The Best Films of 2001
This list might have been longer had I actually gotten around to “In the Mood for Love,” “Startup.com,” “Together,” “Donnie Darko,” “Lantana,” “Audition” and “Under the Sand,” or had I been interested in rewatching “In the Bedroom,” “The Royal Tenenbaums” and “Waking Life” to see if I had just completely missed the point the first time. I also ignored — perhaps unjustly — the extraordinarily divisive “A.I. Artificial Intelligence” and “Vanilla Sky,” but if either one gives me as much undiluted pleasure as the five (no, not 10, that would make it diluted pleasure) below, then this has been a very misunderstood year indeed.
1. “Memento” (Christopher Nolan). The gist of it’s here, but if I might add one final comment about this, the sole flat-out “A” of 2001: I was laid up with food poisoning in early February (thanks, apparently, to a deceptively innocuous macaroni-and-cheese dinner from Trojan Grounds — guilty until proven innocent), and during that luxurious week of bedrest, ended up watching “Memento” three times on DVD. “Does it hold up?” you ask. Would you watch a movie three times back-to-back if it didn’t? With each viewing, the crafty construction and ghostly surreal touches snap into sharper and sharper focus, and — thanks to Guy Pearce, lending personality to a man who, by the very nature of his famous “condition,” can have none — the circle of no return that is Leonard Shelby’s doomed existence cuts a little deeper. Rendering universal the loneliest of tragedies, “Memento” is the rare thriller that revels in fatalism and compassion and dares to suggest — brilliantly, hauntingly, indelibly — that one is inseparable from the other.
2. “Mulholland Dr.” (David Lynch). I wonder what all those people who loathed “Vanilla Sky” would think of “Mulholland Dr.,” had they been even remotely interested in a movie that didn’t star either Tom Cruise or that inarticulate beauty he tossed Nicole aside for. I haven’t seen it myself, but based on the near-unanimous complaints (“It doesn’t make any sense,” “There’s too many loose ends,” “The premise changes every five minutes”) — all of which could be superficially applied to Lynch’s film — it would be interesting to see how one auteur’s impenetrably surrealist satire stacks up against another’s. Crowe is an uncommonly assured director, but I would be surprised to see him command his film’s oblique structural twists and shifts in mood with the same spooky intricacy that Lynch has made so absolutely his own, or saturate his moody dreamscape with so much unbridled passion and black humor it almost doesn’t matter where the damn thing’s going. I certainly don’t expect Penélope Cruz to give the performance of the year; indeed, I don’t know how Naomi Watts pulled off what she did, or whom she had to sell her soul to so she could embody an angel and a demon and make them dual shadings of the same tortured ingenue; I merely regret that she couldn’t finagle an Oscar out of the deal somehow. As defiant experiments go, “Mulholland Dr.” is a more carefully crafted film than Lynch himself would have you believe; if the implications it leaves you with are less about the existential implications of identity, longing and the power of self-delusion and more along the lines of “What the f---?!,” don’t worry — take a deep breath, wait for the mood, the music, the indelible images to wash you back into an appreciative stupor, and give it another spin. If you forget how much fun the journey was to begin with, you’ve no one to blame but yourself.
3. “The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring” (Peter Jackson). Not to pour steaming piss* on Nolan’s or Lynch’s achievements, but you expect brilliance of an obscure, nonlinear psychothriller; how much more surprising when the most widely anticipated blockbuster/high-profile literary adaptation in ages can stand among the year’s best films? Praise Jesus — and I’m not being facetious; you can’t watch a movie this improbably successful and not suspect divine intervention — for Peter Jackson. Bless him for embracing J. R. R. Tolkien’s trilogy with both the passion of a wide-eyed adolescent and the judicious wisdom of a parent (unlike Chris Columbus, who seems to have directed “Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone” with J. K. Rowling's knife in his scrotum), for matching his awe-inspiring landscapes and battle sequences with a soul-stirring depth of character and insight, for making the first movie to scare me stupid both times I saw it. Most novels are labeled “unadaptable”; Jackson’s towering epic is so beautifully and organically cinematic, so thrillingly and completely its own work, that you wonder for a split second whether the book could possibly live up to the experience. “Heresy!” you Tolkien fans cry. No, not heresy — just divine intervention.
4. “Gosford Park” (Robert Altman). God, what a movie. There’s something deeply endearing about a film that amuses you just fine the first time and positively blows you away the second; I have this recurring image of Altman, the master cardsharp, winking at me as if to say, “And for a moment there you doubted me.” The turn-off for the impatient viewer — the labyrinthine camerawork, the thicker-than-James-Berardinelli accents, the incessant hum of an entire social structure in motion — becomes even more of a giddy, disorienting thrill with each successive viewing, and rarely has a canvas this sweeping boasted so many wonderful arias, so many perfectly realized moments of truth and poetry. While most mysteries furnish an English country-house party for the sake of a murder, Altman, subversive devil that he is, commits murder for the sake of the party — his vision of this dense, layered community is alternately playful, tender, sincere and all-knowing. “Gosford Park” ends with the departure of all the houseguests and their maids and valets, all in reasonably good humor, Jennings closing the front door after them, the camera content to drift idly away without resolution — it reinforces what the whodunit was invented to reinforce, the inherent deceptiveness of outward appearances. The English may have a reputation for unflappable composure in the face of murder, but now, Altman seems to be gently telling us, we know better.
5. “Ghost World” (Terry Zwigoff). Missed roughly the first 10 minutes the first time I saw it (sorry, Lameese!), and I actually prefer it that way — it’s not that I don’t love Thora Birch’s dancing; it’s more that I don’t love Thora Birch’s unconvincingly bitchy delivery of semi-stupid lines like “It’s so bad it’s gone past good and back to bad again.” But once that grad-night sequence is finished (and hey, I’m nitpicking; the rest of the sequence, like the rest of this comic-inspired fantasia, is pretty darn great), Zwigoff sustains his rueful comedy with a miraculous lightness of touch, suffusing each hysterical moment with an air of indescribable melancholy; complaints about excessive caricatures (namely the art teacher, played with dead-on goopiness by Illeana Douglas) miss the point that the film judges no one but Enid herself, delighting in her formidable intelligence and her contempt for selling out but refusing to indulge in the self-destructive consequences of her own cynicism. It's a true coming-of-age film, wise and rudely, spectacularly funny; the ending could’ve been shorter by a minute or two, but when you’ve become acquainted with someone like Enid, closure — even overstated closure — feels like a precious gift.
If I, Justonius, Ran the Oscars ...
BEST PICTURE
BEST DIRECTOR
BEST ACTOR
BEST ACTRESS
BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR
BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS
BEST ORIGINAL SCREENPLAY
BEST ADAPTED SCREENPLAY
*MITCHELL: ... Enough rage and helplessness, and your love turns to something else.
ALLISON: What does it turn to?
MITCHELL: It turns to steaming piss.
— from “The Sweet Hereafter”