Top 10 Films of 2010 – Ed’s Picks

January 6th, 2011 | POSTED BY Edward Davidson

3.  Rabbit Hole

Grief. This whole film drips with it. Nicole Kidman and Aaron Eckhart are dealing, or not dealing, with the death of their son eight months previous. They have disconnected from each other, and from the outside world. While Eckhart’s character wants to remember him, Kidman at first tries to rid herself of reminders of him. But she realizes that disposing of the physical reminders isn’t keeping the memories from creeping back into her every thought. I don’t want to give away too much of the mechanics of the plot other than to say that the relationships play out in this story in a fashion that feels honest and real. There is terrific supporting work from Dianne Wiest as Kidman’s mother, and the two leads are spectacular in their roles. Director John Cameron Mitchell shows a terrific amount of restraint and intelligence putting this film together. His previous movie, the terrifically outrageous Hedwig and the Angry Inch, is worlds apart from this movie. He plumbs a world of directing diversity that I didn’t know he had.

2.  Inception

This delicious puzzle box of a movie was what everyone was talking about in the summer of 2010. Christopher Nolan continued his crowd-pleasing string of movies with this big screen spectacular that had everyone talking about dreaming at different levels, “kicking” up a level, and the endless debate over the film’s final shot. The plot has been covered ad naseum at this point, so I don’t need to rehash it here. As far as spectacle, nothing had my jaw dropping this year as much as the hotel hallway sequence with a weightless Joseph Gordon -Levitt floating around rooms and elevator shafts while manipulating bodies and objects before a bomb goes off. The power of that sequence alone had me blown away.

There has been a lot of discussion surrounding what the whole film meant. Was it all a dream? Did Leo’s character wake up at the end? Was Marianne Cotillard always just a figment of his imagination? And so on. It was great that a summer action movie had people actually thinking and talking. That alone is a major accomplishment. Audiences were genuinely excited about digesting this film. There have been critics that say some of the plot was clumsy or cliched (I kind of agree with the wintery raid on the fortress towards the end). Also, the point has been made that dreams are less linear than as presented in Inception. The stories in these dreams made too much sense, with rules and so on. I can see that point as well.

However, there is an overreaching interpretation of Inception that I haven’t seen anyone bring up. What if the director is saying something about the very nature of storytelling itself? To put it another way, what if it is saying that we as the audience are in Christopher Nolan’s dream? Think about it. Pretty much every major film genre is represented in the course of the movie (a love story between Cobb and Mal, lots of action movie tropes, James Bond-esque adventure with the assault on the mountain hideout, a drama with a son coming to terms with his father in the Cillian Murphy/Pete Postlethwaite story, office-set corporate espionage story with the Ken Watanabe character, mobsters, drugs, and a student, Ariadne, learning from the master Cobb). Nolan could be using these well-worn movie tales to show us that all of these stories are presented to us all the time. They are used as a cinematic shorthand to show us how our perceptions shape our reality all the time. And with the top still spinning, our perceptions continue.

That theory is a work in progress, but I think it’s an interesting notion.

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Aaron Eckhart, Aaron Sorkin, Buried, Casino Jack and the United States of Money, Christopher Nolan, David Fincher, Edgar Wright, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part I, Inception, Iron Man 2, Jesse Eisenberg, Leonardo DiCaprio, Mark Romanek, Never Let Me Go, Nicole Kidman, Pixar Animation Studios, Rabbit Hole, Robett Downey Jr, Scott Pilgrim vs The World, The Social Network, Toy Story 3