Year’s Best Films Were Full of
Unlikely Heroes
By Ty Burr
Globe Staff / December 28, 2008
In a year of darkness and hope, the movies struggled to keep up. Things fell apart, the economic center didn’t hold, the man least expected to win the presidency at the start of the year created a narrative of historical inevitability that just grew and grew and grew. The most engrossing drama I witnessed in 2008 may have been at the website fivethirtyeight.com, where daily poll analyses by Nate Silver and comments from his (mostly) articulate band of followers gave shape to a groundswell the mainstream media at times seemed invested in ignoring.
Yet there were movies released in 2008—548, according to Exhibitor Relations—and many of them mattered. For a lot of moviegoers, “The Dark Knight” was the only one that mattered, so deeply and darkly did it mourn a fallen world and the incandescent actor playing the film’s villain. Would “Knight” have been the pop supernova it became if Heath Ledger hadn’t died last January? Probably—it’s an excellent, if flawed, affair and one with its thumb squarely on the era’s discontents—but public grief gave an extra boost to the phenomenon. No other film seemed so urgently and indecisively of the moment.
That may be because we’re between moments right now. The Bush years have already been formalized in Oliver Stone’s “W.”—a film either well before its time or well after it—and the Obama drama has yet to begin. Due to the curious time-lag involved in making mainstream movies, many of 2008’s releases were weighed down with a somberness that seems oddly beside the point. The year-end Oscar releases—all those white elephants of studio-approved art—seem inert and self-important, obsessed with Nazis and emotional repression at a time when it finally seems possible, even necessary, to burst forward and ahead.
So “The Reader” and “Revolutionary Road” and “Doubt” and “Frost/Nixon” feel like yesterday’s Oscar winners, while “Milk” succeeded by reminding us of the fragile but vibrant human passion that can invest politics. The lumbering heaviosity of Serious American Cinema was mocked not just by the success of idiot delights like “Mamma Mia!” and “Beverly Hills Chihuahua” ($142 and $92 million in grosses, respectively) but by “Slumdog Millionaire,” a swooning fairy tale that audiences leapt on like desert wanderers coming to an oasis. By contrast, ecological disaster, made safe for the multiplex by “An Inconvenient Truth” in 2006, is now an official studio meme, one that only Pixar’s genius can spin into a movie that actually works.
A chapter is ending in American life and American movies, and who knows what the future will bring? With the shutting down of a number of studio boutique wings—New Line Cinema, Picturehouse, and Warner Independent, and that’s just at Warner Brothers—a valuable conduit for ambitious movies with low- to mid-range budgets has been shut off. With the disappearance of medium-sized films, the extreme ends will most likely flourish: tiny art house offerings scrambling to be seen, and bloated 3-D apocu-tainments that gobble up all the media oxygen.