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Also this issue: Double Trouble Naughty and Nice Screen Picks |
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December 25-31, 2002
movies
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A look back reveals Hollywood's failure to address the real world.
Where did Hollywood go? Looking over the 10 movies that comprise what I habitually refer to as my "top whatever" list, I'm a little shocked to find that only four were filmed in English, only three are American, and none of those last is exactly what you'd call Hollywood fare. Solaris may be a big-budget space opera, but its quiet estrangement hasn't been seen in that company town since the late 1970s, and About Schmidt might feature a major star in an Oscar-hungry role, but its smart-aleck tone is classic indie. Far From Heaven might look like Hollywood product, but only if you're talking about Hollywood in 1957, and the film's plot undermines rather than enforces the cozy uniformity that style was created to depict.
This was supposed to be the year where we rallied 'round the flag, flocking to popular entertainments that brought us all together, drawing on our common love of martial pageantry, moral tales and bespectacled boy sorcerers. And yet, having thrilled in previous years to Moulin Rouge! and Titanic, I'm hard-pressed to draw up much retrospective enthusiasm even for those blow-out spectaculars I liked at the time. The nagging suspicion that the initially thrilling Blue Crush wouldn't have held up kept it off the list, and while Steven Spielberg delivered two of the most exciting two-thirds movies of the year, both Minority Report and Catch Me If You Can crumbled mightily at their conclusions. (See p. 26 for a full review of the latter.) The Two Towers is about as solid and well-crafted an entertainment as they come, but once the adrenaline fades, that's it.
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That's not, by any means, to discount the importance of adrenaline. The best movie I saw all year, Elia Suleiman's Divine Intervention, was almost dangerously exhilarating, a bracing fusion of politicized hyperbole and filmed diary. Suleiman -- whose movie was last week rejected by The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences as Palestine's submission for the Foreign Film Oscar, on the grounds that Palestine is not recognized by the United Nations -- is an avowed pacifist, but Divine Intervention is a film full of tremendous anger. Set in the occupied territories, the film depicts Palestine as a place where petty disputes erupt into physical violence with next to no provocation. An old man returns a soccer ball that's been kicked onto his roof only after slicing it in half; later, you see him stockpiling bottles, unaware of his purpose until the police come to arrest him and you realize he's been building up an arsenal. Not surprisingly, some of this anger is directed at the Israeli authorities as well, in ways that are simultaneously didactic and oblique: An Israeli tank explodes when it's hit by a piece of fruit thrown out a car window; a balloon with Yassir Arafat's face drifts over the Dome of the Rock, ever-growing in size; a target comes to life and bloodlessly slaughters a group of Israeli commandos with Matrix-like efficiency. But it's hardly anti-Israel propaganda; it's a collective fantasy, a warning (to both sides) and a pained commentary on the state of things. In a year when Hollywood desperately cut any shred of political thought out of its product -- at least any shred that didn't endorse the jingoistic murder of foreigners -- Divine Intervention was a timely reminder that movies can address the world rather than helping us hide from it. Though it may open in Philadelphia early next year (I saw it at the Toronto Film Festival, and it also played at New York's), it so neatly encapsulates everything that was missing from the year's releases that it felt wrong to write about the year's best movies without including it.
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But if movies didn't do much to look outside, they looked inside as well as they ever have. About Schmidt, All or Nothing and Time Out might be loosely grouped as "everyman" tales, stories of men trying to hold onto (or establish) themselves in a world where individual identity is an increasing redundancy. Time Out's laid-off executive and All or Nothing's disheartened cabdriver might seem to have little in common, but despite their diverse socioeconomic backgrounds, they're both men crushed under the weight of familiar responsibility and devalued by society. About Schmidt's retired number-cruncher, by contrast, finds himself unexpectedly freed of all burdens, but his liberation only hastens the realization that he's got nowhere to go.
Solaris' journey is essentially solipsistic: A man travels to the end of the universe, and finds himself waiting there. But it's also about seeing the divine in ourselves, and ourselves in the divine. You'd call Steven Soderbergh's enormous box-office gamble (and inevitable flop) the kind of movie studios don't make anymore, except they never did -- at least not without being tricked into it, which is presumably what happened here. The only upside to the Hollywood view of movies as combinations of marketable elements is that studio executives can apparently be duped into seeing only them -- Oscar-winning director, bankable star, high-prestige remake -- and remaining totally ignorant of the real contours of the project. (I doubt Soderbergh padded his initial script with gun battles and wisecracking sidekicks just to get the film approved.) Far From Heaven was an original movie in name only, since it adapted not a single film but an oeuvre: the aesthetically supercharged 1950s melodramas of Douglas Sirk. Where Solaris ran amok within the system, Far From Heaven came from outside (or at least as far outside as it's possible to come up with a $14-million budget) and turned Hollywood's tools against it. On first viewing, Far From Heaven can seem glib, a slightly superior gloss on outmoded conventions, but further viewings reveal its deep respect for Hollywood's history, and its profound understanding of how effective "dated" genres can be. If you think Douglas Sirk seems corny now, try watching Adaptation in 50 years.
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More than anything, it was a year to think about how we relate to each other -- to our friends, to our neighbors, to people who we'll never see or meet, but to whom we owe our understanding all the same. In the opening of The Werckmeister Harmonies, bar patrons twirl 'round each other, imitating the solar system, while Code Unknown's city dwellers exist on top of each other without ever managing to connect. The Spanish Civil War orphans of The Devil's Backbone band together to ferret out evil in their midst, while Claude Lanzmann's breathtaking documentary, Sobibor, Oct. 14, 1943, 4 p.m., comes down to a long-planned moment where concentration camp prisoners staged a successful uprising against their Nazi captors. Such collective (his)stories seem to be beyond the ken of Hollywood, where charismatic individuals still lead faceless forces on. Why can't we imagine a world where problems are solved by working together? Why can't we imagine the real world?
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