These are films about the issues real men face: coupling, parenthood, growing up, getting old. These are movies about the men we want to be, the men we actually are, and the men we’re glad we aren’t.
Before you ask, this is not a list of the best “guy” movies of all time. These are not the movies that you put on when all your best bros are over, the movies whose posters adorn the walls of 90 percent of male undergraduates’ dorm rooms, or the collected works of Van Damme/Schwarzenegger/Seagal. (Say what you will about the ponytailed one, but the dude was harsh in Under Siege.)
One of the “projects” of this site is to get men to talk about things they might not normally feel comfortable talking about—and movies can make excellent stimuli for such talk. I remember vividly an intense conversation some guy friends and I had after watching Noah Baumbach’s divorce tragicomedy The Squid and the Whale. It started as an argument over whether the mom (Laura Linney) or the dad (Jeff Daniels) was more of a scumbag. It ended up a frank discussion of the ethics of divorce, and how men and women can perceive them differently.
So these are the movies that (we hope) get you talking about the issues that real men face. These are movies about the men we want to be, the men we actually are, and the men we’re glad we aren’t. The men in these movies don’t necessarily carry guns, and they aren’t all ladykillers. In fact, some of them can barely talk to girls.
These are the top 10 “Good Men” movies.
“Blasphemy,” you cry? I know, how could I put a Paul Newman movie on a list of “Good Men” movies that isn’t Cool Hand Luke? Or Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. Or Slapshot. Or The Hustler.
Thing is, you could fill up an entire top-10 list like this one with the the films of Mr. Newman. The actor rarely played men we wanted to be, but the legendary schmucks he portrayed did make us reflect on the ideals of manliness and the long-term consequences of the things that make one “badass” in the short term. Nowhere is that bargain more clearly illuminated than in Robert Benton’s 1994 film Nobody’s Fool.
Newman plays Donald “Sully” Sullivan, an aging troublemaker living in a quiet village in western New York. Sully ekes out a living as a mediocre carpenter and spends most of his days trying to get his boss (a wonderfully insufferable Bruce Willis) to compensate him for a job that busted his knee. Sully ends up giving a job to his son (Nip/Tuck‘s Dylan Walsh) who’s lost his job as a college professor. Peter Sullivan doesn’t think much of his father, who abandoned his family when Peter was young. Peter’s young son, though, seems quite taken with his grandfather. Sully realizes that his poor fathering doesn’t preclude him from having a relationship with Peter’s son. His journey from deadbeat to family man is one of the most affecting in all of Newman’s filmography.
The quintessential romantic comedy for guys. Moving the setting of Nick Hornby’s novel about a heartbroken record-store owner (John Cusack) from London to Chicago seemed like a bone-headed move, but giving a Brit (Stephen Frears) control of the proceedings was a stroke of genius. He maintains the original’s nervy British wit while successfully translating the setting across the Atlantic. And, after all, a music snob’s a music snob no matter where he’s from.
The top-five lists of the movie (and the book) are classic (“Top five musical crimes perpetuated by Stevie Wonder in the ’80s and ’90s”), but the story of Rob Gordon’s attempts to reconcile with recent ex Laura (Iben Hjejle) is what makes High Fidelity the movie about relationships that doesn’t make men vomit. There’s not much of a plot to speak of, other than Rob looking up old girlfriends in an effort to understand what makes him so wretched at relationships and the staff at his record store (filled out by Todd Louiso and Jack Black at his Jack Black-iest) being assholes to customers. But it contains such simple, timeless observations about love and coupling (don’t date outside your station, don’t pin your hopes on a rebound) that it has become staple viewing for a certain type of neurotic, pop-culture-obsessed guy. It’s the romantic comedy your girlfriend might not get.
The only thing people seem to remember about It’s a Wonderful Life is the out-of-body experience George Bailey (Jimmy Stewart) has towards the end of the film. That accounts for only a fraction of the film’s two-hour-and-10-minute running time, though, and the rest of the film is a rather grim journey through the frustrated ambitions of Bailey, a small-town guy with a Springsteen-esque dream to break out of his one-horse hometown and see the world. But he again and again sacrifices his own happiness for those around him and ends up stuck in Bedford Falls running his family’s bank and living in his dream house, which turns out to be a decrepit piece of junk.
It’s a Wonderful Life is a lot of things: a plea for fiscal sanity, an optimistic fable about the power of a single person, a classic Christmas movie. But at its core, it’s about a man who realizes that life doesn’t necessarily turn out well for the noble. George strives above all to be a good man, to see his family and community survive and succeed. But the burden of being his town’s savior begins to crush him, turning him into a wretched, hateful drunk who lashes out at his wife and children. Things turn out well for George in the end, but the film makes you wonder whether there will be a happy ending for the men around the world leading lives of quiet desperation.
“Doctor!”
“C’mon, what. What?”
“Always do the right thing.”
“That’s it?”
“That’s it.”
“I got it, I’m gone.”
Spike Lee’s masterful 1989 film Do the Right Thing did such a good job of encapsulating the roiling ethnic tensions of modern urban America that it pretty much makes every other social problem film irrelevant (I’m looking at you, Crash). Lee directs and stars in the film, which chronicles one ungodly hot day in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn. Spike Lee transforms what could be a preachy movie version of a sociology paper into an evocative, multi-sensory masterpiece. Cinematographer Ernest Dickerson’s exquisite, painterly compositions practically ooze off the screen, and the soundtrack complements the on-screen turmoil with a hodgepodge of jazz, gospel, and hip-hop.
The brilliance of the title and the above dialogue between Lee’s Mookie and Da Mayor (Ossie Davis) is that it’s hard not only to actually do the right thing but, indeed, to figure out what that right thing might be. Lee gives us a cast of subtly drawn characters, one that lacks clear heroes and villains. Most of these people, even the foolish Pino (John Turturro), basically want to do good. Did restaurant owner Sal (a world-class Danny Aiello) do the right thing when he destroyed the jukebox belonging to Radio Raheem (Bill Nunn)? What about Mookie, when he threw the trash can through the window of Sal’s Pizzeria? Or the cops that (spoiler alert) strangle Raheem to death? Do the Right Thing forces us to discern right from wrong when all we’ve got is stimuli.
A friend referred to Ang Lee’s elegiac western romance Brokeback Mountain as a movie about “a series of failings of manhood.” That, I think, nicely encapsulates the story of a forbidden romance between two cowboys (Jake Gyllenhaal and Heath Ledger) who meet while herding sheep on the fictional Brokeback Mountain in Wyoming. The two fall in love, not without some hesitation, and manage to see each other a few times a year as they go through their own lives of, what else, quiet desperation (seems to be a recurring theme on this list). Jack Twist (Gyllenhaal) tries again and again to get Ennis (Heath Ledger) to leave his sham of a normal life behind and buy a ranch with Jack out in the boonies. Ennis declines.
Sure, Ennis is right that two cowboys living wifeless together would attract unwanted attention. But he refuses Jack’s offer more because he’s unwilling to admit what who he really is. Critics have apparently debated whether or not Ennis can really be called “gay,” but it’s obvious that he feels little affection for either his wife (Michelle Williams) or the bar waitress (Linda Cardellini) he shacks up with for a spell.
It’s hard to overstate just how verboten Jack and Ennis’ affair would have been in that place at that time. America is still fairly queasy about homosexuality (although getting less so), and the rural West and South would have been practically rabid at the time. But the two could have transplanted themselves to a friendly area if they really wanted to. (I’m envisioning an alternate-universe Brokeback with the two moving to Castro Street.) But Ennis wants so badly to maintain the appearance of the life he thinks he wants that he’s willing to see that life crumble around him. As the years scrape by, the already impassive Ennis becomes virtually bloodless, until we finally see a (tragic) sign of life as he goes to retrieve Jake’s ashes from his boyhood home. The question is, who’s really alive at that point?
The Godfather Parts I & II (1972 & 1974, dir. Francis Ford Coppola)
So I included a few staples. I can’t be revisionist and post-modern all the time.
Yep, we can all quote the thing to death (“It’s a mob message: Luca Brasi sleeps with the fishes”). But at the heart of this legendary cultural document is a story about the good son, forced to take over the family business when his father passes away—and his brother gets whacked. It’s the dark side of George Bailey’s no-win situation in It’s a Wonderful Life, albiet one that far fewer of us will actually experience.
But so what if Coppola’s gangster costume drama is somewhat lacking in accessibility? Does that really blunt the impact of the Greek tragedy arc of the life of Michael Corleone (Al Pacino, before he was horrifying to look at)? Where Capra’s film shows his hero overcoming self-hatred and appreciating his purpose in life, Coppola sets Michael Corleone’s life-house on fire and watches it burn. Michael’s certainly a good man to begin with, but his moral anguish at what he must do to maintain his father’s empire ends up devouring just about everything around him. When Michael closes the door on Kay (Diane Keaton) in Part II, it’s an act of mercy more than anything else.
I feel weird putting a film with such a glaring flaw (not Katherine Heigl herself, but casting her) on a “top 10” list. But Judd Apatow’s 2007 manchild epic about an ugly unemployed guy (Seth Rogen) who knocks up a beautiful television correspondent (Heigl) has so many great things to say about modern manhood that I couldn’t resist.
Apatow’s filmography is essentially a travelogue through different stages of arrested development, with Knocked Up chronicling the (failed) transition to adult life. Ben Stone (Rogen) lives in a ramshackle ranch house with his buddies (Jason Segel, Jay Baruchel, Jonah Hill, and Martin Starr, all nailing it). The guys basically smoke pot and play video games while they put off developing a website that allows you to see just the parts of movies where your favorite actresses get naked. But in a bit of brilliant meta-humor, the guys discover that a site that does the same thing (real-life celeb nudie cite Mr. Skin) already exists. So Ben’s only hope of supporting his new baby goes down the drain, and Alison (Heigl) understandably flips out.
Heigl is miscast, and I don’t buy for a second that she and Rogen would end up together. (Original star Anne Hathaway, on the other hand, would have made a much better choice.) But the way Apatow portrays Ben and his friends, as a lovable bunch of fuck-ups who were never taught they had to have a life, is so perfectly spot-on that Knocked Up emerges as a modern classic. Maybe I’m just too invested in the lost 20-something milieu of the film, but I get the sense that Apatow has captured something really quintessential about growing up. “You’re not doomed,” the film seems to say. “Just do something.” When Ben decides to get a real job to support his child towards the end of the movie, it seems less like a radical transformation than someone turning on a light switch.
I’d argue no list of movies about good men is complete without one about trying to be a good boy. Truffaut’s French New Wave classic follows a French schoolboy (Jean-Pierre Léaud) caught between his oppressive, post-WWII Paris schoolhouse and his depressive, proletarian home-life. His parents are trapped in a loveless marriage and his schoolmaster is a complete prick, but everyone seems to blame Doinel (Léaud) for his bad attitude. Would you be any better? Life deals Doinel crappy hand after crappy hand until he finally ends up in a school for troubled youth on the French coastline. The most famous scene in the film is actually the last, as Doinel escapes and heads for the beach he longed all his life to see.
The film contains a number of striking qualities, but the thing that most resonates is the inevitability of Doinel’s doom. Just about everything around him seems arrayed to screw him over. Doinel’s not a particularly smart or noble kid, but Jean-Pierre Léaud does make him a real person, which makes his downfall all the more affecting. The French New Wave canon is full of basically plotless tone poems about love triangles (Jules and Jim), aimless revolutionaries (La Chinoise), and fucked-up relationships (literally everything else), but Truffaut’s autobiographical story about a hapless street-rat is one of the best. Watch it with your kids.
It’s well known that audiences hated The Searchers when it was first released in 1956, and it’s not hard to see why. The basic Western stuff that’s there is mindless, hackneyed tripe, and the one badass in the film (John Wayne) is so heartless and awful that it’s hard to cheer along as he slaughters cowboy and Indian alike. The film follows Ethan Edwards (Wayne) in years-long quest to find his niece Debbie (Lana Wood) who’s been abducted by Comanche tribesmen. Ford throws Debbie’s adopted brother Martin Pawley (Jeffrey Hunter) so that Ethan has someone to say horrible things about Indians to.
The Searchers has grown in stature since its release to become perhaps the most critically-acclaimed Western of all time. And that’s a load of garbage, if you ask me. This is another deeply flawed film (seriously, the stuff with Martin and his girlfriend is right out of those cheesy Western double-features from the ’20s), but it contains one of the most trenchant deconstructions of the Western archetype ever put to film. The Searchers‘ steel-eyed murderer of a protagonist isn’t the type of character most of us are liable to meet in our everyday lives, and that’s primarily because most of us don’t live in the Old West. Hollywood delighted in painting the settlers as a band of sweetly idealistic patriots (and the occasional gun-toting lawman with a heart of gold), but, as Patton Oswalt put it, the Old West was settled by “big, white, racist psychopaths.” Kinda makes you wanna tell your kids to hold off on the cowboys and Indians.
Another perennial favorite, included both because I’d be hanged if I didn’t include a sports movie and because it’s damn good. Star and screenwriter Sylvester Stallone eventually sullied the legacy of this film (and its excellent sequel) with a series that got progressively stupider, more implausible, and weirdly jingoistic as it wore on. But John Avildsen’s simple story of a small-time boxer who goes the distance against the champ (Carl Weathers) is a classic for a reason.
The fight scenes are magnificent, of course, and Bill Conti’s iconic score gets even the most ardent sports-hater’s blood pumping. Elsewhere, Stallone creates a quiet, convincing romance between Rocky and Adrian (Talia Shire), which succeeds in spite of the vast difference between the two characters’ temperaments. Avildsen gets great performances out of the rest of his cast, including Weathers as Apollo Creed, Burt Young as Paulie, and an iconic Burgess Meredith as Rocky’s trainer, Mickey.
This has been a list populated by films about drunks, neurotics, and fuck-ups young and old. But occasionally, you just feel like watching a good ol’ fashioned sports movie. You’ll never get the chance to fight Apollo Creed, but Rocky will make you think you can go the distance for at least a few hours. And sometimes that’s all the good man needs.
—Main photo hsuanwei/Flickr