Best of 2001

(originally published in The Outreach Connection in January 2002)

These are the ten films (listed here in the order of their commercial release) that most stayed with me once the lights came up. Apologies to any masterpieces released at the very end of the year. See you in 2002!

The Pledge (Sean Penn)

Penn’s film lacks the constant rigor and assurance that could have made it a masterpiece, but it’s often extraordinary – one of the great detective movies in which the case at hand is the least of what’s being investigated. Jack Nicholson plays a cop who promises a dead girl’s mother to bring the perpetrator to justice – the film’s greatest strength is its accumulating ambiguity over what havoc his commitment has wreaked on his soul. Nicholson gives one of his greatest performances in years – a stripped-down portrayal of a decent, polite man of modest resources. Unfortunately, this imaginative, deeply skeptical film was poorly marketed as a straightforward thriller and quickly disappeared.

YiYi (Edward Yang)

Yang’s three-hour Taiwanese epic is probably the very best film of the year – completely successful both as entertainment and as art – an intricately calculated film with such poise and grace that it often appears to have been dreamt rather than constructed. Providing a very specific portrait of contemporary Taiwan and of its few main characters (built around a family in which all the members are in some form of transition), it’s visually and thematically dense while always seeming pragmatic. It’s “positive” enough that it can be advertised as uplifting and life-affirming, and yet holds back from offering any false buoyancy. I saw YiYi twice and could easily have gone again.

The Wind will Carry Us (Abbas Kiarostami)

I first saw this at the 1999 film festival: watching it again on its commercial release, it seemed less striking as an uplifting conclusion on the value of being alive (as I first wrote), and more so as a depiction of the perpetual struggle that constitutes life. The protagonist is an “engineer” who’s come to a small town for a purpose that’s never quite defined – much of the action is offscreen, and the character is frequently climbing or descending, searching, or realigning himself in some way. The dialogue keeps circling back to repeated questions or assertions like a weird variation on David Mamet. It’s eerie and mysterious, rich and powerful.

George Washington (David Gordon Green)

For a while, Green’s film about a group of kids hanging out in a derelict corner of North Carolina seems a bit limited and repetitive. But as the film’s narrative becomes stranger (and it gets quite strange), everything else about it becomes richer, culminating in a series of images that’s almost hallucinatory. In part it’s about the tentative way people attempt to anchor themselves in their environments and in their own skins; but it’s also a pure creation of the imagination – it could have been documentary or teen movie or much else, but found a muse that makes it all of these, and none of them.

The Man who Cried (Sally Potter)

Potter’s epic of sorts, with international settings and a big name cast, is directed at times as though she were dutifully keeping the financiers’ interests in mind. But at other times it’s bracingly experimental (even if slightly naively so). With Christina Ricci’s cool reserve working well as a dancer in Paris during World War Two – probing her own mysterious past while negotiating the confusion of the times – the film transforms itself at the end into a joyously melodramatic concoction. The film seems designed to be susceptible to analysis in the same way that film theorists mull over Bette Davis’ 1940’s films, and it comes pretty close.

Apocalypse Now Redux (Francis Coppola)

The re-release of Coppola’s 1979 Vietnam odyssey, with fifty minutes of added material, was one of the year’s great events in cinema. The new sequences make Redux less of a pure war film and more an abstract meditation on political, cultural and psychological confusion (with Vietnam being one of the all-time great media for such a project); more effectively leading the way now to the famously murky finale where Martin Sheen finds the missing Marlon Brando. It’s no great shakes as politics or analysis, and its energy sometimes seems touched by naivete, but no “new” movie had even half as much going on.

Mulholland Drive (David Lynch)

Lynch’s movie seems to be one thing for the first ninety minutes (a pseudo-detective story with a young actress and a femme fatale, with hints of various conspiracies around the edges), then changes direction entirely. In broad terms, it seems to me mainly about the narcissism and self-absorption at the heart of Hollywood. It’s stayed in my mind – not so much because of its narrative mysteries, but because of the sense that Lynch has captured the complexities of something real and significant while still indulging his considerable idiosyncrasies to the hilt.

Chunhyang (Im Kwon-Taek)

An old man on a stage sings the story of a nobleman’s son who falls in love with a courtesan’s daughter. The film melts into the past, where the story is sumptuously recreated. The film works as a record of a stage performance, as a historical recreation of immense poise and visual imagination, and in its combination of the two as an artistic construct. The plot turns on an act of female defiance that’s presented here for maximum impact and political clout, making the film equally effective as dialectic.

The Taste of Others (Agnes Jaoui)

Wonderfully structured French comedy of relationships, built around a businessman who falls in love with a sad actress and for the first time develops an artistic sensibility. Everything in the film is counterbalanced and proportioned, and it’s often very funny. “Can’t you see?” says one character in desperation, “Some things go together, others don’t.” The fun of the movie is in keeping us guessing about what falls into what category. Its great insight is in its full and mature depiction of the fluidity of the categories themselves.

Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone (Chris Columbus)

My favourite big-budget release of the year. Some said it was overly literal-minded, but I don’t know the book. I found the film remarkably engaging, even enchanting, yielding one revelation after another. Certainly, the more intimate concepts often come off better than the more obvious spectacles (which sometimes have too much of that distancing computer-generated look about them), but there’s enough magical stuff here to sweep aside all reservations, and the cast is excellent. Now if someone would just explain Quidditch to me…Harry New Year!