The Best Films of the Decade Posted by David Denby

December 15, 2009
The Best Films of the Decade Posted by David Denby

The great directors—Griffith, Chaplin, Renoir, Ford, Hawks, Hitchcock, De Sica, Mizoguchi, Kurosawa, Bergman, Scorsese, and the others—did not imagine that they were making films for a tiny audience; they thought that they were making films for everyone, or at least everyone of spirit, which is a lot of people. But, over the past thirty years, the movies have split, increasingly, into mass and class. The conglomerates, through marketing and maximum use of cable, DVDs, and other ancillary markets, have perfected the task of catering to the ever-emerging young audience—the audience they want to sell to—while older people have been cordoned into the fall season, to wander aimlessly the rest of the year like downsized workers; or they have decided simply to look at movies at home. To put it crudely (and I admit there are many exceptions), we now have a spectacular mall cinema that favors sensation over emotion, and a small, intense art cinema, for the remaining art houses (and, more recently, cable and the Internet), centered on intimate relations and difficult, crabby, even painful themes. As for myself, I'm still trying to bridge the gap, looking for art that speaks to a sizable audience, the dream community of our national theatre.

Some of the big spectacles, like the "Lord of the Rings" series, are made with enormous craft and invention, but few strike me as great, and some of the movies that smart people find cool, like "The Dark Knight," I find appalling, not to mention depressing as hell. So you won't find them here, unless you want to say that Ang Lee's "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon" is one of them—though I would argue that the movie is quite different in appearance and tone from a standard blockbuster.

The big news of the decade in popular filmmaking is obviously the reemergence of animation as a great art form and a vehicle for social and political meanings.

Since there aren't many masterpieces, I have grouped together as a single entry some films that mark the emergence of a new sensibility.

"The Diving Bell and the Butterfly" (Julian Schnabel, 2007): An active, egotistical, and sensual man, the magazine editor Jean-Dominique Bauby (Matthieu Amalric), is paralyzed by a stroke, and can see, haphazardly, from only a single eye. At first, Schnabel confines himself to this limited view, and then he inhabits all of Bauby's consciousness, opening up his entire world. The movie features some of the freest and most creative uses of the camera and some of the most daring, cruel, and heartbreaking emotional explorations that have appeared in postwar movies. Not only is Bauby, for a brief instant, awakened (enough to write the book that serves as the basis of the movie); the cinema itself is reborn.

"There Will Be Blood" (Paul Thomas Anderson, 2007): When the movie came out, the principal complaints against it were that the dominating figure of the oil entrepreneur Daniel Plainview (Daniel Day-Lewis) doesn't develop as a character; that the movie is structurally ungainly; that its political and social allegories are tendentious; and that the last scene is sheer insanity. All these charges are true. But they don't much matter. It's still an overwhelming experience, a blazing, astoundingly vivid chronicle of the twin rise of the oil business and evangelism in California. It begins in darkness, silence, and muck, and it creates an entire world out of earth, air, fire, wood, and human players who, at times, seem to be doing Kabuki rather than naturalistic acting. Like most successful epics, its existence depends on the juggernaut power of exaggeration and repetition. The movie dislocates expectations; it offers dissonance rather than assonance; it makes most of our little realistic dramas look timid.

"The Lives of Others" (Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, 2006): A sombre, heartbreaking view of artistic life in the East German police state in 1984. The interlocking detail is fascinating—the righteous abuse of power, the vicious preying on weakness and loyalty, the overwhelming dead-gray bleakness of a society under wraps. The film may overstate the seductive and redemptive powers of art, but that's a fine myth to build a movie around.

"Mystic River" (Clint Eastwood, 2003): The matrix of the movie is a crime thriller—a police procedural, even—but Eastwood's masterpiece (Brian Helgeland adapted the Dennis Lehane novel) places within that structure a portrait of a blighted way of life. In white, working-class Boston, three men (Tim Robbins, Kevin Bacon, Sean Penn) remain in the shadow of a crime committed against one of them when they were boys. The generic elements—the slow gathering of evidence—forces the past, by degrees, into clarification of the present, but with this twist: we are what the past has made us, yet at any point we could have chosen differently. Few movies have worked out that conundrum so powerfully, or so effectively dramatized the folly of judging by partial evidence. Near the end, a shocking scene: Sean Penn kills the wrong man, and Laura Linney, his wife, is turned on by his violence and pulls him into bed.

"Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon" (Ang Lee, 2000): The most poetically satisfying of action spectacles was made with very little computer work. The warriors scampering across the tops of trees were held by invisible wires. The images are weighted, potent, enduring. Honorable mention: Lee's "Brokeback Mountain."

"Caché" and "The White Ribbon" (Michael Haneke, 2005 and 2009): The Austrian director is a malevolent master of suspicion, surveillance, paranoia, and sin. His weapons: the unspeakable act, the level stare, the flat cut, and silence.

"Knocked Up" and "Funny People" (Judd Apatow, 2007 and 2009): Profanity masking a great tenderness; dirty talk about women masking utter fear of women; the comic as extreme artist, disastrously cut off from family life. These are Apatow's themes, in his own movies and in some that he has produced, most hilariously "Superbad," directed by Greg Mottola.

"The Incredibles," "Ratatouille," and "WALL-E" (Pixar, 2004, 2007, and 2008): During the Bush era, which empowered and even celebrated mediocrity, an animation company made movie after movie insisting on art, adventure, and excellence. (Sounds high-schoolish, but it's not.) The gang at Pixar can't settle for goosing old fairy tales and shining up media-weary pop-culture jokes, as the Dreamworks folks did, in the "Shrek" series. They create each movie afresh, and some of their productions, especially "The Incredibles" and "Ratatouille," both written and directed by Brad Bird, have reached heights of invention, speed, and wit not seen in animation since the work done at Warner in the forties by Chuck Jones.

"Capturing the Friedmans" (Andrew Jarecki, 2003): Despite its brutally sensational subject—allegations of child abuse against both a retired schoolteacher and his teen-age son, who taught computer skills to younger children in a Long Island basement—this documentary was made with breathtaking tact, dedication, and respect for the unending mysteries of family life. Jarecki's movie owes its existence, it turns out, to the Friedman family's habit of memorializing itself in films, tapes, photographs—one searches for clues to the catastrophe in the successive layers of technology, going back for generations. The movie becomes, among other things, an excursion into the archeology of representation.

"Talk to Her" (Pedro Almodóvar, 2002): Almodóvar is something new in movies—a soulful, erotic entertainer of surpassing generosity. In his early work, his characters were drug-addicted nuns, transsexuals, homosexuals, vain hetero studs, jumpy hot-tempered women. In this, his most carefully structured film, two dissimilar men form an unlikely bond as each tends to a woman in a coma. Each has an elaborate fantasy about the woman before him, encapsulated in the Pina Bausch ballets that begin and end the film. Almodóvar's point, I believe, is that you can't have love without fable—that every love affair is an improbable narrative wrung from non-being and loneliness.
The Best Films of the Decade: The New Yorker Blog : The New Yorker (26 December 2009)
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/tny/2009/12/best-films-of-the-decade-david-denby.html
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