This was the year when the news became a headache to liberals everywhere, revealing that we had consistently backed the wrong horse, and great fears and tensions were being felt that led people to vote for politics of division. In the weeks after Donald Trump’s election as president of the United States, we have seen a strengthening of reactionary politics, with demagogues and fascists feeling empowered by the decisions that have gone their way. We have also seen a certain element of the leftwing seek to blame itself for having alienated ordinary folk. This last sentiment is visible in several films that came out in 2016: works with ostensibly right-on politics that nevertheless betrayed a queasiness towards the modern world, towards minorities and women; films in which a fear of a new world order is palpable.  Luca Guadagnino set the tone towards the start of the year, when this apparently juicy psychological thriller lurched into a wrong-headed and iffy discussion of the refugee crisis. In the film, a singer and her boyfriend (Tilda Swinton and Matthias Schoenaerts) welcome her flamboyant ex (Ralph Fiennes) and his young daughter (Dakota Johnson); the sexual tension flares between these rich, beautiful people holidaying off the coast of – wait for it – Sicily. The film revels in the glamour of its characters and in their easy beauty, unironically projecting them as stars wherever they go (witness a karaoke scene in which a whole village flocks to see Fiennes showboat in a tiny bar). So, when catastrophe strikes and one of the main characters seeks to blame it on the refugee population, it doesn’t ring as Guadagnino satirising his characters’ vanity so much as shoehorning in a deeply serious and difficult issue to confect some gravitas. No refugees are named, they are only briefly alluded to, and the disastrous events of the last two years are used as a mere narrative crutch. It’s a move that betrays an uneasy sense that film should be addressing the political topics of the day, but in a film that has no idea with what language to do so.  A similar helplessness inhabits the hapless Absolutely Fabulous film, which seemed to quake with an almost adorable – were it not so totally misguided – sense that it needed to say something about the “trans question”. The film didn’t, in fact, need to talk about it, and what it had to say was foolish when it wasn’t outright hateful. The most egregiously offensive moment came when a character was revealed as being coerced into transitioning, prompting a staggering moment when he is interrogated about when it is going to be cut off. From there, the film rampages wildly through questions of gender, making Patsy drag up and having her tasered when a flight attendant mistakes her for a trans man. The film traduced not only Patsy and Eddie’s discombobulation about the modern world (which is what the audience was there to lap up), but an almost seething misunderstanding of contemporary gender politics on the part of its creators.  If A Bigger Splash and Absolutely Fabulous hinged on very particular phobias, the new Bridget Jones movie was hilariously prone to fear and confusion about just about everything. Internet dating? A terrifying romance-free vortex of cynical narcissism. Sex? An act between a man and a woman, with the purpose of making a baby. The Bridget Jones movies have always had a conservative bent (essentially being Jane Austen adaptations set in a white version of modern London), but the new film goes a little further, with a bizarre scene in which Bridget flees an amniocentesis needle, thereby refusing to check her foetus for chromosomal abnormalities. To each woman her choice, but the film makes a big hoopla of mining discomfort and laughs out of this routine procedure, with the clear message being that it is unnatural. The whole film takes against science in general, mocking the modern world’s attraction to technology – and Bridget eventually finds out the identity of the father of the baby the old-fashioned way, by falling in love with him.  Part of the reason Bridget felt so antiquated and fusty is that films this year were looking back to a romanticised past – the 1990s and the Regency – to justify the idea of “the one” and the true romance of marriage. A few films this year put on similarly rose-tinted glasses to consider the olden days, chief among them Paterson, which harked back to a mythical era of American poetry. Its ex-military hero, with his supportive housebound wife giving him free rein to incarnate the true writer’s authentic calling, writes Wallace Stevens-style poetry in the year 2016 and lives without a mobile phone. Jim Jarmusch’s unease at a fast, connected world is telling, and finds its resolution in its consideration of Paterson’s titular hero, who stands as a true male, a zen man of letters, a sort of John Clare of New Jersey.  This is the biggest political failure of the year: a film which can only have been made by Richard Linklater as a bet that he could flunk the Bechdel test. Set on a university campus in 1980s Texas – a halcyon era mercifully free of safe spaces — Everybody Wants Some!! chooses to tell the story of gender politics from the point of view of a bunch of baseball-playing bros. Blind nostalgia is the order of the day, as this #notallmen mess finds a way to look with fondness upon these violent, sexist men – in the process denying women speech and agency. It becomes almost a game for the characters to work out in what way Linklater, freed at last from having to let Julie Delpy write a character for herself, will next prevent a woman from talking. There are scenes where women are asked questions and don’t reply, merely smiling and nodding. In one scene, a self-professed feminist gets her comeuppance by being seduced by the most grotesque of all the students.  Linklater’s amiable fondness for the dinosaurs at the heart of his film extends to sanitising their world, so that hazing is fun, homophobia is all but absent and one can only imagine that, once they’ve bedded the skirt they spend the entire film chasing, these guys are the kings of asking for consent. It is not possible to have followed events on American campuses in recent years and be blind to the terrible practises in male societies; yet Linklater persists with his oddly tone-deaf celebration of these jocks. In a scene that shows to what extent he is with these guys, he films a man whose prowess as a baseball hitter enables him to cut a ball in half mid-flight with an axe. Lovingly filmed in slow motion, this scene shows that he has no distance from his subject, and that what element of smiling satire his film can muster is completely insufficient. Everybody Wants Some!! is Trump’s America writ large: a sexist and macho look at a completely imagined past, in which things were great – for straight white men.
From the all-bro jocks and silent women of Everybody Wants Some!! to Bridget Jones’s rejection of science, these are the films that failed to take on cinema’s push for inclusivity