Play It Up, Play It Down

2001’s best movies played it up — or way down.

by Sam Adams



Freaks and geeks: Hedwig and Ghost World are two of 2001’s best.

In 2001, extremism was the enemy — except in movies, where it was our bestest buddy. The millennium’s first harvest was a scanty one; even films that started out promisingly couldn’t seem to hold it together until the final reel. The only way to rise above the tide of mediocrity was to go over the top, or under the radar. Of course, it’s possible to have too much of a good thing: If The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring dispensed with genealogy, or In the Bedroom’s haunting sorrow wasn’t shattered by Death Wish clangor, they’d almost certainly have ended up on a list that could well have used a few more entries.

No one can accuse Baz Luhrmann or John Cameron Mitchell of thinking small. Luhrmann’s Moulin Rouge! was an absolute stunner, not least because the movie that preceded it, the loathsome William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet, was such vacuous tripe. A postmodern pop masterpiece whose bare excuse for a story — writer gets courtesan; writer loses courtesan; writer gets courtesan — was merely the stage on which Luhrmann mounted a production that would’ve made DeMille gape. Excess was surely the point, although even then there was almost too much of it. The nonstop bewilder- and bemusements go on so long that you’re gasping for breath, first in astonishment and then in exhaustion, but the lack of air only makes you giddier. As with Titanic, there’s nothing you can say to detractors who bemoan Moulin’s boilerplate dialogue or archetypal plot; you’re either swept away or you’re not, and to believers, the failure to respond seems nothing short of heretical. Parodying forms that haven’t even been invented yet, Moulin Rouge! is like Devo plays Exile on Main Street, a computer-simulated orgy that gets you off, but not where you’d expect.

Working, no doubt, with less than was spent on Nicole Kidman’s Rouge locks, Mitchell took Hedwig and the Angry Inch from the Bowery to the multiplex and made the movie Velvet Goldmine should have been (and maybe the one Boys Don’t Cry should’ve been as well). As a male-to-female transsexual whose botched sex change leaves her neither here nor there, Hedwig both embodies and derails glam rock, literalizing its promise of gender fluidity while illustrating that it’s a bumpy road after all. Mirroring not just Goldmine but Todd Haynes’ Poison as well, Hedwig climaxes in a spectacle of debasement and transcendence that would’ve put a bulge in Jean Genet’s prison garb.

Misfits of another kind ruled Ghost World, only they wanted to lose, not find themselves. Directed by Terry Zwigoff (Crumb), making the crossover from documentaries for the first time, Ghost World was constructed as an anti-Hollywood movie, its characters unglamorous, unhip and unwilling to change — at least until they start trying to change and make things even worse. For weeks after it opened, you heard people discussing it at bars, between bands, over coffee, getting over the shock that they were telling our story. Funnily enough, it took a studio movie to do what no indie ever has: get inside the skin of people who live outside the outside, who even the rejects reject. It didn’t shatter any box-office records, but you can bet it’s on its way into cult immortalization. Next time you’re watching a crap band play, yell out "Blues Hammer!" and see how many people get the joke.

And speaking of doing a lot with a little, The House of Mirth (technically a 2000 release that wasn’t screened here until January) and What Time Is It There? (which never got closer than New York, though keep your fingers crossed) ran the dynamic range from a whisper to a whisper. Terence Davies’ magnificent adaptation of Edith Wharton’s novel positively glowed on the screen. And Tsai Ming-Liang’s What Time…? worked with still, unbroken shots, at least until the very end, creating a formal structure so entrancing that when it’s modified even slightly, it feels as if the sky has opened up.

Wong Kar-Wai’s In the Mood for Love was melodrama in reverse, every emotion wrapped in a cocoon as tight as Maggie Cheung’s filigreed, constricting dresses. Always a technical wizard, Wong found a new use for his flash-cut aesthetic, using the camera as a dynamic counterpoint to his character’s inertia.

In The Tailor of Panama, John Boorman brought complex, pitch-black political satire back to the screen, not that anyone bothered to watch it. With Pierce Brosnan as a kind of anti-Bond, a raffish, cocksure British spy who’s also a mercenary, murderous and utterly amoral, Tailor took a far more complicated look at the implications of colonial power than any movie in recent memory and, given the current climate, any movie we’re likely to see any time soon.

Agnès Varda’s Les Glaneurs et la Glaneuse (The Gleaners and I) used a DV rig as a caméra-stylo, writing a memoir in images, a deeply personal nonfiction essay with more kick than a dozen Pearl Harbors. And Stranger Inside, ex-Philadelphian Cheryl Dunye’s look at the life of women in the penal system, was stellar, straight-up drama. Filmed for cable television, it’s the least visually distinct movie on this list, but at least playing things up the middle worked for one filmmaker this year.

In an era with three film trilogies in progress — The Lord of the Rings, Star Wars and The Matrix — it makes sense to think big, but even as spectacle takes the place of mere entertainment, it helps to remember that movies are never any bigger than the emotions they put across. It seems almost unfair that Hedwig and Ghost World, two of the movies I responded to most deeply in the past year, opened on the exact same day. (In fact, Hedwig didn’t truly strike home until I re-watched it a couple of weeks ago; I knew it was good, but I’d forgotten that it was that good.) And it certainly seems noteworthy, if not necessarily significant, that not a single one of them opened after Sept. 11. I doubt that I would have liked Ocean’s Eleven better if I’d seen it in August, and my disdain for Mulholland Dr. predates the turmoil of the last three months. (There are a handful of releases, too, that didn’t screen locally in time to make the deadline: Ali and Donnie Darko among them.) But it makes you wonder: For all the times that movies have been dismissed as escapist, maybe escape isn’t really what we want, or maybe knowing how contrived and transitory the two-hour flight from reality really is spoils the fun. As enjoyable as Joy Ride and Amélie were, they’re bonbons, and we’re hungry for more.

Sam Adams’ Best of 2001

(alphabetical)

Ghost World
The Gleaners and I
Hedwig and the Angry Inch
The House of Mirth
In the Mood for Love
Moulin Rouge!
Stranger Inside
The Tailor of Panama
What Time Is It There?