2024: the year in late style

Filmmakers who achieve longevity are likely to develop late styles that are entirely their own. It’s hard to generalise about, say, Ford, Renoir, Ozu, Resnais, Oliveira without indulging in fond clichés of maturity, wisdom, the autumnal – in the easy assumption, challenged by the Palestinian American literary critic Edward Said, that “age confers a spirit of reconciliation and serenity on late works”. 

For some filmmakers, that may be so – but it wasn’t the case in 2024. This was a year of films displaying the “intransigence, difficulty and unresolved contradiction” that, for Said, characterise late style. An earlier theorist, Theodor Adorno, suggested that late works are likely to be “devoid of sweetness, bitter and spiny”. Whether or not that characterises Francis Coppola’s long-gestating folly Megalopolis, it was certainly the flavour of many critics’ responses. Some rushed to defend the film on the basis of Coppola’s ambition; of his film’s absolute apartness from both Hollywood and art-cinema mainstreams; and of the Olympian gesture of gambling much of his personal fortune on a cherished vision. 

Megalopolis may elicit awe for its quixotic ambition, and the lurid grandeur of certain individual images, but its vision of America as a neo-Roman empire in advanced decadence was both mundane and gauchely bombastic. This was a singular case of a one-time cinematic Caesar erecting a colossal monument to himself – which, for all its intermittent dazzle, was really an empty, gilded mausoleum.

Another exceptionally personal oddity was David Cronenberg’s The Shrouds, which derived a troubling charge from the director’s own experience of bereavement. Its protagonist is a widower (an insipidly supercilious Vincent Cassel) who has devised a tomb-cam technology that allows him to monitor the mouldering remains of his late wife. Couched in a promisingly dissonant fusion of charnel-house horror and conspiracy-thriller glossiness, and uncompromising in its fixation on corporeal decay, The Shrouds has the sleekness and acerbic perversity of classic Cronenberg – yet the end result is barely watchable. This futuristic reframing of 19th-century-style necro-Romanticism registers from the start as lugubrious kitsch. 

In theory at least, The Shrouds displays all the signs of an archetypal late statement: not just in its focus on mortality, but also because it repeats so many of the director’s long-standing themes and styles. But what some filmmakers retain and others don’t is a clear-minded sense of when such echoes truly resonate, as opposed to manifesting as self-parody. 

One director who did muster such resonance was Paul Schrader in the underrated Oh, Canada, his second adaptation of novelist Russell Banks and the latest in the director’s current cycle of stories about men seeking redemption. Framed as the final testament of a revered documentarist, played in old age by Richard Gere, it offers an ironic biography of an artist whose ­professional insistence on truth proves not to have informed his personal life. This is a film about the unreliable autobiographical narratives we write for ourselves; as a contemplation of the purpose or futility of artistic creation as a life pursuit, Oh, Canada belongs alongside another recent late work, Víctor Erice’s Close Your Eyes.

Then there was Mike Leigh’s Hard Truths: what better title for a late statement? Offering a distillation of Leigh’s chamber-drama style, it too teemed with echoes of his earlier work, including Secrets and Lies (1996), All or Nothing (2002) and Happy-Go-Lucky (2008), whose Poppy is the diametric opposite of this film’s protagonist. In Hard Truths, the soul of Marianne Jean-Baptiste’s Pansy is a soured reservoir of anger and fear – the focus on those emotions making this very much a film for our cultural and political moment. 

Similarly refining things to the essence was Clint Eastwood. His recent career has been uneven, but he excelled with his rigorously to-the-point courtroom drama Juror #2. Cleanly executed, stripped of ornament and distraction, this was also a strong example of the way that late-period films can challenge the received assumptions about a director’s worldview – although this is hardly the first time an Eastwood film has belied his supposed position as an entrenched conservative. In making a calm, measured stand for justice, personal conscience and the rule of law, Juror #2 flies defiantly against the moral distortions of the newly re-Trumped America. You wouldn’t necessarily expect Eastwood, once considered the embodiment of the Hollywood mainstream, to be so determinedly out of step, with a film so perfectly timed. But that is perhaps another characteristic of fully achieved late style, to be – like Leigh’s in Hard Truths – absolutely right both for its maker and for its moment.