[wrote this a long time ago, was planning to clean it up, now i don't care]
The past year was not one of great movie passion for me. Until the tail end, until 2003, actually. I thought I was falling into a lull, a little bit of a disinterest, ever since I took that job with The Charlotte Observer as their little teen critic. I’ve written negative review after negative review for them and have yet to give praise without reservation to any one film in that paper. But I have slowly learned a lesson over these past few years—that the masterpieces are rare, as they ought to be, and the ridiculous (but, I suppose, valid) hunting for the next one to fall from the sky is one of the silly things we do as critics, the pursuit that makes us bestow outrageous superlatives on movies that only approach that dream of ours, the same dream that makes us want more without knowing if there can ever be more (has everything magical already been made? Must we turn back to Keaton and Disney and Fellini to remember, if not hope for, the electricity that made us teary-eyed and amorous about this damned thing called cinema in the first place?). This past year, I didn’t go to the movies enough to qualify myself as a responsible critic, or even as a devoted movie lover, but I can say there were the slight highlights (Brown Sugar, The Ring, that lovely but derivative Town is Quiet), and then there was the clunky droning (Gangs of New York, The Two Towers, that sickening Truth About Charlie). In between were some splendid, exotic creatures, and then some simple pleasures, thanked in the following list of ten, and it’s not even that the feeling of being ignited and exploded as a viewer stays with you. I saw Catch Me If You Can a second time when the lady at the box office wouldn’t let me into Adaptation. without ID, and it was not the same kind of reverie. How could it be? How could there be the same rush of discovery the second time around? Spider-Man kind of wrinkles in my mind while Minority Report looks better in reminiscence. These ten films are honored here because of the memory I have of being seduced, being befriended, being exposed. I love the movies but it’s so hard to find a soul mate amongst them. Some just make me feel old and jaded. The best make us bigger, because movies done right give us the healthy humanist reminder that our lives, dwarfed and trivial in the infinitesimal universe, actually do matter, in the tight parameters of our bodies, souls, and movie houses, in which emotion can be expansive.
1. What Time Is It There?
2. The Hours
3. 25th Hour
4. Catch Me If You Can
I say that I’ve had a tough year as a movie lover—perhaps withdrawal from the 2001 high, or a bad reaction to the new workload as a high school junior, or just a distaste for current cinema’s tastelessness (I know, I’ll quit with the clichéd complaints)—but the unforgettable ache of What Time Is It There? (an imported Taiwanese leftover from 2001), the hyper and stable instability of The Hours, the masculine emotion and dashed American dreams in 25th Hour, and the strikingly beautiful Spielberg treat Catch Me If You Can, equal any of the four or five masterpieces I cherish from last year. Coincidentally, they make one moody quadruple feature about how alone we can feel in the world.
The first, directed by the acclaimed Tsai Ming-Liang, passed by relatively unnoticed in Charlotte, but it’s one of the greatest films of the past ten years, and one of the most quirky, heartbreaking things I’ve ever experienced. Tsai tries on his metropolitan remove, using lengthy shots with a static camera that pretends not to be engaged in the action but ends up being representative of the new world’s mockery and blank-eyed sarcasm. Even with Tsai’s cruel, voyeuristic humor (the camera viscously refuses to turn away while a woman masturbates with the ashes of her dead husband, or during other moments of raw and private embarrassment), What Time Is It There? achieves an overwhelming effect that the icy, gorgeously meditative cinematography, or his aggravating water motif, do not initially suggest. This is the loneliness of the city, in all its jabbing, funny, and pregnant brilliance, but the movie doesn’t make you feel sorry for yourself or the characters, and it continually refers to, and ends on a note of, ethereal human interconnectedness. We get a few minutes to see François Truffaut’s The 400 Blows expanded out across the big screen canvas, a classic film about young loneliness that now seems impossible to understand in the video version. And then Truffaut’s child star, Jean-Pierre Léaud, appears on a bench, out of the blue, gray and injecting legend. In another scene, subways move along and reveal two Asians on two sides of the track, tourists alone in France, not speaking. What is this movie about? I can’t remember. But the feeling I had when I exited the arthouse, ejected into the afternoon, seems to stay with me, a souvenir underneath the skin, unchanged.
The Hours, unlike Tsai’s more demanding entertainment, is easy to dismiss; I didn’t expect its tight clustering of emotion to work because there didn’t seem anywhere for it to go, and critics can bash the movie as a showcase of basketcases, a women’s picture thriving on suffering diva-ism. Which it is, but… There hasn’t been a movie that sustains its nervy, operatic drama this successfully, this movingly, since Magnolia in 1999, and The Hours one-ups P.T. Anderson’s three-hour opus by taking all that misery seriously, by having the sincerity and guts not to make fun of it. The young American ironist Anderson all but negated his drama with an elaborate and cosmic joke at the end, a pat on the back for the audience to remind us that everything will be okay because life is, ultimately, in God’s hands, and the fates of the characters are in the auteur’s. Here, in The Hours, director Stephen Daldry and screenwriter David Hare have adapted Michael Cunningham’s Pulitzer-nabbing novel into a lush, fat piece of emotionalism that intimates the strange, spiritual functions of death, suicide, and sadness. It does make the mistake of giving us too easy of an answer, disturbingly proclaiming suicide as necessary and heroic self-sacrifice, and the movie suffers from never challenging us to challenge that. The bottom line, however, is that the film is an incredible exercise in the kind of moviemaking and the type of acting whose only goal is to conquer our senses and our hearts from numbness, to make us feel again.
It’s easy to get sucked into; the names in the cast are enough to make the head spin. Nicole Kidman as Virginia Woolf, Meryl Streep as a Mrs. Dalloway incarnation in modern-day New York City, and Julianne Moore as a suicidal ‘50s housewife with an Ibsen dilemma act the hell out of their roles, each inflection and bat of the eye doubling as great art and a bid for the Oscar. Yes, this is Oscar acting, but Oscar acting at its best and most revelatory. Serious, existential soap opera at its purest and most thrilling. How long has it been since we’ve seen a union of titanic female talent like this? Since the ensembles of Ingmar Bergman in the ‘60s? Or as far back as George Cukor’s The Women in the ‘30s? The female characterizations fuse the hushed, Swedish pains and furies of Liv Ullman and Ingrid Thulin with the Hollywood drama-queen strength of Bette Davis and Joan Crawford. (Just as any study or celebration of gender is bound to do, The Hours builds a fixed image of Woman, depressed in her repression, and runs with it.) Kidman has never hinted at this kind of charismatic bravado; she sucks her cigarette and walks hunchbacked with a sly vengeance. And I don’t ever recall Streep being this exciting to watch; not in Sophie’s Choice, not in One True Thing, not in that damned Out of Africa. It’s a performance that belongs with her greatest, her small but lived-in roles in Kramer vs. Kramer and Manhattan back in 1979, and the recent Adaptation. The movie is not exactly perfect; for one thing, it overuses the intensity of the awkward screen kiss. But its unapologetically blissful, even when the handsome but too-pat ending should give us more to stomach.
Over the credits of 25th Hour, Spike Lee reintroduces the best and most overlooked track on Bruce Springsteen’s The Rising. “The Fuse” is a great song about sex and marriage after September 11, a Marvin Gaye-slanted rocker with images from the aftermath; despite a creeping sense of pop opportunism (a part of me had wished for Bill Evans, “N.Y.C.’s No Lark”), it fits in one of Lee’s most stunning films, a scatterbrained day-in-the-life set in post-9/11 New York. This generous surprise from one of our most rousing storytellers glides along under the weight of genuine loss, and we are welcomed into the lives of people we may feel comfortably distanced from in our own social standing, that we usually would be able to file away as criminals with bad teeth. Yet we may not even realize that we are dealing and sympathizing with the bad guys of the world; movies can be great equalizers. 25th Hour is a portrait of maleness reminiscent of both John Cassavetes’ The Killing of a Chinese Bookie and the formidable British ensemble in Last Orders, but, of course, it’s more direct and caricatured. Edward Norton gives one in a collection of rich performances as a former drug dealer facing seven years in prison. The cast of friends Barry Pepper and Philip Seymour Hoffman, and father Brian Cox, throws an unblinking eye on how men define friendship and the way they communicate, in a riveting narrowness that makes it a companion to The Hours’ emotional and cinematic femininity. The film rambles, but I was never bored; the palpable dread made for fascinating, claustrophobic, nervous sequences, and at least two dazzling setpieces. The abusive dynamic between Pepper and Hoffman in earlier scenes is particularly prickly to sit through. Lee tries to integrate the specter of the World Trade Center tragedy, and he eventually does in what could be the best and most open way possible; because the attacks implied a threat to the American dream, Lee notices the prices we pay and the contradictions we live with to reach that goal. That dream of family and genial anonymity, or wealth and recognition, is contrasted with the lonely reality of personal responsibility when, in the last ten minutes, Cox takes on a more significant role than we might have first imagined, narrating a highway fantasy of what might happen if he rode his son off like a cowboy into the sunset, the farthest reaches of American desert, and never came back.
While we might not have expected Lee to give so much detail and screen time to the father-son scenes in 25th Hour, Steven Spielberg’s Catch Me If You Can centers itself on that same tender bond between Leonardo DiCaprio and Christopher Walken. (Both films shame Sam Mendes’ cheat Road to Perdition.) DiCaprio, in one of the year’s best performances, has never been this good before, and Spielberg creates a curious, indefinite mood that might shock those who accuse him of being emotionally manipulative. But critics are ignoring this film as a feather-light romp, despite its look at a culture of adventure and divorce, when it is clearly one of Spielberg’s most splendid, a work full of yearning, serious and wonderful enough to stand alongside his thematically similar E.T. Maybe it is this strange reaction to the film that has made the ambiguity of its fun cross-country chase set-up; if it’s so perky, with its sky blues and lemonade pinks, then why is there always a cloud of sadness hanging over it? The disintegration of a marriage may be a cheap psychological connection, but it works (American divorce rates had been steadily increasing in the ‘60s, peaking in the ‘80s), and I never really got over that devastating scene early on even when DiCaprio—as a young, good-natured, and elaborately clever con—coasted through comic situations. One scene has Leo returning on Christmas, after many years of jolly crime, to his mother’s house only to find that he has been replaced by James Brolin and a stepsister he meets at a window; it’s like that moment in Spielberg’s Hook when Peter Pan finds out that Wendy’s all grown up and doesn’t need him anymore.
The film is set to a number of traditional pop tunes, and there are two idyllic scenes in which elder couples dance to the standard “Embraceable You,” but Spielberg’s vision of love is more complex than the Great American Songbook will allow. Spielberg pins down the gradations, the wavy and morphing shades of a young adult who no longer knows what to expect out of love, romantic or otherwise. The tone leans more toward the languor in “The Look of Love” (featured in a playfully dark scene with Jennifer Garner about sex, money, and youth), and the sad-sack saloon songs of Frank Sinatra, the ones that spoke of the disappointment with the impermanent ideal. The film’s flaw is its frightening disdain for women, and I’m not sure what function the stereotypical blondes and backstabbers are meant to serve other than as lame throwbacks to Barbie images of that era, or as embodiments of those sorrowful Johnny Mercer lyrics “A woman’s a two-face/a worrisome thing who will leave you to sing/the blues/in the night…” Where the conventional American family fails, we improvise, build makeshift families that sometimes end up lasting. The surrogate father-son relationship that grows between DiCaprio and Tom Hanks over several lonely Christmases is both divergent from anything that could be considered simplistic holiday fare and truthful about the fragility and beauty in our attachments to others.
5. Minority Report
6. Spider-Man
7. Spirited Away
I have much less to say about Minority Report (the first half of Spielberg’s double triumph last year), Spider-Man, and Spirited Away. I had the pleasure of seeing the former on a trip to New York City, on the massive screen in Times Square’s AMC theater. I loved the film for its energy, for reaching me in such a visceral way, for being a great action movie, but I resented it for its stupid ending, its anxious and amateurish tying of loose ends. Now, I can’t wait to see it again. A lot of people have told me that they hate Tom Cruise, and I am glad to report, as no big fan myself, that he is a mere human in Spielberg’s ravenously visual feast of gadgets, and that there is some complexity to his character, plus a nasty drug addiction.
Spider-Man was an island of hope and gladness; I fall asleep when I watch it now, but I was overjoyed to see an action flick work me into a frenzy, to see scenes of young love that would have looked unbearably saccharine on paper but come out touching because of Tobey Maguire and Kirsten Dunst. I have never been fond of Maguire, but this is a role tailor-made for his endearing awkwardness. And there’s that scene in which the underdog fights the school bully that has a special knee-jerk exhilaration to it. I don’t know how the forthcoming sequels can better this one without the humor of seeing a superhero’s powers coincide with pubescent awakening, or Willem Dafoe’s Halloween tomfoolery. The moralism at the end is cute, until that image of the American flag equates the United States and the George W. Bush administration to comic book heroics and the rest of the world to the Green Goblin’s villainy. But then we backtrack and find Uncle Ben’s nugget of wisdom: “With great power comes great responsibility.”
Spirited Away I admire for Miyazaki’s unstoppable imagination. Where Charlie Kaufman and Spike Jonze’s Adaptation. never seemed to get its grim, hip, sarcastic, and rapidly multiplying ideas off the ground, Miyazaki’s animé is carried along by the constant turning of the wheels in his head, its fresh brand of family-film sincerity, and his startling abandon with fantastical grotesquerie.
8. Va Savoir got my movie year off to a great start. I have yet to see another Jacques Rivette film (I just can’t brave those endless running times at the moment), but I was taken by the lightness of his comedy, and by its pointlessness. The movie (at two hours and thirty minutes, it’s long for a comedy and short for a Rivette) lets you drift into it; it’s not very demanding, but, at the time, I saw it as a nice antidote to my underwhelming Amélie experience. It’s a breezy, urbane French humor I didn’t quite know how to respond to but I was thankful for that night.
9. Lovely & Amazing’s version of humor, on the other hand, is brutal, and it would be very unsettling if there weren’t such love for the characters in it. The performances by the women, particularly Catherine Keener as someone we should hate but don’t, are honest and unvarnished, and the movie is able to cloak its cynicism in affection.
10. Fat Girl is one tough and ugly chick flick, confronting men, sex, rape, youth, seduction, and self-destruction with uncompromising emotional and visual aggression.
GREAT PERFORMANCES:
Meryl Streep in The Hours, Catherine Keener in Lovely & Amazing, Diane Lane in Unfaithful, Nicole Kidman in The Hours, Halle Berry in Monster’s Ball, Julianne Moore in Far From Heaven, Leonardo DiCaprio in Catch Me If You Can, Daniel Day-Lewis in Gangs of New York, Tom Hanks in Road to Perdition, Alfred Molina in Frida, Nicolas Cage in Adaptation., Edward Norton in 25th Hour, Eminem in 8 Mile, John C. Reilly in Chicago, Philip Seymour Hoffman in 25th Hour, Barry Pepper in 25th Hour, Brian Cox in 25th Hour, Brian Cox in Adaptation, Chris Cooper in Adaptation., Viola Davis in Antwone Fisher, Meryl Streep in Adaptation., and Catherine Zeta-Jones in Chicago
Ten older gems I discovered last year:
High Hopes (1988, UK), The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes (1970, US), Senso (1954, Italy), Band of Outsiders (1954, France), The Passion of Anna (1969, Sweden), The Blue Angel (1930, Germany), Written on the Wind (1956, US), Lone Star (1996, US), Poltergeist (1982, US), One, Two, Three (1961, US)
By Andrew Chan [FEBRUARY 6, 2002]