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the movie club: Critic vs. critic.

Five critics dish over the year in film.

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from: Sarah Kerr

2000: The Year of Somberness

Posted Wednesday, Dec. 27, 2000, at 2:51 PM ET

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Dear everyone,

Happy holidays all, and thanks to David for the smoothest of launches. Those of you who had this gig last year may recall that we (not each of us behind every film, but taken cumulatively as a group) got so carried away by the joyousness and technical mastery of Toy Story 2, the bold, black humor of Election, the lunatic inventiveness of Being John Malkovich, the bracing contemporary take on war in Three Kings, and the narrative adventure of The Sixth Sense that we wondered if a mini-renaissance might be on the horizon. Someone, I can't remember who, even half-seriously proposed that 1999 might be the best year in movies since 1974.

Flash forward to this season, when, as Chris Suellentrop pointed out in a recent "Breakfast Table," some critics have quietly begun to grumble that this was the dreckiest year in the history of movies since around 1930--i.e., the dawn of sound. That's something of an exaggeration, probably; films this year were far from universally terrible. And, like someone saying grace for the meal we are to eat this week, I would like to start off by thanking this year in film for some precious and much appreciated gifts. With the exception of Pay It Forward, which got exactly the squirmy critical reaction and mediocre box office showing it deserved, there were fewer high-profile, commercially rewarded, brutishly manipulative schmaltz operas in 2000 than in just about any year I can remember. There are no As Good as It Gets poised to sweep the top acting Oscars. (Unless you count Mel Gibson in as a dark horse for his jittery neophyte's performance in What Women Want--I'm with you there, David.) The toilet-humor craze--which I ardently support in theory but loathe in its current vulgar, more desensitizing than liberating, semen-as-hair-gel, penis-stuck-in-the-zipper practice--seemed to stumble this year as the Farrelly brothers and Adam Sandler each came out with a semiflop. And we were asked to applaud no adorable Auschwitz antics, which mean's we'll be spared the sight of Roberto Benigni flashing his crazy 6-year-old's smile and trampling and stomping on the shoulders of strangers to accept an award made possible by the death of multitudes.

So thank you, O god of the cinema, for the gifts we have enjoyed. Now, on to the suffering we have endured. I rewatched Gladiator last night, marveling all over again at the stunning technical brilliance of the first massive battle, the admirable drive to update our sense of ancient Rome via special computerized effects and multicultural casting, and Russell Crowe's puppyish, sexy eyes, which hold the camera like the real-deal movie star everyone is declaring him to be. Still, though Crowe's proven himself a phenomenal actor playing Jeffrey Wigand in The Insider, as a warrior he seems too small and soft-looking, his face too hangdog; one never sees him fighting except in extreme close-up, when his stunt double has already made the kill and all he has to do is draw his sword out of some furry guy's neck. It's the kind of hungover, depression-as-charisma performance Richard Burton got away with after his first decade of greatness; Crowe needs a couple more brilliant turns before he can get away with it.

But an even more telling thing about Gladiator, more relevant for this week's discussion, was its tone: a weird mix of portentousness and lazy pacing, so that the film drifts restlessly in and out of its climaxes, not unlike porn. There are no more than a handful of humorous moments in the film, and hardly any of joy or even wonder. Instead, there is just somberness--and in this, Gladiator is not alone. If there's any quality that defined the movies of 2000, it seems me to be somberness--an unexamined mournfulness, an unearned profundity, a new trend toward abstract, impersonal sadness. This is true for big movies (the fantastic Chicken Run: heartwarming family fare about loveable birds scheduled to be murdered and eaten; The Perfect Storm: the story of a few brave, hard-working guys who stand up to nature, lose, and die the most painful death known to mankind) and smaller movies alike. In the next few days, I'll try to describe why I thrilled to the first hour or so of Traffic and then began to drift once it became clear that the moody, dynamically narrated ennui didn't grow into something more elastic and vital. And why Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, for all its truly breathtaking panache, seemed to me so bent on being smart about its heroine's emotions as to risk emotional coherence, so bent on avoiding sentimentality toward love that it fell into a kind of exquisitely sophisticated but academic sadness, at some cost to its lovely story.

Meanwhile, I eagerly await all your thoughts.

Till tomorrow,
Sarah Kerr

the movie club
entries
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from: Sarah Kerr

2000: The Year of Somberness

Posted Wednesday, Dec. 27, 2000, at 2:51 PM ET
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Roger Ebert, David Edelstein, J. Hoberman, Sarah Kerr, and A.O. Scott are film critics at, respectively, the Chicago Sun-Times, Slate, the Village Voice, Vogue, and the New York Times. This week, Slate has asked them to compare notes on the year in film.
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