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Following the astonishing wave of ambitious, risk-taking and brilliant films that emerged from Hollywood in 1998 and 1999 (I'm thinking of The Thin Red Line, Fight Club, Eyes Wide Shut, Magnolia, The Matrix, Being John Malkovich...), 2000 was not a particularly good year for cinema. With the exception of the films occupying the top two or three slots, which are genuinely remarkable, most of these films might have struggled to find a spot on the top ten list in an average year. Which doesn't mean they're bad - all the films here are worth watching, all are very good, but, for various reasons, not all manage to cross the line from "very good" into "great".
Luckily, 2001 was to prove a far more interesting year...
tenth: snatch. (guy ritchie)
With Snatch., Guy Ritchie essentially redeployed the formula that made Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels (1998) - itself little more than a cockney rip-off of Pulp Fiction (Quentin Tarantino, 1994) - an international success. There is little in this film that is new, original or meaningful - every detail in its hundred-minute ride through the London criminal underworld is a homage to films that were themselves homages. But there is no denying that this breathless pop-culture rush is energetic, hugely stylish, often painfully hilarious and riotously entertaining. This could be the very definition of mindless entertainment, but sometimes that's exactly what you need.
ninth: ghost dog: the way of the samurai (jim jarmusch)
Anchored by a typically excellent performance from Forest Whitaker, this quintessentially Jarmusch film takes a pulp narrative (a Mafia hitman living according to the Bushido samurai code) as the core for a moving and drily humorous study of characters living in their own worlds on the fringes of society. It's not Jarmusch's best, but it offers a unique, offbeat take on a tired genre, and a host of memorable and perversely lovable characters.
eighth: almost famous (cameron crowe)
Cameron Crowe's fairy-tale vision of the 1970s rock scene may have little to no relation to any actual reality, but, taken as Crowe's love letter to the music he grew up with, and as a magical coming-of-age tale, it is a resounding success, and a standout in the director's somewhat mixed oeuvre (it was easily his best film since 1989's Say Anything...). Its golden-hued nostalgia could easily have been maudlin, but there's a genuine honesty of feeling that makes it affecting.
seventh: the virgin suicides (sofia coppola)
Sofia Coppola's debut film was a languid, gorgeously sensual and disturbingly enigmatic period piece, locating a disquieting, unaccountable horror within the life of five beautiful sisters in 1970s suburbia. There is a poetic grace and a sensitivity to the inexpressible in this film that belie its nature as a first film, and mark it out as the arrival of a noteworthy film-making talent.
sixth: amores perros (alejandro gonzalez inarritu)
The first of Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu's trilogy of non-linear, multi-narrative epics, Amores Perros is also far and away the best. There was a rawness, an immediacy, an intensity and a directness here that disappeared as 21 Grams (2003) and Babel (2006) grew increasingly formulaic, ponderous and self-consciously Important. Here, nuance and a keen, unflinching eye for character match the film's epic scope and wide canvas, making this the closest Inarritu has come to a masterpiece.
fifth: o brother, where art thou? (the coen brothers)
Admittedly a step down from the Coen brothers' late 90s masterpieces, O Brother, Where Art Thou? remains an engaging, joyous and wonderfully-crafted oddity. The Odyssey reworked into a part-slapstick, part-musical, entirely whimsical and beautiful picaresque trip through 1930s America, this was at once an inventive, hugely entertaining road movie and an affectionate celebration of American pop-history and folk music.
fourth: requiem for a dream (darren aronofsky)
Requiem for a Dream may possess a somewhat one-note emotional register, and its vision may be too unremittingly nihilistic to swallow. But what is undeniable is that it achieves a rare, monomanic intensity that is palpably frightening, and that sears itself indelibly into one's memory. Many have interpreted this as a simplistic anti-drugs movie, but beneath the surface it's a terrifying, bleak vision in which tragedy is the only possible result when one reaches for their dreams.
third: crouching tiger, hidden dragon (ang lee)
I'll admit that I find Ang Lee a talented but somewhat overrated filmmaker, with a career consisting of well-crafted and interesting films lacking the true spark of greatness. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (along with, possibly, Sense and Sensibility (1995)) is the exception, and far and away his standout achievement to date. It may seem over-familiar in retrospect, viewing it in the wake of the wu xia resurgence it helped spawn, but at the time it was something almost completely new. Marketed as art-house material, at heart this is a crowd-pleasing epic adventure, but one executed with a grace, gravitas and a sweeping beauty that is rare in any genre, and that invests its undeniably thrilling action with a lasting sense of melancholy.
second: dancer in the dark (lars von trier)
Almost a polar opposite to the traditional idea of the movie musical, Lars von Trier's Palme D'Or winner Dancer in the Dark is one of the most devastating, almost unbearable character tragedies ever put to film. A stunning performance and soundtrack by Bjork are at the heart of the film's emotional pull, and the success of the film is at least as much due to her input as to von Trier's. There is little about the film that is subtle - one could easily argue that von Trier here (and elsewhere) is as emotionally manipulative as Hollywood at its worst - but its raw, unflinching impact is undeniable and unforgettable.
first: in the mood for love (wong kar-wai)
Wong Kar-Wai is one of the greatest masters working in the cinematic medium, and In the Mood for Love is his unqualified masterpiece. Aided by Christopher Doyle's gorgeously saturated cinematography and by impressive performances from Tony Leung and Maggie Cheung, he crafts a quietly intense study of two people trapped in disintegrating marriages, unable to consummate the tentative love that develops between them. One doesn't watch a Wong Kar-Wai film, one inhabits it, immersing oneself in the sensuality of its textures and colour, in the finely-observed details of character and indefinable moods, in the expressivity and emotion that invests even the simplest gesture and image. This is a perfect film, one that deserves the oft-abused appellation of genius, and one of the greatest films of the decade.
honourable mentions: Chocolat, Billy Elliot, Unbreakable, X-Men
No cinephile can have failed to notice, over the past few years, a certain tendency, fuelled at least in part by advances in digital film-making tools, towards an increasingly self-consciously artificial visual style. It is difficult to pinpoint a starting point for this trend, though we can see it at work, for instance, in sections of The Matrix (Andy & Larry Wachowski, 1999). In its most extreme form, it has given us three films (to date, with more sure to follow) that place actors in a completely digital universe - Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow (Kerry Conran, 2004), Sin City (Robert Rodriguez & Frank Miller, 2005) and 300 (Zack Snyder, 2007). In less extreme forms, the tendency manifests itself in a number of ways - for instance, in the digitally-graded colour tones of Peter Jackson's The Lord of the Rings trilogy (2001-2003), in the intoxicatingly saturated colours and impossibly swirling leaves of Hero (Zhang Yimou, 2002), and in the visual gap between the first two Harry Potter films and Alfonso Cuaron's third instalment, with its luminous silvery and occasionally sepia-tinged tones and its iris fades.
Ted Pigeon has recently written a fascinating article (link) on the impact of digital media on cinema; but what interests me is not digital media per se, but the trend, which they seemed to kick-start, towards increased visual artificiality. Digital techniques are only one aspect of this tendency, which also comprises, among other things, of a marked propensity towards a postmodern visual pastiche of historical genres - film noir in the case of Sin City, 1940s studio films in the case of The Good German (Steven Soderbergh, 2006), and everything from the giallo to the spaghetti western to the Hong Kong kung-fu film in Kill Bill (Quentin Tarantino, 2003-2004).
The avant-garde and art-house cinemas, of course, have long played with the idea that the cinematic image, despite any claims made by realist film theoriticians such as Bazin and Kracauer, is essentially an artificially-created construct with no bearing on or relation to reality. The illusion of realism created due to the medium's photographic nature is precisely that - an illusion.
None of this is in any way a new revelation; what is interesting is that, as digital technology makes the link between photography and cinema increasingly tenuous, so too, it seems, does the mainstream audience's expectation of realism decrease. Bar exceptions such as the musical genre, mainstream cinema has always tended towards an essentially realist approach to the image. Even if what is being depicted is clearly alien to the real world, the cinematic images that represent it strive for an impression of reality - attempting to make the audience suspend their disbelief and accept that what is on the screen is real. The image is transparent - what is important is what is represented, not the image itself.
This recent trend demonstrates a clean break with this tradition, giving us instead films that revel in their artificiality - from the comic-panel-come-to-life shots of Sin City to films, such as Shekhar Kapur's upcoming Elizabeth: The Golden Age (at least what we see of it from its trailers) that favour floridly, elaborately beautiful visuals closer to painting than to any imaginable photographic representation of historical reality. These are images that are not afraid to show us they are images, that do not feel the need to pretend to be real; and that are thus entirely free to go as far as they wish in the quest for beauty and expressive, emotional power.
This is not new ground, of course - the expressive manipulation of the cinematic image is as old as the medium itself, entire movements (such as German Expressionism) were built on very similar ideas; it would be difficult to find a single great film-maker, living or dead, whose films do not bear witness to an at least implicit engagement with the image as artifice. What is new (apart from the aforementioned input of digital media and the postmodern tendency towards pastiche) is the extent of these ideas' penetration into the Hollywood and international mainstream. We have David Fincher's (at least pre-Zodiac) swooping cameras, Darren Aronofsky's formal compositions, Zhang Yimou's swirling colourscapes, Chan-wook Park's baroque mise-en-scene, Baz Luhrmann's carnivalesque scenes, even the dashes of surrealism that colour the two Pirates of the Caribbean sequels.
It might be pure coincidence that for the past three years the Palme d'Or at Cannes has gone to resolutely gritty, social-realist features; or it might perhaps represent a critical and academic backlash towards this increase in cinematic artifice, and a retreat to the safety of realism. Admittedly, these tools certainly can, and definitely have, been misused to create vacuously pretty but soulless showreel movies. But it seems clear to me that, regardless of their individual quality, in blowing open the established conventions of cinematic realism, in tentatively mapping out the path for a new, digitally-aided postmodern impressionism that is starting to dominate both mainstream and art-house cinemas, these films have ushered in an exciting new range of possibilities waiting to be explored.
Reading critical views on Darren Aronofsky's The Fountain, I was very strongly reminded of what many of the same critics wrote about another film released a few years ago. Both films premered at the Venice Film Festival, to general disdain. Like The Fountain, the ghost of Stanley Kubrick was repeatedly invoked to explain its grand ambition and ponderous sense of self-importance, while, also like The Fountain, the film's ambiguously spiritual, transcendental themes were dismissed as preposterous and laughable, the film declared emotionless and cold, and ultimately laughed out of theatres. As if to cement the point, both films feature a slightly risque bathtub scene that, for varying reasons, was the focus of tabloid attention on the respective films.
This other film was Jonathan Glazer's Birth (2004), a film that is, to my mind, one of the most well-crafted and fascinating of the past decade; a description which fits The Fountain equally well. I must begin to wonder if many critics' dismissal of the two films, for much the same reasons, is symptomatic of a complete inability or unwillingness to engage with their grand, quasi-spiritual, one can almost say religious (though not in the dogmatic sense) ideas. After all, it does not take any great insight to see that a critical environment that hails such socially worthy but blinkeredly unambitious and safe works of "serious" filmmaking as Paul Greengrass' United 93 and Martin Scorsese's The Departed (both 2006) will not easily adapt to something like The Fountain : it seems as if many established critics are too comfortable in the postmodern, materialist, rationalist status quo to be open to anything that steps outside those boundaries. A film that questions social and political ideologies is radical and daring, but a film that examines deeper assumptions about life and consciousness is, apparently, ridiculous and pretentious.
The Fountain is the third film of Darren Aronofsky's career, and also the third demonstration of flawed but unmistakable genius. This time around, his ambitions have (literally) skyrocketed, and the flaws are writ larger than ever; the successes, however, have become equally majestic and awe-inspiring. Stretching his canvas out into a thousand-year (possibly) science fiction personal odyssey, Aronofsky charges head-on into perhaps the oldest and greatest of subjects: the nature and meaning of death, and how it relates to life and love.
At the core of the story is the relationship between Dr. Tom Creo (Hugh Jackman), a brilliant neuroscientist, and his wife Izzy (Rachel Weisz), who is slowly dying of a brain tumour. Tom's obsessive drive to find some form of miracle cure for his wife is contrasted to her almost serene acceptance of her fate, manifested in the novel she pens. Around and stemming from this story, two other narrative threads intertwine - the story of a sixteenth-century conquistador searching for the tree of life, and of a twenty-sixth-century spacefarer headed for a distant nebula. The connections between the three strands exist not only through the presence of Jackman and Weisz in all three eras, but also through a recurrence of the themes of death and rebirth, love and sacrifice; the thrice-repeated pattern, in different permutations, is of Jackman undertaking a quest to grant eternal life to his beloved - a quest that must end with the acceptance of death and an understanding of its role in the life-cycle of the universe.
The actual, logical connection between the three segments is more difficult to pin down - although, at its heart, the story is much simpler and more logical than many, who have labelled the film incoherent, will have you believe. Its framework, however, does invite considerable thought, and supports a number of conflicting interpretations.
(some spoilers follow in white...highlight to read)
The interpretation that, to me, feels the most plausible and satisfying, is that the sixteenth-century narrative exists only as the novel that Izzy writes and that Tom must finish, as a means of understanding the nature of death and rebirth. The twenty-sixth century narrative, however, is real. Throughout the film we have seen Tom and his team discovering the amazing properties of a new compound that seems to stop the aging process in its tracks; this is hardly the kind of thing that is inserted as a background detail and forgotten about. For five hundred years Tom is unable to come to terms with Izzy's death and unable to finish her novel; understanding finally dawns on him as he travels to the nebula that for her had been a symbol of the afterlife, carrying the tree he himself had planted on her grave. He writes the ending of the novel, where the conquistador dies through the creation of new life in the blossoming flowers, and enters the nebula at the moment of its life-giving, on a universal scale, explosion.
(end spoilers)
It might be true that The Fountain does not have anything new to say about death. And yet, has it ever been told so beautifully, so affectingly? This is a remarkably-constructed and -crafted film, from the interlocking logic of the narratives (creating its own mythology out of various sources, including Mayan and Christian mythologies as well as, undoubtedly, Joseph Campbell), to Clint Mansell's incredible music (surely the best film score in years), to Matthew Libatique's gorgeously dark cinematography and formal compositions, to the unique visual effects, partly achieved through microscopic photography of chemical reactions. It is a film built on a recurring, potently mythic network of imagery encapsulating its core theme, the inseparable intertwining of death and rebirth - evident most clearly in the repeated image of the tree of life, life-giving growth emerging from death. Most remarkable, however, is its deep emotional impact - a mixture of sadness and joy and, ultimately, in its astounding, heart-stopping, unbelievable climax, sheer, spiritual awe. There is an earnestness at the heart of the film which might strike some as pretentious, but which seems to me, in a cultural climate where no form of belief in anything non-rational, or any greater meaning, can be expressed unless regulated by the safety-valve of irony, to be a heartfelt, honest and tortured call for a belief, however momentary, in an all-encompassing, transcendental beauty.
Which is not to say it is a perfect film. Its primary flaw, and it is quite a big one, is that Aronofsky's dialogue often feels leaden, contrived and unnecessarily portentous, with the result that Izzy and Tom never leave an impression on us as living, breathing human beings. The film's plodding, precisely calculated nature gives little space for its characters to live, so the people in the film are rarely more than pieces for Aronofsky to push around in his game. It is a testament to the film's other strengths that this is not enough to destroy our considerable emotional investment in Tom and Izzy's relationship, which is the fulcrum of the entire story; and yet it is not difficult to imagine that The Fountain with a better-realized insight into its central couple would have not only been hands down the best film of last year, but quite possibly one of the cinematic highlights of this decade.
Others have pointed to its artificiality and ponderous sense of self-importance as flaws, but this is an unavoidable part of the approach it must take; this is a mediaeval icon or an ancient hieroglyph of a film, schematically planned out to the smallest thematic and imagistic detail, unconcerned with the day-to-day world, interested solely in its quest for the divine. The price it must pay is constantly treading a fine line between grandeur and silliness; to my mind, the former outweighs the latter resoundingly and conclusively.As it is, The Fountain is therefore undeniably flawed, and yet, I have no hesitation in choosing a glorious, ambitious but imperfect film such as it is over any number of perfectly-realized blandnesses. In its best moments, of which there are many, it is genuinely, monumentally transcendental, and it only gets better on reflection. It is, ultimately, a heartfelt outpouring of great joy tinged with great sadness, a celebration of love, an earnest meditation on the greatest and most eternal of themes, and a grand, towering piece of cinematic artistry.
