

The 10 Best Movies I Watched in 2024

As always, this is a list of the best films I watched for the first time in 2024, regardless of when they came out. In alphabetical order:

Bright Spark: The Reconciliation of Trevor Southey (2022)

A brilliant, honest, and thoughtful portrait of an artist, his families and communities--both those he remained part of, and those he broke away from--and the way his art and life, in some ways (but not all), affected a reconciliation between both. For Mormons like myself and artists of a certain stripe, this short documentary is one of the best films of its type that anyone is ever likely to make.

Excalibur (1981)

Pulpy, melodramatic, surreal, gorgeous, over-the-top, with gross mud and ugly tortured bodies standing alongside brilliantly shining armor, sumptuous heraldry, and almost-but-not-quite porn-quality nudity--40+ years on, this has to remain the definitive D&D approach to the Arthurian legend. I loved it.

A Hard Day’s Night (1964)

87 minutes of silliness, wit, delightful verbal jousting, fine physical comedy, and of course, awesome music by 4 demigods. Seeing it for the first time in a proper movie theater only made it more of an experience. It's not surprising that Ringo went on to do the most in front of the camera; he may not have ever become a great actor, but the guy was a natural, a delightful comic presence throughout the whole film. Some segments look sharper when you think about them afterward than when you actually watch them (Harrison's encounter with youth-obsessed advertisers has some great darkness to it, but it probably needed to play out a little longer), but overall, this movie is an absolute gem.

Hundreds of Beavers (2022)

An insanely creative, low-budget, goofball, straight-out-of-Looney Tunes comic masterpiece. I laughed, I laughed, and I laughed some more. Its mixing of satiric wit and straight-up cartoony farce was equal to the best of Monty Python. I hope beaver Sherlock and beaver Watson survived for the sequel.

The Iron Claw (2023)

A remarkable, powerful, and believable story of a family that I can, in a few ways, profoundly relate to (I have six brothers, and we're all close), but in most other ways is utterly unfamiliar to me (we weren't athletes in our family in any sense, and the world of professional wrestling, especially the low-rent wrestling world of the 1970s and 1980s, was utterly outside of my experience). The masterful acting, pacing, and cinematography of the movie did what the best sort of movies always do: invite us in to a story which is not our own, which is totally foreign to us, and make us identify with the characters and their fates. This move drew me in, shutting off the critical voice always operating in my head, and made me care for these sad, stupid, doomed, but mostly enormously decent characters. I didn't weep for the Von Erichs, but their story weighed on me, and not in a manipulative way. Truly, this is the best kind of middle-brow movie: find a powerful story, and then tell it well.

The Long Good Friday (1980)

This is a fabled British gangster flick from the very early 1980s that I've missed up until now. The expert plotting of the film makes it a delight, but also puts us, as viewers, into surprising historical and moral waters. Can this bad guy also actually be the beleaguered hero of the story, the toxic yet necessary agent of English masculinity as the Age of Thatcher gives birth to a new Britain? Watch to learn the answer, and see why Bob Hoskins and Helen Mirren should have made a dozen films together; what an awesome pair.

Nosferatu (2024)

A brilliant piece of gothic art. Not really a horror movie, though there is much that is horrifying in it; this is Nosteratu with the obsession with foreigners and the plague replaced with a very 19th-century obsession with the dark and mysterious forces of sexuality (particularly of the female kind) and the occult, and the challenges both pose to a rational, patriarchal order. I loved the cinematography, the dialogue, and the interesting twists Eggers took with vampire lore. Maybe not the best straight-up Dracula story I've ever seen on the screen, but absolutely the most stately, most seemingly authentic. Someone online said that if Merchant Ivory had adapted Nosferatu or Dracula back in the 1980s, it would have looked like this, and I fully agree (and consider that high praise as well).

O.J.: Made in America (2016)

A brilliant documentary. The long, slow build through the first four episodes were insightful and often frankly astonishing. The contemporary interviews with lawyers on the defense and the prosecution, with Simpson's friends and enemies (the rueful, unapologetic Mark Fuhrman was particularly fascinating to watch) and hanger-ons and more, all of it was impressive and very well used, but really it was just the amount of revealing footage--from the crime scenes, from Simpson's daily life, and more--which the filmmakers found which really astounded me. I suppose the omnipresence of phones recording everything today had accustomed me--like everyone--to certain assumptions about the quality and character of the surveillance all around us, but watching this I was reminded, in a way I shouldn't have needed to be, of the near-equivalent omnipresence of hand-held video recorders which I can remember from the 1990s and 2000s, and yet had somehow forgotten. Anyway, tremendous story-telling. I initially thought the final episode was a little weak, a little anti-climactic; given the focus on the murder trial, I was bothered that there was comparatively little analysis given to Simpson's civil trial, and why that played out so differently in cultural and popular terms (the reasons aren't hard to guess--the lack of television in the courtroom being an obvious one--but still, it wanted to see those reasons laid out). And I do think they could have done more to continue the interpretation which guided the first four episodes: namely, that Simpson's career and trial reflect the deeply disturbing fruit of how media-saturated and addicted Americans have internalized racial divides, prejudices, and resentments. But with a couple of brilliant sequences, they brought that back in at the very conclusion of the last episode, with Simpson's conviction for robbery in 2008 becoming a troubling coda, making me forgive everything.

Quand tu liras cette lettre [When You Read This Letter] (1953)

This almost impossible to find French classic is both compelling and kind of horrifying, as well as surprising. A marvelous but in some ways opaque drama, the real lesson of which probably is what was said by the old lady on the train near the end: "There is so much [unstated: "which we can never understand"] in every person's heart." I loved the way it closed with exactly the same shots it opened with, only in reverse; perhaps the whole thing is a kind of moral parable, a just-so story--only its message is that people's choices can only ever be observed, never understood.

Uncut Gems (2019)

This movie is incredibly foul and frenetic, the story of an addictive and hyper and undisciplined individual throwing himself into risks that he constantly hypes up, until it collapses messily--but still, everything is right there in the way the story is told, nothing more. But the more I thought about it, the more I came to think that there was something more to the story here, something that Adam Sandler, of all people, manages to key the audience into: his character's confusion and even disbelief at his own sadness, at the emptiness he doesn't know how to deal with, was encapsulated in one moment (when he searches through the empty apartment he shared with his lover) which, in a way, haunts all the rest of the film. The dead, staring, disbelieving form of Sandler at the end, finally at rest, makes us think about how impossible such a life of complete madness, complete addictive activity, truly is--which perhaps makes the visuals of the tiny, eternal, unchanging perfections of the gems which started and ended the film completely appropriate.

Do We Really Not Need Another Hero? (Thoughts About Dune)

Exactly a week ago, I and bunch of local Dune-loving friends caught Denis Villeneuve's Dune Part 2 in IMAX. It was glorious--a fantastic, rousing, compelling science-fiction spectacle which built upon and brought to a satisfying (but also very open-ended) conclusion the story which was begun in his Dune Part 1 back in 2021. I thought it was fabulous, and strongly recommend who hasn't seen it yet and has even the slightest interest in doing to go see the movie immediately, preferably on the biggest screen you can.

But that's just the spectacle part--what about Villeneuve's two-part Dune as a story? Here, as always, there have been opinions aplenty, everywhere on the internet; my friends and I definitely had more than a few of our own. For me, after thinking about it and reading about it, I believe I have to say that, as much as I praise these two films, they're missing something: they aren't mythic. Does that matter: as a matter of cinematic narrative, or--perhaps more importantly, especially to us geeks who know and love Frank Herbert's original story--as a matter of adaptation? Maybe.

As I confessed when I watched Dune Part 1--with mostly this same group of dorky sci-fi-loving friends--nearly 2 1/2 years ago, I'm biased here. My first exposure to Dune wasn't, in fact, Herbert's novel(s); it was David Lynch's seriously compromised, definitely flawed, but still delightful 1984 adaptation. I was a 15-year-old Dungeons & Dragons-playing, Lord of the Rings-reading, "Star Trek"-watching (both the Original Series and the 1980s movies, of course) teen-age nerd; while I was familiar with Dune--I regularly saw Herbert's first four Dune books in a nice boxed set sitting prominently on a much-perused shelf at a gaming store I often visited, and was generally familiar with the story--I'd never read any of them. Watching Lynch's Dune on the big screen changed all that for me. By 1984 I'd already begun to develop an at least somewhat critical appreciation of film as its own story-telling medium (enough that I can distinctly remember thinking to myself, while sitting in the theater opening day watching Return of the Jedi, "you know, parts of this movie aren't very good"), so I think even then I probably was aware, even while grinning like a madman when Toto's guitars blasted out during the worm-riding sequences, that I wasn't watching any kind of masterpiece. But I didn't care. The movie's visionary story of Paul Atreides, a product of both generations of secretive breeding and training but also of a mother's genuine love, surviving terrible betrayal only to emerge as the foretold messiah of a persecuted and honorable people, was romantic and sumptuous and I loved it. So, of course, I had to buy the books, and devour them. Which I tried to do, with some success: I loved Dune, mostly enjoyed Dune Messiah, had serious problems with Children of Dune, and couldn't handle God-Emperor of Dune at all. (And yes, I know, much later there were a couple more, but by then my interest in Herbert's epic was completely exhausted.) My declining engagement with Herbert's treatment of Paul Atreides and his world was, in retrospect, perhaps predictable, for reasons worth exploring.

Those who know the books well--like some of my friends, for whom Dune lives much stronger in their imaginations than it ever did in mine--might have already spotted my difficulty. Lynch's version of the first Dune novel profoundly downplays one of the book's explicit plot-threads: that the messianic prophecy held to by the Fremen of Dune (or Arrakis) was in fact spread among them over a period of millennia by the Bene Gesserit, an all-female cult whose use of the spice melange, which is only available on Arrakis, has enabled them to read minds and see into the future, and they've used those skills to master strange physical and mental arts, and plan for the eventual emergence of the "Kwisatch Haderach," a male who would wield the same powers as the Bene Gesserit. The messianic prophecy of the Fremen, the promise of an off-world "Lisan al Gaib" that would lead the Fremen in a holy war against all the other powers in the known universe, was therefore actually one of presumably hundreds, if not thousands, of legends which the Bene Gesserit had purposefully cultivated to enable their Kwisatch Haderach, when he is finally born, to more easily step into the domineering role which the sisterhood imagine for him (and through which they would control him, from behind the scenes). Paul's messianic role, in other words, was manufactured on his behalf, not organic to Fremen, much less a reflection of the actual eschatology of the universe.

[I'm really proud of that one-paragraph summary of the dominant--though by no means exclusive--plot in Herbert's intricate and multifaceted overarching story, by the way.]

While Lynch's Dune is up-front about Paul Atreides being the genetic inheritor of a breeding program which the Bene Gesserit planned out, it basically elides the Machiavellianism which lurks behind it entirely. Lynch's troubled journey to his finished Dune included a 4-hour rough cut, which he aimed to turn into a 3-hour film (after the plan for two films which he'd originally scripted was shot down), and which he was then obliged, with great frustration, to turn into a finished movie of just a little over two hours. A huge amount, obviously, was left on the editing room floor, and a many last-minute reshoots were made to stitch the drastically shortened film together. If Lynch had been able to follow through with the sequence he'd originally imagined, then after Dune he would have turned to Dune Messiah, the second book of Herbert's original series, and the partially completed script for that movie which has only recently been finally recovered makes it clear that the Lynch was ready to dive into the plots-within-plots story of the Bene Gesserit attempting to take back control of the power which Paul, as the Fremen's messiah, had unleashed, as well as his own doubts and frustrations over the enormous costs--over 60 billion lives--of the wars his rise as resulted in. But even without that sequel, in the best, unofficial, reconstructed versions of Lynch's never-completed 3-hour cut (like the famed SpiceDiver cut, which my friends and I all gathered to watch before Dune Part 1), you can see the Lynch truly wanted to bring in details from the book which would complicate the story, make Paul's tale less of a revelation and more politically ambiguous.

But that was not to be. And honestly, I'm not entirely bothered by that. A little bothered, to be sure--but not entirely.

Before catching Dune Part 2, I went with some of these same friends to see the 40th anniversary re-release of Lynch's 1984 original on the big screen--and seeing it that way, as a whole, separate from alternative cuts and closed-off possibilities, reminded me of what I'd see four decades ago: a science-fiction story of a myth brought to life, of a promised messiah acting out their own legend and becoming more than human as a result. It's absolutely hokey, that's undeniable. The film is crowded with too many details from the books, all of it designed to serve a straight-forward hero's journey. And yet I could only, once again, applaud the genius of how Lynch compressed and rewrote elements of Herbert's Dune so as to tell a story--almost certainly not the one he'd wished to tell, but the one he was obliged to carry across the finish line anyway--that truly works, dramatically speaking. 

Just one example: the Bene Gesserit's "weirding way," a set of physical and mental disciplines, including extensive combat training, appears only as a commanding voice in Villeneuve's films--which is, admittedly, its most famous (and plot-important) aspect. But in the midst of all the other stuff he crammed in--the Mentats, the Navigators Guild, and more--Lynch decided to turn the weirding way into "weirding modules" which Jessica, for the love of her husband, let House Atreides in on the secret of, and by which the Bene Gesserit's trained vocal powers could be weaponized. This gives the Fremen a secret weapon to use against their enemies, one that Paul is essential to their mastering. And, of course, it turns out that Paul's own Fremen name, "Muad'Dib" is a particularly explosive force. In these and other ways, Lynch's film works to make everything, all around Paul, manifest his legend, whatever the pain involved and whatever the cost may be.

Villeneuve's films reject that approach, which is an eminently defensible way to tell the story. First, because he had the budget and the technical skill to put on the screen five hours worth of Dune adaptation, so he could take much more time to emphasize characters and scenes (the expanded focus on Liet Kynes, the Judge of the Change when House Atreides arrives on Arrakis, is a great example of this) that contextualize the complicated, plans-within-plans reality of Paul's fate. But second, and more importantly, Villeneuve clearly loves the original books, and as such, really doesn't love the prospect treating the story Paul's rise as something explicitly heroic, and definitely not as the authentic embodiment of a mythological truth contained within an otherwise manufactured Fremen myth. Hence Villeneuve introduces factions among the Fremen, with Paul's great love and the eventual mother of his children Chani being presented as one of the most vocal resistors to accepting the Lisan al Gaib legend, insisting at multiple points in the film that such stories only exist to pacify and control the Fremen. And while that colonial-resistance spin isn't at all present in the books, since Herbert truly did believe that 1) all messiahs are to be feared, and 2) all messiah stories are manufactured anyway, this addition of Villeneuve's really does reflect Herbert's bottom-line secularism and cynicism well.

All of this is fine--it's Herbert's story, after all, and while the author may be dead and authorial intentional nothing like it used to be, there is still something to be said for respecting the explicit text. Except that is exactly the problem, or at least one potential problem. Because Herbert was too good a writer to turn his whole epic in the just plots-within-plots, all the way down. Paul Atreides really does have something special about him, and he really does become something more than he was. He really does put on a Fremen stillsuit the correct way the very first time, without any previous instruction; that's right in the text. He really does summon a massive worm to ride upon, without any ability (and that point in the story, anyway) to communicate with them. Herbert actually voices this mysterious ambiguity--that a person bred to step cunningly into the role of a prophet might actually, innocently, be a true prophet all the same--explicitly, having Princess Irulan (the child of the emperor who set up House Atreides to be destroyed, and whom Paul and his Fremen will completely overthrow) at one point write in her diary about Paul, "How much is actual prediction…and how much is the prophet shaping the future to fit the prophecy? Does the prophet see the future or does he see a line of weakness, that he may shatter as a diamond-cutter shatters his gem with a blow of a knife?" In other words, could the Kwisatch Haderach, this immensely skilled and impossibly perceptive individual, also be a figure in some actually, only-coincidently-Bene Gesserit-orchestrated, prophesied eschaton? As Timothy Burke--who supports whole-heartedly the approach which Villeneuve has taken in these films, seeing it as a way to avoid a "sad but necessary"-type of justification for White imperialism arguably present in the story's subtext--put it, "the problem in the end is that Paul Atreides is both a fake messiah and a genuine superhuman." Villeneuve has his own, still unfolding, way of responding to that dilemma, Lynch had his much more direct solution. And maybe there's something to be said, beyond just my own 40-year-old nostalgia, for the latter? 

I can think of three possible arguments. The first is the question of the dramatic style incumbent upon any story told in this particular genre. Dune, in any of its incarnations, is not a romantic comedy, is not a documentary, is not a one-act play. It is a sprawling science-fiction epic about the dramatic reversal of fortune which those who thought to destroy House Atreides and take control of Arrakis suffer at the hands of Paul Atreides and the Fremen, filled with vicious betrayals, spectacular action, and terrible violence. If you're going to film this story, you simply have to make your protagonist at least somewhat mythic; otherwise the whole project collapses. Freddie deBoer, in a delightful piece in which he admits that, on the level of imagination anyway, he's totally ready to sign up for the Fremen jihad under Muad'Dib, put it this way:

On a serious note--if Paul and his movement aren't seductive, if the audience doesn't feel the pull to romanticize them, then there's no movie. It's like Fight Club, another story that gets aggressively explained a lot--driven, to be fair, by misinterpretation from both fans and critics alike. It's true that Tyler Durden is not a figure to be consciously admired, let alone emulated. (Please do not emulate him.) But he has to be cool. If he's not seductive, if there's no sense that we want to be like him, then there's no stakes and no lessons; there's nothing to be gained by holding up a figure that we all admit is wrong and bad, in that kind of story.

Given that deBoer is talking about the Paul Atreides played by Timothée Chalamet in Villeneuve's Dune Part 1 and Part 2, I should emphasize that I'm not attempting to flip his comments against his own appreciation of these films. Villeneuve really does give us an exciting, engaging Paul; his story, as played against a tableau of remarkable sci-fix visuals, is compelling and great fun. But there is nonetheless, I think, a degree in which Dune's story, as it is told in these two recent films, cannot be carried by Paul alone. Which again--is fine! The story is not made any less, at least not in terms of the overall sweep of it, by introducing additional protagonists with agency, humor, and anger. But if we were to focus solely on Villeneuve's and Chalamet's Paul, it's undeniable that they want him to recede before the whole weight of Dune's epic-ness. He treats his visions as frightening, disturbing, an annoyance, a threat: in other words, as a disruption. Lynch's Paul, as played by Kyle MacLachlan in a way which makes his every interior thought explicit, with a kind of radical openness, is clearly communicated to the audience as believing his visions, of making them a part of him, and growing along with the story's unfolding myth accordingly.

Second, let's think about the cinematic situating of characters who, because of the story they are part, are arguably necessarily mythic. That is: grand, awesome, larger than life. There are plenty of ways to tell stories which invert those myths, the focus on the god's clay feet, etc. But at some point, if that is all you're doing, you then have to ask yourself: why tell this story at all? Surely there are better ways to dramatize the stories of the little people that those in power use or abuse or pass over, than to spend a great deal of time reconstructing the life of these characters, and not allowing them to be seen in the way that history, for better or worse, as brought them forward to us today, the audience. Noah Millman makes this point very thoughtfully by considering four recent films that he considers sad failures: Napoleon, Ferrari, Maestro (about Leonard Bernstein), and Priscilla (about the wife of Elvis Presley):

All of the foregoing films are, in some fashion, telling stories about greatness: world-historical greatness on a political and military level, the race for glory in a competitive sport with death and bankruptcy always around the corner, the drive to create great art and to touch a mass audience. I can certainly understand the desire to avoid simple-mindedly worshipping great people, or people who sought greatness. But these are not films that focus on the price exacted by that quest for greatness, or that are alive to the ironic role of contingency in history, or that emphasize how any great achievement rests on the shoulders of innumerable unknowns, or any of the many ways that one might complicate a “great man” narrative and make it more interesting than hagiography. No, what they have in common is an apparent disbelief in the quality of greatness itself. 

Again, it would be wrong to directly apply this against Villeneuve's adaptations of the Dune story, not least because Noah is talking about movies that were all, to one degree or another, biopics, while none of the faux-documentary conventions which attach themselves to that genre apply to science fiction. Even if you can make the comparison, it's not as though Chalamet's Paul isn't presented as competent, smart, charismatic, etc. (the extended Fremen attack on the spice harvester in Dune Part 2 nicely fits into making Paul larger than life among his fellow rebels). But once again, I can't help put wonder if telling a story about an individual who achieves universe-changing significance, who is received by the Fremen who brought him as the universe's messiah, and who demonstrably manifests--in the books, definitely in Lynch's version, and even in Villeneuve's as well--awesome powers, isn't served as well quite as it might have been otherwise by constantly reminding people (mostly, in Villeneuve's films, through Paul's mother Jessica, who becomes increasingly Machiavellian with every scene) that the prophecy Paul is inheriting isn't a "real" hope?

(I feel like doubling down on this point. Once more, I really enjoyed the divisions Villeneuve introduced into the world of the Fremen; in the by-now classical model of the hero surrounded by doubts (including their own), it's handled very well. But when Chani, after Paul has drunk the Water of Life, after he has become what the Emperor's Bene Gesserit Reverend Mother denounces fearfully as an "abomination," after he is just casually reading the minds and telling the futures of everyone around him, Chani still denounces the whole idea of Paul being the Lisan al Gaib as a myth that oppresses the Fremen. Really? For that acting choice to make sense to me, I'm going to have to go with Chani being angry, confused, frustrated, whatever--not as her being a reliable narrator of what's "really" going on in the story, because what's really going on is that Paul, whether or not it was something the Bene Gesserit ever wanted, has kind of become a god. Perhaps Lynch's underlining of this point by having Paul make it rain on Arrakis was too much--it's not in the reconstructed 3-hour versions of his film--but damn, it actually kind of follows, whereas I think Chani angrily riding away on a sandworm in the final scene of Dune Part 2 doesn't entirely.)

Third and finally, let me invoke one Max Rockatansky, the protagonist of the Mad Max films, a property that admittedly doesn't have anything remotely like the political, emotional, or ecological range and depth of Herbert's Dune universe (but which has some great stories under its belt nonetheless). Specifically, let me talk about Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome, where Max, wandering the post-apocalyptic desert, is adopted by a community of child survivors, who imagine he is the legendary "Captain Walker," returned to them, to help them return to and rebuild a world which none of them have any real memory of:

 

Mad Max, of course, isn't Captain Walker--we know this, because we'd just seen the latest turn in Max's history in the first 45 minutes of the movie, and it has nothing to do with being a returned or resurrected airline pilot, a messiah, that could fly these children to a new life. And yet, in fighting to make it possible for this small community to live and escape and build anew somewhere else, didn't he fulfill their crazy, chanted prophecy after all?

My point, in the end, is no more than the heart of The Music Man: "I always think there's a band, kid." There's something to be said for stories that are centered on myths and heroes, because embracing myths, believing in them, is part of making it possible for heroes, for people who transform the presumed possibilities of one's world (or for boy's bands, for that matter), to be. Of course, this is kind of pedantic at this point: it's not like we're lacking in movies with heroes! Every Mission Impossible film, every movie the Rock stars in, is actively engaged in the myth-making business. So why complain that Dune, a book which makes the manipulation of myths a key part of its overall tale, is adapted in such a way as to center that manipulation, rather than the myth itself?

Maybe no reason other than nostalgia after all. Or maybe because the book itself, as reflected in Lynch's flawed and interfered-with but still majestic interpretation, makes it impossible, arguably even against Herbert's own intention, to thoroughly dismiss the possibility that the Bene Gesserit, like any group of story-tellers anywhere, may have mythologized better than they could have possibly known. That wasn't Herbert's own self-understanding of what he wrought, and that hasn't been the dominant understanding of what Dune has to say over the decades; most readers, I think, have always gotten the point that Paul Atreides is supposed to be understood at least as much as a pawn as a protagonist, as least as much a murderous villain as a national liberator. Lynch himself saw that in the books as well. But in being forced to finish his adaptation on terms other than his choosing, he still found a way to double-down on the book's heroic, mythological elements that didn't, I think, entirely undermine what Paul Atreides meant, or at least could mean. I'm going to hold out the hope that when Villeneuve finishes his three-part tale, with an adaptation of Dune Messiah, he'll leave the door open for us viewers to see that Chani, or even Paul himself, may be scrambling to understand just how real the myth they are a part of, the myth which inspires Stilgar and the other Fremen, the myth which has arguably outstripped the Bene Gesserit's millenia-old machinations, may be. Because for this view, at least, if only for the time I'm taking in the story on the screen, it's real to me.

The 10 Best Movies I Watched in 2023

As always, this is a list of the best ten movies I watched for the first time this year, whether they came out in 2023 or not.

First Cow. A decidedly unconventional Western story (welcome to the multicultural 19th-century Oregon Territory!), an anti-capitalist story, a story of simple survival and small pleasures. I would have liked the film to have slightly more momentum, but the score and the scenery, as the the movie's quiet and small--but for all that, emotionally enormous--tragedy unfolds, was frequently captivating nonetheless. I love that so much was left to the viewer, and not just in the ending; even without having read the book, you can tell this is a deeply literate adaption, not allowing the story-telling tricks of the cinema to tell more of a story than is on the page.

 

Godzilla: Minus One. Is it an apology for World War II? A revisionist history? A what-if fantasy? Whatever it was, the way this superb, hammy, utterly melodramatic movie leaned hard into updating and re-imagining the trauma and guilt and horror of WWII for the Japanese people, with token narrative throw-aways to somehow contextualize the whole thing as taking place in the midst of MacArthur's occupation of Japan and the beginnings of the Cold War between the U.S. and the Soviet Union, was simply marvelous. Put yourself in mind of the 1954 original, with its sadness and earnestness, and the desperate, romantic hopefulness of this version will seem well-earned. Godzilla always was, and always will be, best when considered incomprehensible enormity, something that makes no sense on its own terms but something that human science and human sacrifice can succeed against, so long as all the usual bastards don't get in the way. 

He Got Game. Another near-brilliant Spike Lee movie, with deeply persuasive performances and an Aaron Copland + Chuck D score than goes from sweepingly pastoral to intensely personal to back again. Denzel is simply a marvel, with so many great scenes that communicate the struggles and choices of a confused, angry, caring, limited, gifted, haunted man. Practically everyone else in the movie is a stereotype or a mixture of stereotypes of one sort or another, and as usual with Lee movies, some of that borderline racist/sexist/classist stuff edges right up to being discomforting outrageous or overripe. But all together? A wild cinematic ride, from one of the great directors of the past 30 years.

 

In the Mood for Love. Just brilliant, emotionally and stylistically. If I've seen a better, more captivating film about marriage and pain and desire and love and loss than this one, I can't remember it right now. Tightly contained throughout most of its running time, but I never felt that movie was claustrophobic; also, a succinct, briskly cut movie, and yet I never felt rushed through the story. Simply the best constructed, most emotionally powerful film I watched in all of 2023, hands down.

Jiro Dreams of Sushi. A beautiful and intimidating portrait of a serene and enormously talented monster of a human being. This film needs to stand as a text alongside every other study of virtue: we talk about practice making perfect, we talk about dedication to one's craft, we talk about the deep humility and wisdom that comes from embracing the constraints of a particular art and submitting oneself entirely to them, but in the end, what does any of that look like? This documentary of sushi master Jiro Ono is one answer. I love in particular the fact that his tremendous achievement is partly dependent upon many other people--fish and rice merchants, in particular--who in their own, presumably less monstrously dedicated, but nonetheless impressive ways, reflect that same devotion to their vocation. A lovely, haunting film.

 

Killers of the Flower Moon. A tremendous movie, one that, in my opinion, makes entirely justified use of its massive running time; with only one partial exception (the long burn scene at the Hale ranch), I don't think I was aware of the passage of time all the way through. Scorsese's direction of the film is brilliant; completely aside from visually arresting costuming, set design, and cinematography, he oversaw the creation of a film that is not structured like, and doesn't play out like, a horror film, and yet for a good two hours of its running time, between its musical cues and staging, it absolutely felt like a horror film, even while also being captivating Western and tragic study of evil, endurance, and plain gross capitalist stupidity. A friend and I spent 40 minutes talking about the movie afterwards in an empty, post-midnight parking lot, deconstructing it all (including the audacious, but in retrospect I think defensible, ending), and we could have stayed longer. I was a big fan of The Irishman, Scorsese's other recent 3+ hour movie, but this is an even greater accomplishment in almost every way.

 

Mother. A brilliant, creepy, surprisingly mix of horror, police procedural, and family drama. Compelling acted all the way through, and narratively tight as a drum; no loose ends whatsoeever. Like he did in Memories of Murder--which this movie really made me want to rewatch--Bong Joon-ho just triggers me endlessly with his visuals of the quotidian details of the poorer side of South Korean life: the tiny shops, the make-shift apartments, the trash collectors, the sleazy drinking parties, the slovenly yet somehow orderly routines of the police, the ridiculous bus tours, etc. It's not like I knew any of this intimately, but I lived in the midst of it for long enough that Bong sends me back to Seoul or Suwon, scene after scene.

 

RRR. 110% CINEMA!!! Singing, dancing, ultra-violence, chaste hand-holding--what more could anyone want?! ("Can I see a man punch a tiger in the face?" Yes, you definitely can. "Can I see a phantasamogorical alternate-history critique of British colonialism and also a man punching a tiger in the face?" Yes, you can get that too.)

 

 

 

 

Sound of Metal. An engrossing, fascinating, completely believable story of a musician losing his hearing. The final sequence of the movie, after our main character leaves the home for the deaf and attempts to reunite with his girlfriend, seemed slightly less organic, slightly more rushed to hit all the required story-telling beats than everything that came before, in which every step both logically followed what came before and yet was a surprise--kind of like life! But overall, the whole thing was quite wonderful, deeply honest and, as a matter of sound editing, brilliantly creative in its depiction of the world of the deaf. A must see. 

Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse. Tremendous comic-book story-telling, and simply peerless comic-book animation. But I have to say: Mayday Parker is cute and hilarious and all, but making her directly part of the adventure--and lying to Mary Jane about it!--is just bad parenting, and I think more highly of Peter B. Parker, redeemed hero, the Spider-Man all us middle-aged White guys with a paunch should aspire to grow up to be, to accept that he would actually do such a thing. Boo!

The 10 Best Movies I Watched in 2022

As always, the movies which I watched in 2022, whether they were released this year or not, that I thought the best and/or that I got the most out of, in alphabetical order by title.

Coming in at the very end of the year, my first response to The Banshees of Inisherin was more admiration than love: gorgeously shot and hauntingly acted, it was a great little tragic-comic horror story, but probably not more than that. But conversations with my daughters afterwards helped me see some marvelous coherences in the film's story; the fact is, in light of morning-after thinking, this movie is a gem, a scary and sad portrait of human limits and human choices, with multiple brilliant revelations packed into short exchanges and scenes. (Hint: the movie maybe focused on Pádraic and Colm; but it's really about Pádraic and Dominic, and Colm and Siobhán.)

I watched Bathtubs Over Broadway early in the year, and it was such a delight. It introduced me to a slice of American art that I'd never known anything about, and indeed can't remember having ever even heard anything about before; it was a genuine revelation. And a pretty delightful one, done with great spirit and nostalgia and joy. Honestly, everyone should learn about "industrial musicals," the grand shows that corporations put together for the annual meetings of their stockholders or whatever, year after year, throughout the middle of the 20th century. Such a fun film.

Everything Everywhere All at Once is absolutely a lot of movie; maybe too much. But it reduced me to tears when we saw it in the theater, and I know why: I couldn't contain the admiration I felt for, my sympathy for the pain felt by, and my hopes for the future of Waymond, and every other decent person who just honestly wants to people to talk to each other and listen with compassion to what they have to say, even when--especially when--what is being said makes no sense. "This is how I fight," he says: with kindness, not comprehension. I'm an intellectual who loves trying to understand things, and I won't ever change--but I'm a better person for being reminded, as I am not nearly often enough, of the limits of that approach.

Flee is a remarkable movie, one whose stylistic choices in how it unfolds its story didn't always seem to me to make perfect sense on their own terms--sometimes the movie would depart entirely from the conceit that we were watching an animation of an originally recorded interview, but then there would be a scene which leaned hard into maintaining that pretention--but all of which added up to a film that was more than the sum of its parts. The story of Amin, an Afghan whose family fled to the Soviet Union to escape the Mujahideen, then spent years attempting to escape the USSR as it slowly collapsed through the 1980s and into the 1990s, is a powerful one, and I appreciated the creativity and honesty--despite the frequent artifice of the movie--with which it was told.

For Mormons like myself--heterodox, liberal, critical, but still settled in our identity--the past couple of years have delivered a lot of media content almost perfectly designed to get us arguing about and dianosing ourselves and our history. I never got into Under the Banner of Heaven; my wife and I watched some of, but couldn't maintain interest in, Mormon No More; I thought Murder Among the Mormons was terrific. But by far the best documentary about my tribe, or those associated with it, I watched this year was Keep Sweet: Pray and Obey. A deeply creepy story, told with remarkable clarity and restraint considering the ugliness of the child and sexual abuse and the religious fanaticism at its center, it provides all the interviews and all the context and history you need to understand this small, horrifying branch of the fundamentalist movement within Mormon culture; if you can handle this sort of thing, I can't recommend it strongly enough.

I'm not sure I'd ever even heard of The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp before a friend of mine did a complete rundown of all of the movies by the mid-20th-century British team of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger and praised it to the high heavens, but now I mention it whenever the topic of British movies comes up. This is simple a spectacular yarn, telling in miniature the whole cultural story of the British empire from WWI to WWII, through the character of Major-General Clive Wynne-Candy, whose great virtues and perhaps even greater "Blimpish" flaws are laid out with affection, insight, and great wit. I was constantly being surprised and impressed by how the movie is put together; for what it wants to do, it's practically flawless.

Once again, a Spike Lee joint makes my top ten list, but this is an early movie of his, the first one he made after his career-defining film Do the Right Thing, and his first movie with Denzel Washington. And I have to say, I'm not sure Washington, whose work I love, didn't set himself a high bar that he has only ever equalled, never exceeded, in Mo' Better Blues. People can complain, legitimately, about how Lee makes use of crude--but funny!--stereotypes in filling out his films, and about the way he inserts himself--literally or metaphorically--into his movies, but here his camera is centered on Washington's amazingly calm, yet nonetheless deeply expressive, face, as the leader of a jazz band who thinks of nothing but music but is also intelligent enough to recognize all the trouble his lack of thought for anything else is getting him into. The soundtrack is tremendous, and the final 10 minutes, though completely predictable, are made transcendent by being accompanied by John Coltrane's A Love Supreme. Absolutely worth seeing.

Salt of the Earth is a nearly 70-year-old melodrama, and it shows--the dialogue, acting, and staging all reflect a very different story-telling sensibility, one lacking the sort of abiding aesthetic which allow musicals similarly decades-old to still work for us. So no, it's not the style of this movie that made it so good for 2022-me; it's just how damn contemporary its honest, unflinching, thoughtful engagement with complicated issues of poverty, labor, exploitation, gender politics, cultural difference, faith, inequality, racism, and more all felt to me. The story it tells is an almost entirely fictionalized tale of an actual strike at a New Mexico zinc mine, with some of the actual participants appearing in major roles in the film. Written, directed, and produced by men who had been blacklisted in Hollywood, and dimissed as communist propaganda by many when it was first released, this is a great, powerful, however melodramatic, document of women and men fighting hard--against the power of capital, and against their own weaknesses--to achieve something better.

The Seven-Per-Cent Solution was just a totally unexpected blast. Terrific, nutty, often downright hilarious yet on-the-nose characterizations (Sherlock Holmes as a paranoid, traumatized drug addict? Sigmund Freud as a manly swashbuckling hero?), complete with a bonkers, definitely politically incorrect yet entirely entrancing plot? An adventure story-slash-costume drama, with hokey (but well-intentioned!) psycho-analytics, corrupt (but absolutely proper!) European aristocrats, confused and falsely accused (yet still guilty!) English academics, and a run-away train? All that, and tennis? Sign me up!

Sorry folks, but this is just cinema. Complain all you want about Tom Cruise; with this film, he did everything that Tom Cruise, Inc., does best: give us fabulous stunts, a perfectly efficient plot, lots of sharp and edited-to-perfection scenes, a few moments of almost-entirely-honestly-earn sentiment (Iceman! The hero we--and he--always knew he could be!), and, yes, plenty of non-distracting but solidly landing jokes. Just in terms of movie-going, popcorn-munching delight, Top Gun: Maverick was absolutely the summer flick of the year.

Planning and "The Politics of Beauty": Reflections on Stewart Udall

[Cross-posted to Front Porch Republic] 

John de Graaf, an author, filmmaker, and friend of Front Porch Republic, has recently completed a documentary tribute to a hero of his: Stewart Udall, the pioneering conservationist who in many ways defined (almost entirely for better, though perhaps, in a small way, partly for worse) the environmental agenda of the U.S. government and, more specifically, the Democratic party for the past 60 years. “Stewart Udall: The “Politics of Beauty” is a gorgeously shot and highly informative short movie, a wonderful introduction to a fairly unique and entirely admirable figure from 20^th-century American history: a crew-cutted WWII veteran and New Frontier liberal whose passion for the natural world literally changed the landscape of this country--but also an open-minded thinker, a lover of poetry, family, and community, whose conservationist passions led him to be ever more conscious, as the decades went by, of the complications inherent to the liberal statism through which he did his greatest work (even if he never did turn against it entirely). In an essay last year, de Graaf called Udall a “true conservative,” someone who “really wanted to conserve things: land, air, water, beauty, the arts and graces, gentle human relations, the best of tradition, democratic ideals,” and this movie reflects that aspect of Udall’s life very well.

Udall’s early history—his birth into the Udall family in 1920 (which was already by then an expanding political clan), his life as a young Mormon in Saint Johns, Arizona, and the poverty, the conflicts, and the fellowship which existed in that arid farming community—is by no means the focus of de Graff’s film, but I was entranced by those opening shots and the story it told, complete with comments from Udall’s surviving siblings. It put me in mind of my own maternal grandfather, Joseph Arben Jolley, who was born just four years before Udall in Tropic, Utah, a similarly remote and tiny Mormon hamlet on the Colorado Plateau (though 300 miles, a couple of mountain ranges, and several Native reservations separate the two towns). Like my grandfather, Udall’s early years were without electricity or running water, something which FDR’s New Deal (specifically the Rural Electrification Act) changed, with radical consequences for the Udall family—among other things, they became Democrats, convinced that government action really can improve human lives.

It was that conviction, tied to his passion for racial and, especially, environmental justice, which shaped his public career, first as an elected representative, and then as Secretary of the Interior under both Presidents Kennedy and Johnson. During those years, Udall orchestrated the establishment of more national parks, historical monuments, wildlife refuges, and recreational areas than any other Interior Secretary either before or since; if you’ve ever visited Canyonlands National Park, or hiked the Appalachian Trail, or spent time at over a hundred other similar locations across America’s beautiful and diverse ecosystems and geography, it’s likely that you have Stewart Udall at least partly to thank. His years of government service were not restricted to what he did to strengthen and expand the conservationist mentality in Washington D.C.; de Graaf’s documentary does an excellent job highlighting Udall’s broad engagement with cultural issues, as well the tensions and frustrations he faced as a leading government official during the heights of the civil rights movement, the Vietnam War, and all the protests both unleashed. But still, it is the lessons he leaned in Saint Johns, the way he applied those lessons, the things he learned from his struggles over them, and how his own take on those lessons thus evolved over the decades, which strike me as most valuable to America today.

In 1963, Udall published his first book, The Quiet Crisis. An idiosyncratic and unsystematic but still deeply insightful history of conservation attitudes and efforts throughout American history, its perspective on the role of government in protecting wilderness, particularly in the American West, was in some ways superseded by later books of his. But the original remains something of lost classic, regularly rediscovered and praised by those trying to understand the development of American society’s relationship to the land. Reading it in conjunction with watching de Graaf’s film both complicates and deepens our understanding of this indefatigable public servant.

In these pages, there are a fair number of embarrassing paeans to the presumed virtue and wisdom of American planners and policy-makers. Among others, the book begins with Udall presenting the national government’s Indian Claims Commission, which is generally accepted to have utterly failed in its task to treat Native land claims justly, “as a singular gesture of atonement, which no civilized country has ever matched,” and then towards the conclusion includes some glowing praise for Robert Moses, the devastating over-builder of American cities, highlighting his efforts to “overcome earlier failures to plan” and bring to American urban areas “asphalt for beach parking lots, for playgrounds, and for roads” (pp. 11, 163-164). But between such missteps, there much worth admiring and pondering.

In The Quiet Crisis, Udall provides thoughtful portraits—and critiques—of influential naturalists, conservationists, and geographers like George Perkins Marsh, Gifford Pinchot, John Wesley Powell, John Muir, and Frederick Law Olmstead. He off-handedly introduces the idea of global warning decades before scientific debates over such crashed into the public consciousness ("What are the long-range results of man's modification of the environment? When men clear a forest in order to make space for agriculture, how does this clearing affect the climate, the rate of erosion of soil, and the populations of birds and other wild animals?"--p. 81). Predictably, the book includes vicious condemnations of what he various refers to as the “Big Raid,” the “Great Giveaway,” and the “Myth of Superabundance,” the guiding ideology of many American business interests and monopolists which, facing only occasional resistance, exploited and denuded American forests, ecosystems, watersheds, species, grasslands, resources, and more throughout the 19^th century and the first part of the 20^th. Perhaps just as predictably, he lavishly praises those who took executive action on behalf of environmental interests, particularly Presidents Theodore and Franklin Delano Roosevelt. According to Udall, TR “regarded himself as the trustee of the lands owned by the people” and “dared to use his pen,” aggressively expanding the application of the Reclamation Act and the Antiquities Act so as to more than quadruple the size of protected natural lands in the United States (though whether TR’s actions really “dealt a decisive blow to the Myth of Superabundance” in America is doubtful--pp. 131, 136). And in Udall’s view, FDR’s New Deal aimed to reverse effects of “the Big Raids…[during which] much of the nation's resource capital had been borrowed and used up to advance the personal fortunes of a few”; through the creation of the REA, the Civilian Conservation Corps, the Tennessee Valley Authority, the Soil Conservation Service, and more, the government aimed to “to invest in land-rebuilding programs that would assure adequate resources for tomorrow….[with] the needs of the community and of the next generation…given first priority" (p. 144).

Udall’s reference there to “the needs of the community” may give one pause here, and it should. Because as the aforementioned tendency in The Quiet Crisis to occasionally see national planning as an obvious solution to any environmental or historical or urban problem demonstrates, Udall’s passion for the American landscape and wildlife was not always entirely cognizant of the local people who actually live in those landscapes and with that wildlife. It’s an attitude he clearly struggled with; in “The Politics of Beauty,” de Graaf shows an excerpt from a 2003 interview with Udall, in which he reflects that “there has always been local opposition, regional opposition, state opposition to the creation of new national parks….because people…wanted to control [the land around them] and do it the way they wanted to do it.” But even 40 years earlier, Udall was, I think, conscious of the ambiguity here. On my reading, the heart of that ambiguity resides with Henry David Thoreau, whom Udall calls “one of our first preservationists” and “a naturalist’s naturalist,” and whom, I believe, haunts his thinking. Consider his criticism of the man’s oeuvre:

Thoreau was alarmed by the Raider spirit, but he failed to realize that the land spoilers were already in command, and were committed to a course of action that would destroy the land values he prized the most. With his negative feelings about government and politics, he failed to perceive that it would take government action to stop the destruction. There were other contradictions:  although he abhorred the very thought of social action, land conservation could not begin until men organized for action; he was anti-reformer, but it would take the crusading zeal of reform-minded men to save the woods and wildlife; he was, moreover, the most thoroughgoing nonconformist alive, though the dangerous drift of the time pointed to the need for conformity to minimum rules of resource management. In short, government action was necessary to curb the exploitation of resources and allow the land to renew itself, but Henry David Thoreau was constitutionally and unalterably antiprogram and antigovernment (p. 52).

To Udall, the results of this disposition was obvious: no national parks, no resistance to those would abuse the natural world for their own profit. And yet, consider also Udall’s concluding remarks, in which he looks out the suburbanizing, postwar America he was partly responsible for leading:

We are now a nomadic people, and our new-found mobility had deprived us of a sense of belonging to a particular place. Millions of Americans have no tie to the 'natural habitat' that is their home....A land ethic for tomorrow should be as honest as Thoreau's Walden....Henry David Thoreau would scoff at the notion that the Gross National Product should be the chief index to the state of the nation, or that automobile sales of figures on consumer consumption reveal anything significant about the authentic art of living. He would surely assert that a clean landscape is as important as a freeway, he would deplore every planless conquest of the countryside, and he would remind his countrymen that a glimpse of a grouse can be more inspiring than a Hollywood spectacular or color television. To those who complain of the complexity of modern life, he might reply, 'If you want inner peace find it in solitude, not speed, and if you would find yourself, look to the land from which you came and to which you go (pp. 189-190).

This ambivalence—leavening what is otherwise a learned and vigorous defense of what Udall clearly understood as a progressive and beneficial fight by experts to tame American individualism and protect America’s natural bounty, most especially in the arid ecosystems of the American West—shouldn’t surprise anyone who sees in Udall the mature wisdom which de Graaf’s movie so ably demonstrates. Udall was a person capable of changing his mind—about the postwar passion for dam-building, most prominently—and of growing and rethinking as the years went by. That growth helped him come to see the foolishness of his support for Cold War policies which have paved the way for American militarism, and to regret his support for energy and highway development projects which have only led to greater urban centralization and pollution. His deep, almost religious commitment to principles of frugality, family, and justice (my sole complaint with de Graaf’s wonderful documentary is that its brief references to Udall’s Mormonism don’t capture the complicated reality of his membership in his and my shared tribe) may have expressed themselves in different ways over the decades, but they surely only grew stronger with time.

It would be too much to say that the work he committed himself to in the decades following his later years—among other things, a long legal struggle to get the national government to acknowledge the harms of the radiation it had exposed thousands to through nuclear testing in the American southwest through the 1950s and 1960s—was something he took on as a penance. On the contrary, it’s unlikely he ever regretted his role in using the power of the national government to accomplish ends which provided great benefits to the broader public, to say nothing of the benefits to the ecosystems which his push for conservation and protecting wilderness areas made possible. But I do think that over the years the ambivalence I sense in his writing--an ambivalence which reflected a frustration with Thoreau's rejection of collective action, but also an admiration for Thoreau's committed locality--put him on a somewhat different trajectory. He's not alone in finding himself struggling over the best balance between the local and the national, or between engaging individual ecological tending and establishing collective ecological boundaries. As I noted years ago, in connection with other contentious acts of national conservation--the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument, specifically--Udall's trajectory has been shared by other Interior Secretaries as well. In an essay for Front Porch Republic, Nathan Nielson once spelled out this dynamic well: reflecting upon the protective routinization which the National Park Service provides to America’s beautiful places, Nielson observed that while “local governments have a better sense of what the land means…the federal route is the only viable option when the clamor for nature reaches critical mass.” Indeed.

In a letter Udall wrote to his grandchildren in 2005, Udall had a lot of advice, some of it still quite programmatic and planning oriented, and perhaps defensibly so. But he also brought his mature, reflective perspective to bear on his own part in the ambitious planning of his generation:

Operating on the assumption that energy would be both cheap and superabundant, I admit, led my generation to make misjudgments that have come back and now haunt and perplex your generation. We designed cities, buildings, and a national system of transportation that were inefficient and extravagant. Now, the paramount task of your generation will be to correct those mistakes with an efficient infrastructure that respects the limitations of our environment to keep up with damages we are causing.

Not a fully Thoreau-esque statement, to be sure, but one that is perhaps animated at least in part by his non-comformist, place-loving spirit nonetheless. Sharon Francis, Udall’s longtime aid who knew his work as well as anyone, was extensively interviewed by de Graaf; she called Udall “the Henry David Thoreau of his generation.” Ignoring all the circumstantial ways that comparison doesn't quite work (to say nothing of the fact that, two generations on from the high point of Udall's impact sixty years ago, perhaps environmentalism needs less Udallian confidence and more Wes-Jackson-style apocalyptism), and focusing instead on the shared, fundamental passions which make it essentially true, one can’t help but wonder: what better tribute could a true “conservative”—that is, a conserver of the land and the resources which provide human communities and indeed the whole human race with life and joy—possibly receive than that? "The Politics of Beauty" reminds us of this romantic, poetic, but also practical conservation-minded Udall, and that alone is reason to watch it again and again.