A. O. Scott’s Top 10 Movies 2014: ‘Boyhood’ and More

时报金牌影评人的2014年十大影片之选

I’ll skip the usual laments about the cruel arbitrariness of list making. There were a lot of movies this year — more than 950 reviewed in these pages — and quite a few good ones. Here are 21, a 10 Best list followed by runners-up, arranged alphabetically. It is, as always, a highly personal selection. These are the movies that touched, excited, challenged and haunted me most in 2014.

我通常会抱怨列榜单是一种残忍的专断，不过这次暂且略去。今年出了不少电影(本报影评版评论了950多部影片)，其中不乏佳作。下面是今年的21部佳片，包括10大最佳影片和按字母顺序排列的11部其他佳作，和往常一样，这是非常个人化的选择，是2014年最令我感动和兴奋，让我感觉受到挑战，让我久久难以忘怀的电影。

 

1. In my 15 years of professional movie reviewing, I can’t think of any film that has affected me the way “Boyhood” did. It is not just that I was moved — I’m frequently moved — but that my critical impulse seemed to collapse, along with my ability to find the boundary between art and life. Some of this is a matter of coincidence. Arriving in the summer that my only son and oldest child graduated from high school and prepared to fly the parental nest, this chronicle of a boy’s life from 6 to 18 would have wrecked me even if it had been more conventional. As it happened, it took a second and a third viewing for me to appreciate the ingenuity of Richard Linklater’s idea and the artistry of his methods.

1.在我15年的职业影评生涯中，还没有一部电影像《少年时代》(Boyhood)这样打动我。我不仅仅是被感动了——我经常被感动——它似乎瓦解了我的批判冲动，让我难以判断艺术与生活之间的界限。这有点像是巧合。今年夏天，我最年长的孩子，也是我唯一的儿子从高中毕业，准备离开父母的庇护，而这部影片按时间顺序记述了一个男孩从六岁到18岁的生活，就算它更平庸一点，也肯定会深深打动我的。就这样，我看了第二次，第三次，去欣赏导演理查德·林克莱特(Richard Linklater)的新颖创意与艺术手段。

Filming the story over 12 years was a bold and brilliant gamble. Mr. Linklater’s discovery of Ellar Coltrane to play the lead role of Mason was serendipitous. Watching his character grow in fairly ordinary circumstances is endlessly intriguing and surprisingly suspenseful. But “Boyhood,” while rigorously faithful to Mason’s perspective, is as much about his world and the people in it as it is about him. The film is a sympathetic critique of manhood and a critical tribute to motherhood (and also a chance to watch Ethan Hawke and Patricia Arquette grapple with the passage of time as no actors before them have). It opens on American life and offers a progress report on our spiritual condition. There are missing pieces, of course, but that’s part of the point. A movie, like an individual’s life, is a singular thing. It can’t be comprehensive; it can only be, as comprehensively as possible, itself.

用12年来拍摄这个故事是一场勇敢而精彩的赌博。林克莱特发现片中饰演主角马森(Mason)的艾拉·柯川(Ellar Coltrane)纯属偶然。他观察着这个角色在相当普通的环境下成长，这非常有趣，而且令人意外地保持了悬念。但《少年时代》严格地从马森的视角出发，既是关于他，也是关于他的世界，以及这个世界里的人们。这部影片是对成人世界充满同情的批评，也是对母爱带有批评性质的致敬(另外在片中还可以看到伊桑· 霍克[Ethan Hawke]和帕特里西亚·阿凯特[Patricia Arquette]以前所未有的方式同时间的流逝做斗争)。它对美国方式开火，呈上了一份美国人精神状态的进度报告。当然，片中也有缺失的环节，但这也是主旨的一部分。一部电影就像一个人的生活一样，是一桩单独的事件。它不能是复杂的，只能是尽可能地复杂，它只能是它自身。
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2. Pawel Pawlikowski’s “Ida” is another kind of coming-of-age story, a retrospective consideration of girlhood in Poland in 1962. With breathtaking concision and clarity — 80 minutes of austere, carefully framed black and white — Mr. Pawlikowski penetrates the darkest, thorniest thickets of Polish history, reckoning with the crimes of Stalinism and the Holocaust. But the heart of the movie lies in the performances of Agata Trzebuchowska, as a young novice learning the truth about her family’s past and Agata Kulesza as her cynical aunt, part of the country’s Communist elite.

2.保罗·帕夫利克夫斯基(Pawel Pawlikowski)的《修女艾达》(Ida)是另一种类型的成长故事，是对1962年在波兰度过的少女时代的怀旧思绪。影片长80分钟，是一部精心取景，风格简朴的黑白片，有着激动人心的简洁与清晰，帕夫利克夫斯基到深入波兰历史最黑暗、最痛苦的错综状态中去，直面斯大林主义与纳粹大屠杀的罪行。但影片的核心还在于阿伽塔·特泽布霍夫斯卡(Agata Trzebuchowska)的表演，她饰演的年轻见习修女从家族的过去中了解真相，阿伽塔·库莱沙(Agata Kulesza)饰演她愤世嫉俗的阿姨，某种程度上是这个国家的共产党精英分子。
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3. Before seeing it, I assumed that “Citizenfour,” Laura Poitras’s documentary about the National Security Agency leaker Edward Snowden, would be yet another work of earnest cinematic advocacy, preaching to the choir on issues already widely aired in the news media. What I saw was something much more subtle, artful and unnerving: an eyewitness political thriller dramatizing the confrontation, in an ideologically confused and technologically tangled age, between the individual and the state.

3.劳拉·珀特拉斯(Laura Poitras)的 《第四公民》(Citizenfour)讲述爱德华·斯诺登(Edward Snowden)泄露国家安全局机密的故事，在观看之前，我觉得它可能又是一部真诚的辩护电影，在传播一些新闻媒体中已经被说了很多的言论大合唱。但我看到的东西要更加微妙、有技巧而令人不安：这是一部目击式政治惊悚片，在这个意识形态混乱、技术进步纠结错综的年代，将个人与国家之间的冲突处理得更加戏剧化。
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4. The modern state provides Andrey Zvyagintsev’s “Leviathan” with its controlling metaphor, and it is interesting to note that the particular state in question — Vladimir Putin’s Russia — is the one in whose belly Mr. Snowden now resides. Mr. Zvyagintsev depicts it as a cruel, beautiful and passionate place, and tells a simple, primally powerful story of marital distress, political corruption and heroic vodka consumption in gorgeous, almost hallucinatory wide-screen compositions.

4.现代国家是安德烈·萨金塞夫(Andrey Zvyagintsev)的《利维坦》(Leviathan)中充满控制性的隐喻，影片所谈的国家是弗拉迪米尔·普京(Vladimir Putin)治下的俄罗斯，有趣的是，斯诺登就藏匿在这里。萨金塞夫把它描绘为一个残酷、美丽而又热情的地方，讲述了一个关于不幸的婚姻、政治腐败与痛饮伏特加的故事，简洁而又有力，宽银幕构图几乎能让人产生幻觉。
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5. Even if it did not open in the midst of a season of racial inflammation, “Selma,” Ava DuVernay’s meticulous reconstruction of a crucial chapter of the civil rights movement, would arrive bearing the burdens of history. It’s not often — it’s pretty much never — that a major studio allows a black woman to direct an expensive, prestige-laden historical drama. But the stiff, bland, self-congratulatory pageantry that so often weighs down such projects is entirely missing here. There is instead a palpable sense of political urgency as a vivid assortment of characters (importantly but not exclusively David Oyelowo’s the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.) quarrel over strategy, tactics and the moral future of America.

5.艾娃·德约列(Ava DuVernay)的《塞尔玛》(Selma)是对民权运动中关键一幕的细致重现，即便它不是在种族冲突如火如荼之际上映，也必将满载历史的负担。大制片公司让一个黑人女导演来执导一部花费高昂而充满名人的历史剧是很少见的——根本就是前所未有的。但是这部影片里完全没有类似题材中常见的那些拘谨、平庸、自我赞美的盛大场面，而是各种形象鲜明的人物对战略、策略与美国的道德前景展开辩论，令人清晰地体会到政治上的紧迫感，大卫·奥伊罗[David Oyelowo]饰演的小马丁·路德·金博士[Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.]是片中的重要人物，但不是唯一重要的人物。
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6. Like “Boyhood,” Ira Sachs’s “Love Is Strange” hit close to home. Its New York locations, in both Manhattan and Brooklyn, were easy to recognize, and many of the characters seemed uncannily like people I know and love. Maybe this means that the movie, which starts with the wedding of a longtime gay couple (Alfred Molina and John Lithgow, never better), has been tailored to please a specific, easily caricatured blue-state demographic. But I’d prefer to believe that Mr. Sachs’s compassionate and unflinching interest in the lives of his characters is expansive rather than exclusive, and that his tale of romance, friendship and real estate is a magnificent and universal love story.

6.和《少年时代》一样，艾拉·萨克斯(Ira Sachs)的《爱很怪》(Love Is Strange)也同家庭密切相关。影片以一对保持长期关系的男同性恋的婚礼开始，他们由阿尔弗雷德·莫利纳(Alfred Molina)和约翰·利特高(John Lithgow)饰演，精彩绝伦。它在纽约的曼哈顿与布鲁克林取景，非常好辨认，片中的很多人物都与我生活中熟悉和喜爱的人有着惊人的相似之处。这意味着影片可能进行过调整，取悦某些特定的、容易被视为多愁善感的人群。但我更愿意相信，萨克斯对片中人物充满同情、毫不动摇的兴趣是广泛的，而不是排他的;而他的这部关于爱情、友情与房地产的电影则是一个精彩而又带有普遍意义的爱情故事。
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7. When I was a teenager, back in the 1980s, musical taste was a line in the sand. If you didn’t like certain records — punk rock and affiliated genres, mostly — I wasn’t sure I could like you. Tastes mellow with age, but I kind of feel that way about “We Are the Best!,” Lukas Moodysson’s ebullient celebration of the adolescent punk-rock spirit, circa 1982. The story couldn’t be simpler: Three middle-school girls in Sweden start a band. Only one of them can play an instrument, but when has that ever mattered? Their anthem “Hate the Sport” is the song of the year, whatever year it happens to be.

7.我的青少年时期正值20世纪80年代，在那个时候，音乐品味就像是一道底线。如果你不喜欢某些专辑(主要是朋克摇滚之类的)，我肯定也不喜欢你。品味会随着年龄增长而变得温和，但我对《我们是最棒的!》(We Are the Best!)还是有同感。鲁卡斯·穆迪森(Lukas Moodysson)的这部影片大约发生在1982年，热情地赞美了青春期的朋克精神。故事情节不可能更简单了：三个瑞典的中学女孩组了一支乐队。她们当中只有一个人会玩乐器，但这又有什么关系。她们的圣歌《讨厌体育》(Hate the Sport)不管在哪一年都堪称年度歌曲。
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8. This has been quite a year for difficult male artists and their troubles — with women, with ambition, with a world that doesn’t quite understand them. Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s “Birdman” and Alex Ross Perry’s “Listen Up, Philip” each take a crack at the creative ego and its discontents, but they are pale, tentative efforts next to Mike Leigh’s “Mr. Turner,” an earthy, messy, altogether sublime portrait of the great 19th-century British painter, played by Timothy Spall.

8.这一年有很多影片都是反映那些处境艰难的男性艺术家与他们的烦恼——关于女人、关于抱负，还有这个并不完全理解他们的世界。亚历桑德罗·G·伊纳里多(Alejandro G. Iñárritu)的《鸟人》(Birdman)与亚历克斯·罗斯·佩里(Alex Ross Perry)的《菲利普的生活》(Listen Up, Philip)都成功拍出了创造型人格及其内心的不满，但和麦克·李(Mike Leigh)的《透纳先生》(Rr. Turner)相比，这两部影片就显得像是苍白而不确定的尝试。《透纳先生》由蒂莫西·斯波(Timothy Spall)主演，为这位伟大的19世纪英国画家勾勒出一幅质朴、混乱而又庄严的肖像。
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9. The raw material of Justin Simien’s “Dear White People” is raw indeed. The state of race relations looks pretty bad right now, and things don’t look so great on our college campuses either. Rather than soothe us with false hope or dreams of consensus, Mr. Simien offers the homeopathic remedy of elegant, intelligent comedy. His fictional Ivy League university is a hotbed of political posturing and social rivalry, but it is also a laboratory of shifting identities where the possibility of enlightenment is never entirely foreclosed. Kind of like America.

9. 贾斯汀·西米恩(Justin Simien)的《亲爱的白人们》(Dear White People)采用的素材的确新鲜直接。目前的种族关系状况很糟，在校园里也不见得有多好。西米恩没有用虚假的希望或天下大同的梦想安抚我们，而是以一部优美、聪明的喜剧以毒攻毒。他虚构的常青藤联盟大学是政治姿态与社会对抗的温床，但也是提升身份认同的实验室，启蒙的可能性从未消失，就像美国一样。
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10. I’m still too freaked out to say much more about “The Babadook.” I don’t want to provoke the monster. And I’ll be looking forward to Jennifer Kent’s next movie. I’m already clearing out a hiding place under my bed.

10.我仍然不敢说出更多关于《鬼书》(The Babadook)的东西。我可不想惹怒怪物。我期待着詹妮弗·肯特(Jennifer Kent)的下一部电影。我已经在自己床底下收拾出藏身的地方了。