The Best Films of 2012: #7

"A Prophet" director Jacques Audiard returns to my top ten with his new film "Rust and Bone," a major achievement featuring four or five of the most powerful scenes of the movie year. Marion Cotillard, in her strongest and most feeling performance since "La Vie en Rose," plays the tough and scrappy Stephanie, an orca trainer at a French Marineland, who loses both her legs in an accident during a routine set to Katy Perry's incongruously upbeat "Firework." I will never forget the scene in which Stephanie awakens from her long sleep, alone in a hospital bed very late at night, and discovers for the first time that she has no legs. The scene is a living nightmare, pierced only by Stephanie's otherworldly wail.

Hyde Park on Hudson, Rust and Bone

Hyde Park on Huudson

Rust and Bone

There's almost no substance at all to the weightless and pointless "Hyde Park on Hudson," about King George and Queen Elizabeth's war support-seeking visit to the New York home of a philandering FDR (Bill Murray) and an Eleanor (Olivia Williams) who lived separately from him but not apart. Through an accident of history, the story is told by a distant cousin of FDR's (Laura Linney) who became one of his conquests, driving with him out to a lavender-flowered field and giving him a hand job (from somewhere I heard the voice of Bea Arthur: "I swear I thought I was setting the parking brake"). Murray manages to contain himself enough to have a couple warm-fuzzy chats with George (Samuel West), but Linney's Daisy Suckley is such a nothing character (with no evidence of any thoughts or ideas in her head), and Linney herself such a standoffish actress, the entire weekend takes place at a remove, never developing any comedy-of-manners momentum or historical gravitas.