2001: A great year for movies

While the studios distracted us with big-budget behemoths, a renaissance in art film unfolded before our eyes.

By Andrew O'Hehir

Nov. 16, 2001 | It has to be a good year for something, right? I mean, something besides therapists and manufacturers of latex gloves. In fact, as attentive filmgoers are starting to notice, 2001 has already become one of the best years for truly strange movies in the last few decades. I'm not so much talking about movies that offer an escape from reality (as much as we all might appreciate that right about now) but those that present almost hallucinatory alternate realities, or those that suggest nothing could be weirder than reality itself.

Hollywood had a dismal summer in which most of its big-budget offerings, with the sole exception of "Shrek," opened huge and then went down like the USS Arizona. That's a joke that might have been funny a few months ago; and indeed, the events of Sept. 11 made everyone in the mainstream film world feel justifiably uncomfortable, if only for a while. The real disasters we saw on that day brought the most callous excesses of the blockbuster era into horrific reality. They made those excesses seem puny, which is why perhaps no burst of patriotism these recent weeks manifested itself in a desire to see "Pearl Harbor" again.

And, of course, box office isn't the point: None of those big-budget movies are memorable or represent good filmmaking. Yet while we were all watching interestedly as the hype around "Pearl Harbor" produced a delicious flop, out there on the margins of the moviemaking system, both in the U.S. and around the world, exciting things were happening.

This goes against everything that film critics, myself included, are accustomed to saying. We have a certain Chicken Little tendency: The sky is always falling, the movies get crappier and crappier every year, and the golden age that never existed in the first place is fading ever more into memory. Soon the entire entertainment universe will be ruled by one gargantuan Spielberg-Lucas-Cameron machine, squatting astride the globe and grinding out treacly sentiment and sadistic cruelty in roughly equal portions.

There may be a kind of truth to this view, which has been around at least as long as Pauline Kael's influential 1980 essay "Why Are Movies So Bad?" if not since time immemorial. But it's not the kind of truth that's, well, actually true. Sure, the Hollywood production system tends to create shallow, cynical and sloppy movies. But guess what? It always did.

When we think of Hollywood in the 1940s, we think about "Casablanca" and "The Big Sleep" and Lauren Bacall saying, "You know how to whistle, don't you? Just pucker up and blow." We don't think about Ronald Reagan and Shirley Temple (as a couple!) in "That Hagen Girl" or about "A Guy Named Joe," directed by Victor Fleming (who helmed both "The Wizard of Oz" and "Gone With the Wind"), the slogan for which was "A guy -- a gal -- a pal -- It's swell!" But the latter kind of movie, as always, outweighed the former by perhaps 10 to 1.

Yeah, good mass-culture popcorn movies got made in the old Hollywood, and they still do in the new one, even though you wouldn't know it from the evidence of 2001. What this year, and indeed the last several years, have brought us is something far more surprising: a new golden age of art movies. Yeah, that's what I said, and I'm not taking it back.

We told ourselves that American independent film had died, or morphed into an inflated and corrupt imitation of itself, and then 1999 brought us "American Beauty," "Being John Malkovich" and "Three Kings." We thought foreign filmmakers had enslaved themselves to making pallid, pretty imitations of Hollywood spectacle, and then 2000 brought us the uncompromising visions of Abbas Kiarostami ("The Wind Will Carry Us"), Edward Yang ("Yi-Yi"), Bruno Dumont ("Humanité") and of course Ang Lee ("Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon").

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