Moving On

He’s so vein: Jared Leto as a junkie in Requiem for a Dream, according to Sam Adams, "the one and only truly great movie of the whole damn year."

Looking back at 2000, and praying things get better next year.

by Sam Adams

"I want you to remember this moment."

Despite the generally painful quality of dialogue in the otherwise involving Pitch Black, Vin Diesel’s would-be catchphrase stands as a fitting epitaph for the year 2000. If there’s any way to look back at the year that was without plunging into a suicidal depression, it’s to remember the moments, the little bits and pieces of pleasure strewn in otherwise fallow pastures. No two ways about it: 2000 was a uniformly awful year for movies, chockablock with leaden blockbusters and art-house duds, with little if anything to stoke the fires of the imagination. It was easy enough to find little things to love — Björk’s cataclysmic performance in Dancer in the Dark, or the hypnotic fight scenes in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon — but they were almost invariably trapped within movies that for one reason or another fell short. This time last year, all you got for suggesting that 2000 wasn’t technically the start of a new era was a series of baffled, slightly pitying stares. But it’s become an issue that concerns more than numerologists and math geeks. It’s time to insist: The third millennium starts with the year 2001. Indecisive elections, bankrupt theaters, Rocky & Bullwinkle: Is this any way to start a millennium?

But as we bid good riddance to the 20th century — once and for all, this time — there are a few fond memories to take along with us. Chief among them is Requiem for a Dream, which is for my money the one and only truly great movie of the whole damn year. Appropriating techniques others had used but never as well, and coming up with a Santa sack full of new tricks, Darren Aronofsky vaulted himself straight to the front ranks of American directors, infusing his tale of addiction with a humanity and cinematic verve the likes of which this country hasn’t seen since Martin Scorsese made his mark in the early ’70s. And there was Ellen Burstyn, herself a Scorsese veteran, giving the year’s most affecting, soul-searching performance. (No, it didn’t have the raw edges of Björk’s Dancer turn, but you also weren’t distracted by the thought that the actress might simply be losing it.) Even Requiem was, it’s true, a movie of moments; the pretty young junkies who balanced out Burstyn’s TV-obsessed diet pill addict weren’t nearly as interesting, but Burstyn had half the movie to herself, and her electrifying vigor lifted even the scenes she wasn’t in.

As visually extravagant if not nearly as sophisticated, Pitch Black pulled out all the stops with its bleached-out yellow-and-blue first hour. And Mr. Death, one of those "technically 1999" releases that didn’t make it to Philadelphia until February — the same week as Pitch Black, incidentally — put Errol Morris’ docu-fictional techniques to bravura use, pushing the boundaries of documentary with a story which asked questions about the very nature of truth.

Though both hail from Iran, and the latter once assisted the former, Abbas Kiarostami and Bahman Ghobadi crafted dramatically different films which showed why that country’s movies generate so much excitement around the world. Kiarostami’s The Wind Will Carry Us used majestic, almost ostentatious restraint to turn communication breakdown into an existential joke, while Ghobadi’s brutally realist A Time for Drunken Horses dramatized the plight of the embattled Kurds who eke out a living on the border between Iran and Iraq. What the two have in common is a patient, poetic soul, an elongated rhythm and delicate cadence that soothes a mind accustomed to being pummeled by an onslaught of commercial product.

Patient too was Edward Yang’s Yi Yi, a three-hour Taiwanese melodrama that seemed utterly unconscious of its own epic nature. Michael Winterbottom’s overlooked Wonderland, which has to my knowledge made no other critic’s year-end list, made better use of digital video than the histrionic Dancer in the Dark or the confused Chuck and Buck, exploiting both the medium’s intimacy — scenes were shot on the streets of London, with bystanders as unsuspecting extras — and its emotional coldness. Both films spread over a wide canvas and kept their statements simple, allowing viewers to put the pieces together themselves. Traffic, on the other hand, leans way too hard on its the-drug-war-isn’t-working message (it’s painful even if you agree), and its emotion is often lost beneath the frantic effort to keep the plot moving. But Steven Soderbergh works magic weaving together his disparate threads, even if the two-and-a-half hour movie still feels frustratingly abridged.

You Can Count on Me worked miracles with a finely-honed script and a beautifully-directed ensemble, though at its heart the story boiled down to the interaction between a brother (the brooding, child-like Mark Ruffalo) and a sister (Laura Linney, finally getting the lead she’s deserved for years). And though Spring Forward director/writer Tom Gilroy came off as a condescending prick during his post-screening Q&A, the film’s entry provided one of the few bright spots in this year’s Philadelphia Festival of World Cinema. Though composed of fewer than a dozen scenes and shot almost wholly in real time, Spring Forward used inventive framing and off-center composition to avoid the pitfalls of the stagebound screenplay. With only Ned Beatty and Liev Schreiber on screen (barring a few interludes), Gilroy explores the contours of their faces in a way that’s as cinematic as anything in Cast Away.

All of the above are flawed, some egregiously so. But they had more than moments in them. It makes you wish the year’s other brilliant spots took place in more conducive contexts. If only Jesus’ Son ended as well as it began. If only the stellar performances in Almost Famous weren’t shackled to a cloying, overwritten script. If only Ghost Dog were as mesmerizing as its score (which, irritatingly enough, didn’t even turn up on the soundtrack, though it’s available as an audio track on the DVD). After seeing Joaquin Phoenix in Gladiator, or Drew Barrymore in Charlie’s Angels, or Willem Dafoe, John Malkovich and Eddie Izzard in Shadow of the Vampire, or Madeline Kahn in Judy Berlin, or Jack Black in High Fidelity, or Julie Walters in Titanic Town and Billy Elliot, or Fred Willard in Best in Show, or Clive Owen in Croupier, or a sari-clad Kate Winslet speeding across the Australian outback clad while belting out Alanis Morissette’s "You Oughta Know" in Holy Smoke!, it’s hard to wish away the year 2000, even if every one of those films was too flawed to thoroughly love. So leave the baby in with the bath water, and give 2000 a break. It’s not easy closing out a thousand years. As for 2001: You’ve been warned, buddy. I better see some improvement, or there’s going to be trouble.