The best, the worst, and should we care? - Reel World - Brief Article

USA Today (Society for the Advancement of Education), March, 2002 by Christopher Sharrett

ASSEMBLING A LIST of the year's best films is always a melancholy and distasteful project for me. It is an enterprise that seems so American, this preoccupation with who's on top, who's on the bottom, who gets the brass ring, who's the year's designated loser. It's all pretty pathological. Most disheartening of all as we play this game is confronting the ongoing bankruptcy of the entertainment media, which now scarcely has any pretense of seriousness or interest in addressing the audience as mature adults. Picking and choosing among the rubble of this industry merely reminds one how far the medium has fallen, how few intelligent voices come through, and how the cinema, that great visionary art form of the 20th century, became eye candy in the hands of the new globalized corporate culture.

There are always bright spots. Tilda Swinton was affecting as a distraught wife and mother trying to keep her dysfunctional family protected by its cloak of denial in "The Deep End." Michael Mann delivered a moving, but uneven, tribute to one of the last century's greatest athletes in the biopic "Ali." Fans of David Lynch are singing the praises of his "Mulholland Drive," but for my money, this director has long since drifted into a self-absorbed obscurantism, preoccupied more with chilly vignettes than transmitting anything like a cohesive meditation on a given subject. Much-trumpeted pictures like "A Beautiful Mind" are tearjerkers that sanitize their subject matter to create the kind of human interest story we once watched on TV's "Hallmark Hall of Fame." Such films ignore moral complexity to go for the jugular, offering audiences the cheap emotional rewards they ostensibly came for. "Moulin Rouge" is another attempt to resuscitate the musical in the postmodern age, via a slew of hip allusions to movie and music history, helped along by the sexiness of Nicole Kidman. It tries to return us to the notion of the musical as symbol of art as utopian space, but this film is too self-aware, too much involved in the hermetically sealed Hollywood history (and its exhaustion) to count for much as an enduring work once the thrill of its spectacle dies out.

Even grimmer news is obvious in the directions taken by filmmakers like the Coen brothers, often seen as symbols of the remaining fragments of the American independent tradition. Their "The Man Who Wasn't There" is another trip through cinematic yesteryear, flaunting the conventions of film noir without doing a thing with them. After last year's indulgence, "O Brother, Where Art Thou?," one is tempted to think there is less to the Coens than meets the eye, with "Fargo" a commercially shrewd triumph that speaks more to their calculation than their sensibility.

Several critics noted that the outstanding picture of 2001 was Francis Coppola's release of a revamped "Apocalypse Now," a movie from 22 years ago. This response says much about the current state of affairs. "Apocalypse Now" is by no means short on action and spectacle, but, unlike the current fodder, it has another couple of ingredients: a script and characters that draw you into a narrative that attempts, at times pretentiously to be sure, to make comments on warfare, on the incursion into Vietnam, and the condition of America during that troubling time. Try finding such ambitions in the current cinema.

In a recent issue of The New York Times, David Thomson noted that the films of 1971 seem almost Homeric compared to the fare of 30 years later. The cinema of the 1960s and 1970s hardly required a degree in epistemology, but they at least contained adult characters with complicated adult personalities. Movies like "Bonnie and Clyde" "The Wild Bunch," "The French Connection," "Dirty Harry," and "A Clockwork Orange" were meant to sell popcorn, but at the time such an enterprise wasn't seen as incompatible with offering the viewer an image of the world that had at least a rough similarity to real human experience. Today, we get hyped-up video games bereft of any connection to a sophisticated adult sensibility. Domestic dramas very often convey "feel good" ideas (if ideas is the word) about the basic goodness of the family for all its foibles. Action pictures opt for cheap patriotic sentiment and hyperviolence. Above all, sequels rule the day, as corporations recycle what they see as tried and tree. After all, if "Planet of the Apes" should crash and bum, it will find a new market on DVD once loaded with gimmicky extras.

Although I've already done it, I dislike painting a monolithic picture. There are always bright lights on the horizon, some of which can look dim as you approach them. I anticipate new films by people like Abel Ferrara, Gregg Araki, David Fincher, and Mike Figgis, while keeping in mind that, in this day and age, a director's critical recognition often means that his next effort won't be so hot. It can be fun to wait for new performances by Swinton, Brad Pitt, Gary Oldman, Helena Bonham Carter, and other actors who became interesting performers in the 1990s. Such older actors as Dennis Hopper, Christopher Walken, Robert De Niro, and Tommy Lee Jones can still turn in quirky and compelling performances, although some (De Niro) have been wasting time on worthless projects solely to keep working.