Reanimations
The Best Movies of 1999

By Mark Dellelo
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January 6, 2000 | Page 1, 2

Thus far, most of this year's wrap-up columns by movie critics have been joyous in tone. I've got no reason to demur - the rough cut of my own list included more pleasures than I can recall seeing in any other single year this decade. While I share Michael Sragow's uncertainty about whether or not we are truly witnessing the "rebirth of American filmmaking," what I do know is that the smartest filmmakers of this year each in their own way breathed life back into forms that had been lying pretty dormant, and that - at least from my vantage point - the effect of these reanimations was truly bracing. The thread I see running through the list that follows connects filmmakers who seemed less concerned with innovation for its own sake than they were with revitalizing great movie traditions, with fitting their own voices to the language of classic conventions. At the close of the first century of cinema, it's hard to imagine a better cause for celebration than the following testaments to the strength of storytelling legacies that have drawn audiences back to the movies time and again.

1. Besieged. In terms of its plot, Bernardo Bertolucci's adaptation of a short story by James Lasdun borders on magniloquence. But Bertolucci's visuals magically translate the romantic melodrama into a fable of surpassing purity. It's an imaginative feat worthy of Max Ophuls, and as a piece of moviemaking it suggests a modernized version of that director's sensualism - the images glide and jump as Kinsky's passion for Shandurai inspires him to lead her in a tender, graceful waltz, and as she tentatively follows step. The music he plays for her on the piano works alongside the lyrical imagery to distill the drama to dance of a gentler yet no less intimate variety than in Bertolucci's other masterpiece of emotional choreography, Last Tango in Paris.

2. The Straight Story. In David Lynch's hands, the endearingly odd story of Alvin Straight's journey on his John Deere riding lawn mower through Iowa and Wisconsin to visit his ailing brother becomes valorized rather than blandly sentimentalized. The movie is an honestly composed hymn to human virtue, and the sights and sounds that Lynch assembles add up to a genuinely ennobling vision. Through his supremely assured craftsmanship, Lynch attunes every nuance of the film to Alvin's dogged yet peaceable spirit - the character is both driven by the urgency of his quest and patient enough to see it through properly. Richard Farnsworth's performance and Lynch's direction seem to be working in perfect synch, gesturing together in a steady, mellow harmonic rhythm that carries Alvin along on his odyssey through America's heartland like the musical currents of a folk ballad.

3. Three Kings. Mixing together elements of caper comedies, wartime melodramas, and adventure movies, David O. Russell arrives at a vision of the Gulf War that is equal parts satire and modern myth. The four soldier-protagonists are archetypal figures who plot a fast con that turns into a heroic quest; they begin as participants in the disoriented moral universe that Russell is critiquing and morph into projections of the audience's moral consciousness, heroes who manage to accomplish something truly noble amidst the chaos. Russell's polarized tonalities are crystallized by his hyper-stylized filmmaking techniques, which are alternately alienating and exhilarating.

4. Cookie's Fortune. Under Robert Altman's direction, the finest ensemble of the year evokes a community of characters who seem as familiar with each other as the members of a large family. The central joke of this marvellous comedy, written by Anne Rapp, is that they know one another all too well. The actors all seem to have inhabited the town of Holly Springs, Mississippi so comfortably that wherever he films them - Lyle Lovett gutting catfish in the warm noon sun, Chris O'Donnell and Liv Tyler relaxing in the dingy jailhouse, Ruby Wilson at the microphone in the smoky blues bar, Patricia Neal surrounded by memory-laden trinkets in her old mansion, Charles Dutton strolling back to the house after a wearying night of bourbon and pausing to peek into Tyler's trailer - Altman proves able to bring as much life to the milieux as each of them brings to his or her role.

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