Awards Features

In a very twisted nutshell, this scene succinctly captures almost an entire year's worth of American moviegoing.

On one side, 2007 was dominated by moody, violent films centered around the tortured male psyche -- inward-gazing, obsessed, utterly oblivious to the needs of women. Fortunately, the year was also balanced by films that dared to put women's desires front and center, and found them gentler and less all-consuming, perhaps, but no less complicated.

It's a cinematic gender divide that's neatly represented by this year's Oscar nominees for best picture: "Atonement," "Juno," "Michael Clayton," "No Country for Old Men" and "There Will Be Blood."

Ladies first, of course. In "Atonement," a precocious young writer named Briony brazenly destroys two lives, then spends the duration of the movie trying to repair the damage, yielding not merely a lush melodrama but also a study in the redemptive properties and ethical limitations of fiction. (Noah Baumbach seems to have allowed this idea to curdle into "Margot at the Wedding," which stars Nicole Kidman as one of those monstrous literary types who churn their family skeletons into award-winning short stories.)

"Atonement's" wartime setting and young heroine in pursuit of justice were subtly echoed in a pair of WWII-era resistance thrillers: "Black Book" (a late-2006/early 2007 release about a Jewish woman seeking to avenge her murdered family) and "Lust, Caution" (in which a Chinese actress targets the leader of the Japanese occupation). Unlike Briony, these self-styled Mata Haris craftily use their sexuality as a weapon, willingly defiling their bodies for their respective causes -- a provocative image of female sexual liberation still rare in American movies.

Said image, of course, brings us naturally to the dominant movie theme of 2007 -- the unwanted pregnancy. No film conveyed the dilemma with more urgency or concern for its female characters than "4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days," the Romanian drama that was unceremoniously dismissed by the Academy's foreign-language film committee despite being a consensus favorite among critics.

Though less harrowing, American comedies such as "Waitress," "Knocked Up" and, of course, "Juno" took an equally sympathetic tack, showing how these expecting mothers would adapt to circumstances for which they were singularly unprepared.

Juno opts for an adoption, certain she's doing the best thing for herself and her unborn child. But as her plans go comically awry, it dawns on her -- just as it dawns on Briony in "Atonement" -- that her decisions, even at a young age, have the power to affect the fortunes of those around her, for good and for ill. "I'm not sure what kind of girl I am," Juno says, and she's certainly not alone.

This tentative optimism stands in stark contrast to the murky river of blood, oil, booze and testosterone that flows through that stark trio of male melodramas, "Michael Clayton," "No Country for Old Men" and "There Will Be Blood." Not unlike last year's big winner, "The Departed," these films are steeped in primitive codes of male aggression, rivalry and warfare.

Death can be surprisingly quick, even businesslike: In "Clayton," a lawyer is overpowered by two assassins on his doorstep with ruthless, bloodless efficiency, while in "No Country," a key character dies offscreen, occasioning no terror or anxiety but merely a whimper of resignation. Death truly waits for no man; sometimes, it doesn't even wait for the audience.

Unsparingly pessimistic in their worldview, these films locate American masculinity against a backdrop of violence and solitude, marginalizing women to the point of exclusion. One could sense this isolation in a raft of other films this season: in the obsessive, workaholic sleuthing in "Zodiac," in the tense interplay of trust and treachery in "The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford," in the celibate wilderness odyssey of Chris McCandless in "Into the Wild," in the rotten patriarchy of a New York clan in "Before the Devil Knows You're Dead" and in the brutal mob subcultures depicted in "American Gangster" and (with a latent dash of homoeroticism) "Eastern Promises."

Collectively, these films seem to suggest that to be a man in America is to be alone -- to shut oneself off from affection, to react with violence when needed (which is often), to be governed by an insatiable lust for lucre, knowledge, power or revenge. No actor absorbed these qualities more completely or ferociously than Daniel Day-Lewis as Daniel Plainview in "There Will Be Blood," itself a vicious parable of the moral and physical toll exacted by America's oil industry.

"Blood" was scarcely the only drama that seemed in conversation with our troubled times. "Sweeney Todd" turned the machinery of cannibalism and capitalism into a merry, bloody joke. Psycho killer Anton Chigurh aside, "No Country" seemed to channel an entire host of nameless, ambiguous fears -- of war, of grief, of national decay. And "Michael Clayton" felt like an outraged response not merely to an era of white-collar scandal but to the soul-killing malaise of corporate culture in general.

Yet for all its cynicism, "Michael Clayton" -- pointedly sharing its name with a character who shuns the mantle of heroism and still ends up a hero -- manages to conclude on a note of quiet resolution, even grace. Having overturned an evil empire, Clayton winds up in a taxi, unsure of his destination, yet certain it will be better than where he's been. The movie may be winking at us, yet we're left feeling that so long as George Clooney is around to embody man at his worst and his best, there will still be hope for the sex -- and, perhaps, for the species.