Dan Murrell on Call Me by Your Name
Call Me by Your Name is number one on my list. And that is the most human– I think people go into movies for different reasons. The thing that always captures me with movies is if you’re gonna give me a story that is authentic and human, and brings a perspective to this… you know, you’re watching false reality. That’s movies are; they’re artifice. You pan out and it’s nothing’s real. The sets probably aren’t real, and if they are they’re filled with lights and technicians and stuff. So to be able to take those tools and make something that feels so authentic is something that I admire. And this was the best combination of cinematography, acting, writing, directing. Every aspect of this movie was so spot on for me, picture perfect.
And Timothée Chalamet again gets all the credit. This movie ends with this kind of– Talk about the director, Luca Guadagnino. Talk about trusting an actor to put a coda at the end of your movie. He put the ultimate trust into Timothée Chalamet to bring this movie home. And he nails it.
But there’s also a scene in this movie that is just– I’ve thought about this scene more than any other– anything that I saw, not just this year, but in a long time. There’s a scene between Timothée Chalamet and his father that is so beautifully written, and profound, and human and true and raw that it’s hard for me to even believe that it is actors on a set.
It is a movie that— it gets headlines for its subject matter that like, ‘Well, it’s a gay love story.’ It’s not. It’s a human story. It’s a story about people who are struggling with themselves. […] And Timothée Chalamet portrays that, the depths of that, the highs of it, the joy that you can find in it, the anguish, the terror and not knowing like, ‘Who am I? What am I?’ There’s so much more to it than just like, ‘It’s a gay love story.’
It’s rare. You get like two or three or four movies of this a year where it just transcends being a great piece of art to just being a really effecting, moving thing that exists in this world.
And that’s why I land on Call Me by Your Name. I just think it was so authentic. And to make that kind of authenticity out of– just false shreds of unreality, false– people being paid to say words that were written on a page. It’s what movies should do, and out of so many movies that did that well this year, Call Me by Your Name for me did it the best. And I love this movie. It’s number one on my list. I can’t recommend it enough.
Don’t get caught up in the subject matter because it is about much more than the subject matter if you allow it to be. And I think people get caught up in it in the same way like they get caught up when Brokeback Mountain came out. It got labeled the gay cowboy movie, and so many people weren’t able to see past that to just the human story that it was telling, that it was a story of these two people. It’s the same with Call Me by Your Name.
– Dan Murrell for Top 10 Movies of 2017
