Dear all,
Thanks everyone for setting me straight on how Traffic is a) only apparently murky and hard to follow, b) only apparently schematic and predictable, c) reminiscent of the lost, honorable tradition of socially engaged liberal movies from the ‘70s, and d) libertarian. You dramatize my reservations much more effectively than I explained them. That said, I do agree that it’s one of the best American efforts this year–in part because, for me at least, this year has been something of a disappointment.
J. and Roger, thank you both for bringing up Two-Family House; David, you make a good point about its major failing. In my first year as a full-time rather than part-time critic, really observing the cycle of screenings, predictions, and the mysterious first inklings of how a tiny, fragile film performs out in the big bad world, the destiny of Two-Family House came as a memorable surprise. I saw it in July, I guess, six months after it won the audience award at Sundance. It has flaws, easy to spot as a big zit on your nose–the characters a little too broadly drawn, the acting style a little shouty. But it’s so unexpectedly moving! I really foresaw a bigger hit. For you readers who haven’t seen the film, it’s about a bumbling Italian-American guy in Staten Island in the ‘50s. He and his wife (played by regulars on the Sopranos) take in lodgers upstairs–a brutish Irish drunk and his pregnant young wife. The Irish hate the Italians and vice versa, and so on and yadda yadda. For the first half-hour or so, you fear the film will just flounder in ethnic kitsch, but lo and behold, the young Irish wife gives birth to a black baby boy and everyone shuns her except our hero. Based on a true story, the film is not only irresistibly sweet but also braver than the usual message movie. It doesn’t flatter the audience’s broadmindedness in order to go down like candy. It shakes up a potent and taboo subject–the deepseated and historic racism of some white ethnics–and stares it down, and defeats it with jokes and humanity.
David, I saw Gun Shy on your recommendation (you’ve become a crucial comedy suggester since sending me to The Big Lebowski, an unprecedented masterwork I somehow had missed) and loved the brainy first part, especially Oliver Platt as the sad-sack reluctant mobster who’d rather be growing tomatoes. But I grew sad as it fell apart (Sandra Bullock’s presence hastily scripted in with nothing like the insight accorded the men, the contrived plot hogging more and more space and slowly squeezing out the wit); and I’m tiring of the mob as emblem/metaphor/emotio-political allegory of the American experience/family/male conundrum. Oh well: You say potato, I say potahto. I liked Nurse Betty for reasons that surprise even me. I’m no Neil LaBute fan, and on paper and in principle I agree the plot is neither promising nor savory. But I appreciated the filmmaking–the craftmanship and confidence; in a year when too many movies went on too long, or had no idea how to hang onto their energy, how to trace an emotional arc, how to build or how to end, I felt it stood out.
I’m sorry you didn’t get to see The House of Mirth, and I’m sorry Tony didn’t like it as much as I did: Gillian Anderson is physically not quite right as Lily Bart, but her acting is often magnificent. Could the screening screw-up be that the film was a Showtime property until recently and not necessarily headed for theatrical release? It’s quite good, if–again with the theme of the week–a little gloomy. But in this director’s case, chalk it up to temperament, not fishing for awards. In revisiting Wharton’s novel, I was taken aback by how right Davies was; the book has a buried-underground quality and is much less glittering and more suffused with pain than I had remembered.
As for Chicken Run, we all seem to agree that it’s one of the year’s best. I put it in the gloom category only because it seemed remarkable that the year’s most rousing children’s fare should focus on the enslavement, murder, and eating of cute animals. But in every other respect–in its unwavering yet subtle morality, its pizzazz, and in the beautifully modern courtship of the flashy rooster and the brave and practical and charismatic hen (now there’s a love story, one of 2000’s best), it was an antidote to ennui. Still, it makes me sad to put a film like Chicken Run at the top of the heap. No offense to animation, but I often longed this year for a film starring human beings that I could like so unreservedly.
I’m traveling today and getting ready to sign off. I must say I wish we’d talked a little more about the widespread perception–exaggerated and erroneous to some of you, but worthy of exploration to me–that this was an off year for the movies. I don’t think this is a conspiracy fomented by the mischevious agitator Peter Travers; anecdotal evidence tells me that lots of moviegoers, both avid and casual, believe it to be so. Are they wrong? Possibly, but movies are a communal experience, and when the audience gets antsy, it bears looking at. Perhaps I should have rephrased the question to ask not which movies were best and worst this year (we are in surprising agreement on that score) but which movies pierced the consciousness, either on an art house or a massive scale. Which movies will enter the vocabulary–become a shorthand for a mood, a new idea about what’s fun or tragic, a contemporary fact of life? Blair Witch, Boys Don’t Cry, The Sixth Sense, and Being John Malkovich (you might also include The Green Mile, about which I have the most mixed feelings) were none of them the best movies of 1999, but they fulfilled this necessary function. This year Almost Famous tried, hard, but it settled for speaking to a certain strain of late-boomerish guys who in their youth aspired to be Ralph Gleason and Ben Fong Torres the way, decades earlier, they would have wanted to be Joyce. I can think of only a few patchy equivalents: the climax of Chicken Run, the fight scenes in Crouching Tiger, the best 20 minutes of Cast Away, and on a shallow but not meaningless level, any five minutes of Charlie’s Angels.* I don’t think I’m alone in wishing there’d been more, and more grownup excitements. The great consolation is that the situation could, and will, change at any moment–and when it does, I have no doubt audiences will be game.
Until then all the best,
Sarah
* I don’t include Yi Yi or You Can Count on Me because, as a few of you pointed out, their emotional subtlety was not new so much as it was remarkable in a year of emotional drought.
