MORRIS DICKSTEIN
Going to the Movies: As Good as
It
Gets
W
ITHOUT PRODUCING
any real masterpieces, 1999 was not
only the best moviegoing year of the decade, but offered per–
haps the most impressive array of new films since the 1970s.
How did this happen? How did so many first-rate movies steal in upon
us? Some of our shrewdest critics-David Denby in the
New Yorker,
Godfrey Cheshire in the
New York Press,
Susan Sontag in the
Times
Magazine-have
argued that the movie culture as we knew it is a thing
of the past, done in by the new digital technology, the pressures of the
bottom line, the decline of the individual auteur, the leveling effect of the
American movies in the international market, and the breakdown of
other national cinemas. But in the last few years, even as knowledge of
film history has all but evaporated, movies have come to rival sports as
a universal point of reference, serving even as a lingua franca for the
educated class. Many things
have
declined, including the old reverence
for cinema as art, along with some bedrock standards of Hollywood
moviemaking. Yet somehow, in the teeth of a crass and gigantic busi–
ness, a vibrant new film scene has emerged, despite the predictable frus–
trations of those trying to do serious work.
Nearly all of last year's best movies, including some wonderful films
from abroad, proved surprisingly unconventional. The British director
Mike Leigh made his reputation with slice-of-life dramas about con–
temporary life filmed in quasi-documentary style, with scripts worked
up through months of improvisation by the actors. Who would have
expected him to make
Topsy-Turvy,
a period piece about Gilbert and
Sullivan, developed in exactly the same painstaking manner? Neil Jor–
dan's finest work is infused with his passionate feeling for Irish life, yet
for
The End of the Affair
he recreated the stoical mood of Britain in
the 1940s, adapting one of Graham Greene's religious novels in the
spirit of small, moodily romantic films like
Brief Encounter.
David
Lynch and Pedro Almodovar were two of the kinkiest, most intransi–
gent talents to emerge in the 1980s. In
Blue Velvet
and the
Twin Peaks
TV series, Lynch set out to expose the dark secrets of small-town life,
the corruption that passes for innocence and normality. Almodovar,
