By Dan Callahan
I haven’t seen David Lynch’s Mulholland Dr. since it was released in theaters in 2001, but I saw it twice on the big screen then, and I remember it vividly. There are some dead ends in the narrative, and these dead ends are what people seize on when they criticize the film, but there are scenes and moments in Mulholland that strike me as classic: Naomi Watts’s audition setpiece, where we realize that her character is a fine actress, or maybe just dreams of herself as a fine actress. The rapture of the sex scene Watts shares with Laura Harring. The impatient look on an aged Ann Miller’s face as she stares at Watts at a party near the end. Most of all, though, I remember the face and the voice of Rebekah Del Rio as she sings Roy Orbison’s hit “Crying” a cappella, in Spanish, her voice soaring out from some deep place within her and lingering in the air like a taunt of emotional defiance. I’m not sure how Mulholland Dr. would look to me now that this decade is ending, but I thought at the time that it was the best film I had seen that had been made after the year of my birth, 1977, which saw the unfortunate debut of Star Wars.
I suppose I’m reluctant to look at Mulholland again because I don’t want to let go of the ecstatic experience it was for me in 2001. I was not a particular Lynch fan and had no expectations when I first saw it at a screening, but I remember that I felt from its first shots that it was leading me to a place where the idea of the movie past would be sensuously analyzed, raked over and irradiated in a new way, without ever losing sight of the human emotions and hopes that went into this art form of the twentieth century. Was the film a renewal, or an apocalypse, or both? There was a smaller movie that year, Richard Kelly’s Donnie Darko, that seemed to feel a similar sense of sexy misgivings, of luxurious, thwarted feeling and wised-up regret. In 2007, Rebekah Del Rio reappeared to sing the Star Spangled Banner in Kelly’s much-reviled Southland Tales, a film I championed at the time. I have doubts about it now, but I still think that it instinctively caught a sense of its year, just as Donnie Darko did, just as Mulholland Dr. illuminates the past and points the way to the future.
There were some impressive films released in the first year of this decade, 2000. I very much enjoyed Curtis Hanson’s Wonder Boys, and I assume it would still work as an entertainment. Darren Aronofsky’s Requiem for a Dream knocked me out when I saw it, mainly because of Ellen Burstyn’s extremely raw performance and the tense score by Clint Mansell, which has been used to death in movie trailers ever since. There are a lot of people who hated and still hate that movie, but whenever I’ve caught parts of it on television, it still seemed to hold up well. Aronofsky’s much-derided follow-up, The Fountain, had moments of pure, almost silent movie romantic beauty, but then came The Wrestler and its shameless use of Mickey Rourke. I dislike that movie, and it sheds a new light, or “explains” Requiem in an unflattering way. It’s as if Burstyn and Rourke were baring their souls and Aronofsky was off to the side, gazing at them with insincere admiration and secret contempt.
Also in 2000, there was James Gray’s The Yards, a slow, deliberate, painterly gangster movie that was shot and edited in an entirely original style. After I saw it, I rented Gray’s first film, Little Odessa, which had a similar, not quite developed rhythm and shy sense of music and composition. I eagerly waited for Gray’s follow-up. And waited. And waited. In 2007, there came We Own the Night, which still feels to me like a near-great film, not as all-encompassing as Lynch’s Mulholland, but large, anguished and as formally inventive as anything made this decade. This year, Gray’s Two Lovers only confirmed how special he is, and the good news is that people who are serious about film are finally starting to see that Gray is as promising a director as is working today.
The years 2002-2006 were a truly miserable time to live in Manhattan, and the movies that were made in those years are tainted for me; I have only to see a film listed on television that was made in 2002 or 2003 to feel a queasy kind of depression and overall “what’s the use?” vibe that clings to them like barnacles. There are exceptions to this, like Robert Altman’s The Company (2003), which is one of his best works, serene, highly sensual, sometimes hateful in his “honest” mode, but filled with curiosity and life in all of its frames; we lost one of our major American artists when Altman died, and I was grateful to get a few more jazz riffs from him. In the same year, Steven Spielberg made the revealing Catch Me if You Can, with its eye-opening, old-fashioned credit sequence, its lust for fantasy life, and its debilitating knowledge of real life compromise, as honest a film as this problematic director has ever made.
I recently re-visited Sofia Coppola’s much-lauded Lost in Translation, which came out in 2003. Everyone seemed to go wild for that movie at the time, and I was no exception; I wrote a long rave of it for Film International that really embarrasses me now. Seeing it again, it looked flat, ignorant, self-pitying and off-putting; even Bill Murray’s work didn’t feel fresh anymore. I can only guess that it hit some kind of nerve in 2003 that isn’t available to us now, and I’m glad to be rid of that particular nerve. We treaded water for quite a while, and I believe American cinema reached some kind of bottoming out with Little Children (2006), which is hands-down the worst and most insultingly ugly new release I saw during this decade. Awful bits of it are still in my memory, just as shimmering pieces of Mulholland Dr. still bob up in my consciousness to startle and delight me, every now and then.
2007 was the year where a kind of footing was regained, a tension was released. I’m not sure how some of the films released that year will age, but Paul Thomas Anderson’s There Will Be Blood, the Coen Brothers’s No Country for Old Men, David Fincher’s Zodiac, Sean Penn’s Into the Wild and Gray’s We Own the Night all had an ambition that felt bracing after the dead, constricted movie years that had come before them. As a bonus, two still-active members of the French New Wave put out succulent valedictory works, Eric Rohmer’s The Romance of Astrea and Celadon and Jacques Rivette’s The Duchess of Langeais; this was a kind of bounty that was heartening to experience after so much depressive time-serving. 2008 brought two favorites: Jonathan Demme’s surprisingly emotional, almost O’Neill-esque Rachel Getting Married, and the Coen Brothers’s Burn After Reading, which seems to me after three viewings like a future comedy classic, an almost improvisatory yet perfectly judged and balanced cruel farce.
And what of the other major David, Cronenberg? I can’t say I liked his two biggies from this decade, A History of Violence (2005) or Eastern Promises (2007), but each of them had admirable formal sequences and I have a feeling that they might grow in my mind as time goes on; they might even survive this period better than some of the other movies I’ve loved. I was mostly bored by Tarantino’s Kill Bill movies and reached a plateau of impatience with him when Lucy Liu recited an old Trix commercial in the first installment. This year’s Inglourious Basterds felt bizarre, an experiment with Leone/Hawks time-stretching and ambiguous wish fulfillment, predicated on a “great” performance from Christoph Waltz that I was tired of about two minutes after he started giving it. Aleksandr Sokurov’s The Sun was made in 2005 but is only now getting a release here; it’s a fascinating look at the Japanese Emperor Hirohito that has remained with me long after I caught it on DVD.
There were single episodes of The Sopranos that were more intuitive and scathing about our culture than anything I saw at the movie theater, and I’ve heard repeatedly just how good Deadwood and The Wire are. In New York, there were rewarding film retrospectives, none more impressive than the nearly full season of Roberto Rossellini at the Museum of Modern Art and the event-like Jacques Rivette retro at Museum of the Moving Image, both in 2006. Film Forum released Jean-Pierre Melville’s long-unseen Army of Shadows (1969), a masterpiece that amplified and colored all the other new movies around it. I was stunned by Jean Grémillon’s Gueule d’Amour (1937) at a BAM Grémillon festival. Frank Borzage’s reputation has steadily risen, from a good cross-section retro at Museum of the Moving Image to the Murnau, Borzage and Fox DVD set, which made many of his best early films available. And Turner Classic Movies continually arranged mini-film festivals, filling gaps in our knowledge and offering unexpected rarities.
At galleries, I was blown away by a dual Jackson Pollack/Lee Krasner show at Robert Miller and a Louise Nevelson show at Pace Wildenstein. I swooned as I listened to Jean-Yves Thibaudet play the melancholy second movement of Ravel’s "Piano Concerto in G" at Carnegie Hall. In the theater, we had Edward Albee’s The Goat, a tough, major new play that actually ran on Broadway for a few months and seemed bolder and better every time I saw it (I wound up going three times, twice with Bill Pullman and Mercedes Ruel, and once with Bill Irwin and Sally Field, who was magnificent as the wounded wife). Ingmar Bergman crowned his career as a theater director with defining productions of Strindberg and Ibsen at BAM. The ever-hungry Marian Seldes confirmed her position as the Grande Dame of the New York theater in play after play. Gabriel Byrne went all-out on Broadway in O’Neill’s A Moon for the Misbegotten. Debra Monk was unforgettable in a revival of Arthur Laurents’s The Time of the Cuckoo at Lincoln Center. Mary-Louise Parker did a real old-fashioned theater star turn in Proof. There was a lot of innovative work done at Soho Rep, especially a razor-sharp production of Maria Irene Fornes’s Molly’s Dream. And no one who saw her will forget Meryl Streep as Mother Courage in Central Park, particularly her first act closing, “The Song of the Great Capitulation,” which was as physically thrilling as descriptions of Olivier on stage at his best.
On an acting level, Streep had a triumphant decade, moving from her fluid performance in Adaptation (2002) to her popular success in The Devil Wears Prada (2007), while Judy Davis did some of her boldest work ever on television (be sure to catch her lethal turn as Sante Kimes in A Little Thing Called Murder {2006} when it turns up on TV). Dina Korzun was heartbreaking as a Russian trophy wife in Ira Sachs’s beautifully made Forty Shades of Blue (2005), and Anna Faris did a comic tour-de-force in Gregg Araki’s little-seen Smiley Face (2007), finding new and inventive and often unflattering ways to be stoned out of her mind in every single scene. Marion Cotillard won an Oscar for the Edith Piaf biopic La Vie En Rose (2007), and she has many detractors who felt that she was over-the-top, but I couldn’t disagree with them more; it’s a huge performance, like Tilda Swinton’s outrageous yet well-disciplined star turn in this year’s Julia, yet always invested with an emotional specificity that does full justice to the hard life of the great singer. Then there was the guilty pleasure of Mike Nichols’s Closer (2004): Has there ever been a sexier movie scene than the strip club confrontation between walking hard-on Clive Owen and a lusciously turned-out Natalie Portman?
Early in the decade, there was Isabelle Huppert’s career-best performance in Michael Haneke’s The Piano Teacher (2001). I often dislike Huppert on screen, sometimes quite intensely, but there’s no arguing with the depth of her work as Erika Kohut, a woman whose sexuality is so twisted that she inspires a sense of awe. “Fearless” is an overused word when it comes to describing performances by actors, of course, but surely it’s a necessary term to describe Huppert’s work as Erika; she dives so deep into horrific sexual impulses that I had never seen or even guessed at before that I kept thinking, “Alright, Isabelle, you’ve gone this far, you might as well go further!” I don’t know how this decade will look to us in the coming years, either socially or artistically, but I assume that since we’ve gone this far, we might as well go further.
House contributor Dan Callahan's writing has appeared in Slant Magazine, Bright Lights Film Journal and Senses of Cinema, among other publications.
Tuesday, December 01, 2009
A Perspective on Aughts Culture
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24 comments:
Disagreed with some of your points, but always good 2 get a differing opinion. I like that u touched on tv as The Sopranos and Lost are 2 of the best filmed entertainment pieces of the decade. And i think The Wire is the best piece of filmed entertainment ever!!!! I would take the Pepsi Challenge with The Wire up against anything the has been put on film, video, computer hard drive, etc.
Like you, I was not a particular Lynch fan when I first saw Mulholland Drive (on an airplane from Sydney to LA, believe it or not). I was pretty stunned by it though. I recently rewatched it on a bigger screen with better sound, and in my opinion it definitely holds up.
I'm with you - that Rebekah del Rio scene in Mulholland Drive has haunted me ever since. Show-stopping scene.
I really loved this decade, cinema-wise. Some years weren't very good, but in terms of how much great stuff came out overall, this might be the best decade since the 70's (if not as good as the 70's). 2007 in particular was incredible, and even if its incredibleness doesn't totally outweigh the lows of the weaker years, this is still the decade that begins with Yi Yi and ends, for me at least, with Love Exposure, and finds room for Mulholland Dr., The New World, Zodiac, and A Christmas Tale in between.
I'm not happy saying it, but for American film this decade remains for me clearly inferior to the 70's, 80's & 90's.
The generally fine to excellent films that have floated to the top of some of these lists (Zodiac? Eternal Sunshine? I'm Not There? Children of Men? Lord of the Rings?) pale in comparison to the best of decades past.
I still think the most exciting and important American filmmaking of the decade happened on HBO with "The Wire," "The Sopranos" and "Deadwood."
Some may disagree. Certainly T.V. remains an artistic and spiritual toilet, generally. & many may resist conceeding any ground to a T.V. show.
But I just think David Simon, Chase, & Milch's shows outdid American cinema this decade in almost every area that matters, and the more time that passes this will only become more apparent.
I really enjoyed this post, Dan. It's personal and yet universal.
This sentence is so key: I have doubts about it now, but I still think that it instinctively caught a sense of its year.
Not to put this on an Oscar tangent, but the reason many people have the impression that the Oscars don't reward true greatness as well as they used to is because the Oscars have evolved into being a snapshot of what's hot for about 45 days, instead of something closer to a year -- pretty fitting for our Twitterfied culture.
In the case of your Requiem for a Dream or Lost in Translation experiences, maybe you changed, or maybe the times changed, or maybe the landscape changed because of what hit the big screen in subsequent years, or maybe all of the above. Regardless, the film we see today might not be the same one we see 10 years later, and I love the honesty with which you approach that shift.
This piece also shows that it's premature to compare the 00s to the 60s when the ground is still settling under some of the decade's best films. Reactions to There Will Be Blood in 2007 were honest, but 10 years from now that film will feel different than it does today. Better? Worse? I don't know. Just different.
"I still think that it instinctively caught a sense of its year."
Agreed, Jason, this is a key point, one causes me to ask the question, what are the films that caught a sense of this decade?
So many filmmakers big & small attempted to capture this, to address the historical landmark events of this decade in their films. As the ground settles under the best films of this decade, I suspect this will remain a key question.
I don't agree on all your points but I do appreciate what you wrote. However I have to take issue with the comment that one decade of filmmaking is necessarily "better" than another. It's apples and oranges, and quite frankly who cares?
A big part of why my feelings changed on films from this decade was subsequent films from the mostly youngish directors I was watching. But even in the case of an older artist, new films often shift our perceptions of their older ones.
As far as decades go, I think this one is on par with the nineties, not as rich as the seventies. To me, the eighties is a comparative wasteland, especially for American film; I'm always being gobsmacked by the brain dead, consumerist vibe of 80's movies when I re-see them on TV.
Mulholland Drive is full of deeply moving scenes: Winky's diner, Club Silencio, the audition, and many others. But the scene that actually made me leave my body out of the top of my head occurred in the second "half". Naomi Watts, as the junkie version of her character, makes coffee in her squalid kitchen. She faces the camera and hallucinates her lover's return. In that sequence, mostly a long take on Naomi Watts' face, I thought the actress had physically changed into someone else. Moreso, her face goes through contortions that I've never seen a human being express before. I was floored, devestated, and actually scared shitless. I thought I was hallucinating and possibly losing my mind.
Usually, I'm a pretty jaded moviegoer, always conscious of the ways in which filmmakers operate on an audience emotionally. But Lynch seems to have a direct line to the subconscious. I don't know how he does it.
@ Joel E: Comparing apples and oranges seems to be a cinephilic pastime. It doesn't have much of a point, per se, but it can be fun. Like making lists. I wish Umberto Eco was into comparing decades, because I'm sure he would have something awesome to say about this.
@ Dan: Totally agreed about the 80's. A couple of my all-time favorites are from the 80's (the top ones both start with Bl-), and it was something of a renaissance for escapist pop, but the crap made during the 80's stinks worse than most. As for the 90's, I guess the reason why I like the 00's more than the 90's isn't that more good stuff came out, but that, save for maybe Goodfellas, I like a lot of the good stuff that came out in the 00's more.
Dan, Mulholland Dr. has only gotten greater in the years since I saw it four times at the 42nd Street AMC, all late shows populated mostly with solo dudes who I assumed heard about The Scene between Naomi and "Rita."
The first time I saw the derelict creature appear behind the dumpster at Winkies, with a subwoofer grumble from the pit of hell, I damn near made like the dude in the movie and had a coronary.
Wondrous, terrifying scene after wondrous, terrifying scene, this is the film of the decade.
Requiem for a Dream always came off shallow and opportunistic to me.
Little Children is similarly cheap and predetermined, but it's luminous, fleshy cinematography almost transcends its elaborate bullshit.
I still have my suspicions about The Wire, universally beloved as it is. But this bias has something to do with my belief that the problems of inner cities are way too big/important for TV drama. This was a job for documentarians, not clever scenarists and their technical advisors.
So many procedural documentaries from the '90s and the Aughties that show how the real system works (shoot, even COPS) whip The Wire's pedigreed ass. I'm sorry, but in terms of getting us somewhere as a sociery, so far I don't see that series as much of great leap. More like a giant shrug.
Every decade has a surfeit of great films. I just think that they are concentrated in different areas of the world at different times, according to the vagaries of the market. This decade, the U.S. wasn't the best place to look, as corporate quality control turned the movie biz into a twin cousin of the music biz (zzz). Still, in the internet age, it's a lot easier for the avaricious/inudstrious viewer to track good flicks down wherever they may be hiding.
"This decade, the U.S. wasn't the best place to look, as corporate quality control turned the movie biz into a twin cousin of the music biz (zzz)."
Thank you! Well said.
"Still, in the internet age, it's a lot easier for the avaricious/inudstrious viewer to track good flicks down wherever they may be hiding"
& if we (sadly) spent this decade watching movies on our computers, we should have been watching the 3 Davids paint their masterpieces on HBO.
"the problems of inner cities are way too big/important for TV drama. This was a job for documentarians, not clever scenarists and their technical advisors."
The Wire's was genre entertainment, popular urban crime drama like The Big Sleep or The French Connection, working in a tradition than spans novels & cinema. It addressed the traditions of TV crime dramas mostly by pissing their graves.
As for social commentary or whatever we call it, haven't movies and novels & music done this as well?
ON their graves.
Hard to write & proof read only when the boss's back is turned.
Michael, everything I've seen and read of The Wire tells me it set its ambitions a lot higher than genre entertainment, or pissing on Raymond Chandler. More like they were aiming for Shakespaerean complexity, tying the Baltimore malaise to tragic power plays and civic disasters throughout history.
Still not high enough for me. I'll reserve (or withdraw) the full indictment until I've watched the whole series, but something like The Wire just seems like a bunch of very brilliant, clever professionals gathering to marvel at and embellish the conundrums, the catastrophes. HBO's documentaries on similar subjects at least gave us something of the real thing, unrehearsed (ostensibly).
Not to mention PBS and so many other documentary outlets. http://www.pbs.org/kqed/presumedguilty/
The best kept secret this decade might just be all the searing microbudget documentaries that brought viewers a lot closer to practical, useful understanding of everyday problems rather than just flaunting pathology pyrotechnics.
I can't say that I particularly like more than a couple of the films you cite as the best of the decade, but I certainly buy Little Children as the worst and most invidious movie of the past ten years. It's sadly typical of today's film criticism that probably the very worst scene in the movie, the "being that we are wicked conformist suburban mothers, we must all react in hysterics when the poor innocent pedophile gets into the pool to take a swim" scene, got a glowing write-up in the Times from Stephen Holden in his end of the year wrap-up as one of the best scenes in film that year.
And I'd like to jump in and say that it's precisely at the level of genre that I think The Wire attains its brilliance. There's been a bit too much hemming and hawing about its realism and social commentary/effect (or lack thereof), when I think the series is pretty definitively constructed (in the fictional narrative sense) all the way through.
It's cops and robbers. It's spaghetti western. It's working class lament. It's infrastructure exploration. It's flights of fancy and punches to the gut. It's comedy. It's tragedy. It's a great story, well told. And it makes me feel a little less alone because it explores and reveals so many facets of the human experience.
The Wire is true to its time, but my sense is it will go beyond its time too because—for whatever David Simon and his writers say outside the fictional world—it isn't trying to half-assedly fix things as they currently stand so much as hold up a mirror (slightly skewed as fiction tends to be) and ask us to consider the panorama, now and then and into the future.
It's breathtaking to me, and I hope you'll give it a fuller accounting, Steve, because it's damn deserving.
"Clever" is not a word I'd use to describe The Wire. I'm not sure what connotations that word has to you, but to me it suggests the use of fancy storytelling techniques (non-linear narration, tricky cinematography, etc) with a certain degree of self-satisfaction. The Wire really uses no fancy storytelling, no fancy camerawork, and I don't detect any self-satisfaction in its creators. Lost is clever. Memento is clever. The Wire is not; it's just smart.
I wouldn't describe it as "Shakespearean" either---David Simon cites the Greek tragedies as the main influence.
Keith,
It's passionate, eloquent defenses like yours and Michael's here that got me to give flicks like INLAND EMPIRE another shot. We'll see. I know David Simon has been biting his nails awaiting my final judgement.
I HAVE to get past that first scene of the first episode of the first season, which always stops me cold:
WHITE COP (w/fake American accent): I gotta ask you. If every time Snot Boogie would grab the money and run away, why'd you even let him in the game?
STREET THUG: Got to. This America, man.
Something about that scene ices my veins like trailers for The Blind Side: Wanna be part of our family? I thought I already wuz.
That opening scene seemed to announce that these folks were writing the hell out of this thing, aiming for powerful home truths and aphorisms, coming up instead with loaded soundbites. This America, man. You complete me.
But I did get to see most of somebody's 2nd and 3rd season discs a few years ago, finding them fairly diverting in a soap opera kind of way.
Ok, lemme stop hurting you. :) I know at The House, speaking ill of The Wire is like trashing The New World, which (to borrow a phrase from another resident troublemaker) is sorta like farting in church.
"documentaries that brought viewers a lot closer to practical, useful understanding of everyday problems"
Yeah, but who wants that from fiction? Who wants to watch (or read) fiction that primarily aims to inform you about the world? We want ART. We want the human experience dramatized in ways that help us "feel a little less alone" as Keith said.
Nothing I've seen this decade made me feel less alone than "The Wire."
The series has its didactic moments for sure, Steve, and I understand why that first scene might stop you cold. From my own experience, I didn't recognize the breadth and scope of The Wire until the end of the penultimate episode of Season 2. It's probably why that season remains my favorite, 'cause that's when I fully connected with it.
Then, it wasn't until a second pass through the series that I realized how beautifully all-encompassing it all was. There are scenes that state the point too emphatically at times, but I think there's room for such things in art (I seem to recall Alan Moore defending his comic "Promethea" on similar terms). It's not all The Wire is, and I don't think such sequences are directed to play with the hammerhead mock-profundity of something like The Blind Side. I guess we could consider them flaws, but such things only deepen the series for me, because these and other florid gestures are weighed against as many potent subtleties. And per Lester Freamon, "Every piece matters."
@ Steve: The Wire does have some lines that hit the nail too hard on the head for my liking, but typically it backs them up with hours of nuanced storytelling. While that scene might seem a little glib in the moment, after I started watching the series again I realized that it was basically a well thought out and not at all glib microcosm of everything that happens in the 60 hours that follow.
RE: Mullholland Drive, I remember reading critics talk about how they liked it on the big screen but fell out of favor with it when seeing it on television. I think with that movie the sprawling shots of Tokyo, projected onto a large screen, add an enveloping dimension to the film that's lost when viewed on a TV set.
My Top 31 films from the 2000's (in alpha-order):
25th Hour
The 40 Year Old Virgin
About a Boy
Adaptation.
American Splendor
Amores Perros ("Love's a Bitch")
Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy
Before Night Falls
Best in Show
Black Hawk Down
Blow
Bowling for Columbine
Brick
Cidade de Deus ("City of God")
Control
The Corporation
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
The Filth and the Fury
The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara
Hable con Ella ("Talk to Her")
Hot Fuzz
Kill Bill: Vol. 1 and 2
The King of Kong
The Lord of the Rings Trilogy
Mullholland Drive
Rabbit-Proof Fence
Sexy Beast
Sideways
Snatch
Sorry, Haters
Zoolander
Oops...I meant "Lost in Translation" in my 1st paragraph.
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