Movie Magic: When Bigger Is Better

That's what Peter Jackson did with his Lord of the Rings trilogy and, to a lesser extent, what the crew of the later Harry Potter films has achieved. It's what Christopher Nolan has squeezed into his Batman movies. The Dark Knight may have six too many subplots, but you can't say this 212-hr. morality play has nothing on its mind. It's a very thinky action film.

One of the tonic aspects of the new action genre is that writers and directors have taken their big budgets as a license to innovate. Perhaps they've been inspired by the dense, ambitious plots of modern graphic novels (though Frank Miller's film of The Spirit, based on the 1940s comic book by graphic-novel creator Will Eisner, somehow contrives to be a risible botch). It's a tendency that stretches from Hollywood to distant movie capitals. In Paris, Luc Besson has been producing turbocharged action movies like the Transporter series with Jason Statham. Timur Bekmambetov, from Kazakhstan, made two wildly imaginative Russian sci-fi thrillers, Night Watch and Day Watch. Then he went west, linked his hallucinogenic eye to the narrative drive of the Mark Millar comic book Wanted and fashioned a clever, bustling summer hit. Like the sharpest American action auteurs, Bekmambetov knows his audience has a desire beyond "Blow stuff up." It's "And while you're at it, blow my mind."

The Little Movies That Couldn't

So machine art is here to stay. Is handmade art on the wane? It might seem so, if Rachel Getting Married is the standard bearer. Like Mike Leigh's lauded English film Happy-Go-Lucky, Jonathan Demme's Rachel is a stern test of the audience's indulgence for an extreme personality--not Leigh's cockeyed optimist but noisome Kym (Hathaway), on parole from a rehab center, who has a gift for ruining everybody's day, especially the wedding day of her sister Rachel (DeWitt). Studiously slapdash, the film wants you to see Kym's destructive nature while understanding her desperate needs. Cuddling up with a python would be more fun. As for Kym's large, weird family, convened for a big event: Didn't we get enough of that when we went home for the holidays?

Some viewers have responded warmly to the Rachel menagerie, and we're not quarreling with them. We're just saying there's no artistic challenge Demme offers his audience, apart from choosing whether to sympathize with the film's protagonist or reject her. And with indie films, the choice is usually premade, in stories about outsiders triumphing over propriety or being crushed by the system. The former is the case in Thomas McCarthy's The Visitor, with the nicely reticent Richard Jenkins as an isolate who lets some improbable strangers into his life. It's a slow, amiable film boasting fine performances, but if you can't predict every plot twist, you're just not paying attention. Writer-director Kelly Reichardt takes the bummer route in Wendy and Lucy, a kind of Marley & Me for depressives. This is a virtual one-woman show: Michelle Williams (again, excellent) plays homeless waif Wendy, whose only reliable friend is her dog Lucy. It's minimalism par excellence, which is to say nothing happens.

The indie-land exception is the downer comedy Synecdoche, New York, about a theater man (Philip Seymour Hoffman) who creates the system that crushes him. Charlie Kaufman's film may be about an artistic dead end, but for the sympathetic traveler, it's a new, exciting yellow brick road.

The end of the year often brings major-studio movies that play like indie films with bigger stars and heftier budgets. Revolutionary Road casts DiCaprio as a commuter to Manhattan wage-slavery in the '50s and Winslet as his wife, eager to escape the suburbs and regain what she thinks was the boho freedom of their early days. With its trenchant performances and its acute view of the midcentury middle class, the movie shares a lot with the AMC series Mad Men--except that director Sam Mendes italicizes the domestic drama instead of finding its quieter nuances. As Mad Men brilliantly proves, that sort of behavioral subtlety has become the almost exclusive province of long-form TV drama. When movies try it, they can seem shrill by comparison.

Can the indie drama and the action film congenially meet? They already have, twice. Danny Boyle's Anglo-Indian Slumdog Millionaire is the indie movie Americans only wish they could make: a vibrant, swirling social fresco that has broken out of the art-house ghetto into the mainstream. David Fincher's Benjamin Button, a century-spanning, episodic epic that rarely raises its voice, has such assurance and conviction that its considerable F/X magic can support the sweet character of Benjamin and his darling, dancing Daisy (Cate Blanchett) instead of upstaging them. Obsessed with death, enthralled by life, the picture is an old-fashioned love story as well as a state-of-the-art wonder.

Slumdog and Benjamin show that films need not be all action glitz, all indie introspection. They can be both: computer-cool and handmade, movies that move and move the audience. That's the best reason to look forward to the movies of 2009.

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