I’ll start with a short disclaimer: I fully recognize the potential arrogance in claiming to know the four most misunderstood films of the year. To say that I have some supreme viewing power that allows me to see these films for what they truly are reeks of a high and mighty attitude that I’d rather stay away from. However, as many critics are preparing their final tallies of what they loved and hated in 2008, I simply feel the need to put into print a positive perspective on four films that seem to be frequently criticized or overlooked.

That being said, there is a certain irony in the fact that all four of these films deal with a kind of misunderstanding. Whether it be a mix-up between characters or a challenging thematic element that dares the viewer to reevaluate the way they approach the subject matter, I feel each of these films does something particularly audacious with the concept of false impression.

One other quick side note: It is impossible for me to get to the core of these films without spoilers, so if you haven’t seen them and would like to view them blind, please return to the article after watching Joel and Ethan Coen’s Burn After Reading, Mary Bronstein’s Yeast, Johan Renck’s Downloading Nancy and Pascal Laugier’s Martyrs.

Burn After Reading

It’s not hard to see how one could dismiss the Coen Brothers’ follow-up feature to their Oscar winning Best Picture, No Country For Old Men, as slight. Leaving behind a good deal of the bold, cinematic gestures in the interest of making a moody, screwball, comedic thriller seemed like a step backwards. But let’s consider for a second the actual thematic make-up of the Coen Brothers’ career, with particular focus on No Country For Old Men. That film is, without a doubt, incredibly derivative, packed with constant nods to cinema history spanning everything from Hitchcock to John Ford. This is nothing new for the Coens: from day one, with Blood Simple, they’ve been pulling names out of classic 30s movies and making mockeries out of literary references with a kind of self-conscious, self-reflexive wit used to cleverly undercut classic stables of dialog that could otherwise potentially come across as overdone. They even point the harshest of mirrors on themselves with the arrogant character of Barton Fink, a self-obsessed, self-important playwright, who pontificates on “the common man.”

But this time the joke is on us. No Country, with all its ingenious directorial decisions and memorable sequences, holds very little thematic weight. The film is great genre fare, but in its snarky treatment of Javier Bardem’s unintelligible lessons it still mocks any viewer who dares look for a message to take seriously – not unlike Barton Fink. When stacked up against films like 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, the beloved cinematic stylings of No Country seem to pale in comparison. And this is where we get to Burn After Reading: for two guys who have been horribly self-aware their entire careers, it doesn’t seem like such a stretch to mock the audiences that put their work on such a high pedestal.

It’s no small piece of irony that Reading is set around the story of an arrogant ex-fed whose laughable memoir, spawned out of his self-proclaimed sense of individuality, gets assigned a false importance when put into the hands of an image-conscious aerobics instructor with a taste for the norm. As if that wasn’t metaphorical enough, the film builds itself like any other Coen production, one plot device at a time, and resolves with the same sense of hopelessness we get at the end of No Country –– except this time it’s capped by J.K. Simmons stating, “What have we learned? … I don’t fucking know.” As Josh Rothkopf pointed out to me, even the title dares you to throw it away and not pay it so much mind. Have fun with it while it’s there. Everything past that is just silly. In their own light-hearted way, Joel and Ethan Coen are having the last laugh at us for taking them so seriously, but with a gentle smirk that lets the audience play along to a much greater extent than any of this year’s other challenges.

Yeast

I think it’s safe to say that Yeast was the most divisive movie of SXSW 2008. Bronstein’s abrasive, low-budget, pitch-black comedic view of deteriorating female friendships left some wholly satisfied and others wholly uncomfortable. Perhaps the jerky, handheld aesthetic that we’ve come to recognize as the “realism” of mumblecore was part of what threw viewers off from grappling with the true originality of Bronstein’s work: The characters in Yeast exist in a world in which one externally expresses their internal emotions. They hold nothing back from each other and, as a result, we feel the queasiness of being inside their heads.

I’ve heard some critics say that Yeast is a film that wants you to hate it. I think that’s too simple. Yeast wants to plunge you into the darkest places of the human soul, it wants you to revel om your own pent up internal aggression by forcing it in your face for eighty minutes. It’s possible Bronstein wants us to hate the way the movie makes us feel, but she also wants us to recognize that we only feel that way because of our discomfort with that part of ourselves. As one friend pointed out to me, “It really plays on the new age of friendship with Myspace and Facebook.” Indeed, this is an age where you stay friends with someone much longer than you are supposed to because you believe that disrupting the natural ebb and flow of staying in touch with people that you grow apart from says something positive about your character. No one wants to believe that their close friends can change in incompatible ways to them, and Bronstein’s film shocks us with this harsh reality.

Downloading Nancy

Garnering a very similar reaction to Yeast at SXSW 2008, was Sundance 2008’s Downloading Nancy, Johan Renck’s haunting true story of a grown-up child abuse victim who seeks comfort to her trauma, via an internet friend, through S&M and suicide. Audiences fled the theater mid-picture as Nancy and her new companion engaged in depressingly violent sexual activity, padded with an icky sensitivity that makes each viewer feel like they should go home and shower after just being present at the screening.

I’ve found that when you break all the elements of Downloading Nancy down one by one for someone who hates film, it’s impossible for them not to admit that all the ingredients are pitch perfect. Maria Bello’s performance is a tour de force, backed by stand out supporting acting from Jason Patric as the sympathetic fetishist who helps Nancy end her life, and Rufus Sewall as her neglectful and confused husband. Shot by infamous cinematographer Christopher Doyle and beautifully scored by Krister Linder, the film captures an eerie tone that stays with you weeks after the first viewing. But the subject matter is what makes viewers shy away. “Why would I want to see something that makes sex look awful?” one acquisitions exec exclaimed to me after the press and industry screening. Well, quite simply, because to Nancy, sex is awful. Much like Paul Greengrass’ United 93, Renck’s film pays incredible respect to the real life story that is its source material. It’s not sensationalistic or sugar coated. It’s not constructed as a desperate plea to make you understand where its tormented protagonist is coming from. It forces you inside the last days of her troubled life, blemishes and all, and makes you feel what she feels. It is gross and unsettling and that’s exactly what makes it so tasteful and honest.

Martyrs

2008’s true statement on sensationalism really came with the Cannes premiere of what is perhaps the most daring film I’ve seen in the last ten years, Pascal Laugier’s Martyrs. With the brute force of the new wave of French horror (High Tension, Inside), Martyrs manages to rapidly catalog through all forms of terror within the first forty-five minutes. There are supernatural beings and human torturers, conspiracies and quests for vengeance, and certainly enough blood and creative ways to destroy the human body to go around. But the real shocking twist comes at around the sixty-minute mark when the film drastically changes tone, from fast-paced, pop sensationalism to long, realistic shots of the bare-knuckle beating of a fourteen-year-old girl.

When I first saw the film, I was struck by the visceral impact of the shift, equating it very much with the feeling of watching films like Downloading Nancy, as if Laugier had pulled the rug out from under me and I was now face to face with the real horror of violence in the world. And that certainly still rings true as the first level of why Martyrs is so brilliant and daring an experiment. But I think it goes deeper than that.

It took me three viewings to process what seemed like awkward choices, including a searing score over the beatings, and fades in and out to signify the passing of time. These took me out of the supposed realism for a minute.  And then I realized what I was actually watching was a blow by blow (no pun intended) cinematic equivalent of what a naysayer would claim to be torture porn: Long takes, painstakingly detailing the violence which are absolutely devoid of tension despite their cliché filmic techniques. With one fell swoop, Laugier pulls back the curtain and reveals the nature of what makes something cinematic, proving once and for all that timing is everything and that films like Hostel, Saw and even the first half of Martyrs itself rely on cutting, clever camera work and negative space to build the strong visceral reaction that they incite, and something simply pornographic has the distinct, and undesirable, feeling of realism.

Given the discomfort drawn by audience after audience with these other films, Laugier’s point clearly does not come a moment too soon. Just try to remember, it’s only a movie.