End of Days (Going Back to 1999)

(Optional musical accompaniment to this post.)

In assessing the best movies of 1999 for Salon on December 17th of that year, Michael Sragow quoted James Agee assessing the best movies of 1945, deeming himself “neither more ‘hopeful’ nor ‘despondent’ than usual.” And maybe that’s the best way to approach a year-end movie audit, not decreeing it the best of times, or the worst of times, but just a moment in time, one that can be properly contextualized from a significant remove. That’s how Mark Caro saw it for the Chicago Tribune, writing “(1999) was an excellent year for very good movies and a breakthrough year for interesting movies, but only time will tell whether it also was a good year for great movies.” He had an inkling, though, noting, “Hollywood took risks in ways it hadn’t since the 1970s, and the result was films that were exciting, ambitious, innovative and imperfect.” In his year-end appraisal, Roger Ebert had an even bigger inkling: “The last four months of 1999 were a rich and exciting time for moviegoers–there were so many wonderful films that for the first time in a long time, it was hard to keep up.”

Jeff Gordinier dropped any pretense of qualifying. “You can stop waiting for the future of movies. It’s already here,” he wrote for Entertainment Weekly. “Someday, 1999 will be etched on a microchip as the first real year of 21st-century filmmaking. The year when all the old, boring rules about cinema started to crumble.” Mr. Gordinier appears to have segued into becoming a food and travel writer somewhere along the way, and so I was unable to locate his thoughts on Matt Zoller Seitz’s recent piece at the Roger Ebert site decrying the impoverished, anti-intellectual state of modern popular cinema and whether his heralding the new and improved future had been premature. Then again, the treacly “Cider House Rules” won a few Oscars at the ceremony honoring the best in film from 1999, and a Washington Post reader survey crowned “The Phantom Menace” as the best movie of 1999. Maybe populism is an inviolable fortress. “It was the best of movie times,” Manohla Dargis summarized for the L.A. Weekly on December 29, 1999, “sometimes.”

Even so, in due course of a quarter-century, 1999 has proven a seminal one for the movies, as the ongoing silver anniversary retrospective at the New York Times illustrates, if not the Best.Movie.Year.Ever, which was the title of Brian Raftery’s book, subtitled: “How 1999 Blew Up the Big Screen.” That book was published in 2019, going to show how even five years ago the consensus had already formed. Indeed, that same year The Ringer ran a 20-year retrospective much like The Times is running now, Vox’s Alissa Wilkinson lauded 1999’s cinematic risk-taking, and both the BBC and Kristopher Tapley at Uproxx declared no movie year had been better. Esquire proclaimed no movie year had been better ten years ago, five years before 2019.

Esquire also wondered if 1999 was the last great year for movies, which seems a little over-emphatically dubious. I always thought 2007 was an especially great year for movies. And as to whether 1999 was, in fact, the exemplar, there are myriad other noted contenders, like 1939 standing as the pinnacle of the Golden Age, 1960 pointing toward the future, the blooming of New Hollywood in 1967, the disparate tendencies of New Hollywood and the nascent blockbuster age in 1975. That’s why my instinct is to hedge, to say, if the working theory is that 1999 was the Best.Movie.Year.Ever then another movie year is likely just as good. I mean, I worked in a movie theater for most of 1999. I had a front row seat, in a manner of speaking, and I’d like to state for the record that I put together film reels for “My Favorite Martian, “The Deep End of the Ocean,” “Forces of Nature,” and “Pushing Tin,” among many forgotten others, a virtual what’s what of the mediocre DVD shelf from The Onion. They can’t all be winners, can they? And then: I examine the movies released in 1999 and wonder if everybody else had it right all along.

Among 1999’s considerable crop are my favorite Robert Altman movie (“Cookie’s Fortune”), and my favorite David Lynch movie (“The Straight Story”), and my favorite David Cronenberg movie (“eXistenZ”), and my favorite Steve Martin movie and favorite Eddie Murphy movie and favorite Hollywood movie in one (“Bowfinger”), and my favorite horror movie (“The Blair Witch Project”), and maybe, probably, my favorite Kirsten Dunst performance (“Dick”) and, I mean, heck, if you go by the U.S. release date then maybe, probably, my favorite Kate Winslet performance too (“Hideous Kinky”). Of course, these were not all beliefs I held in 1999; a couple of these movies I did not see until a few years later. If the passage of time takes so much, it also gives a lot in the form of perspective and understanding. And if back then I suspected that “Dick” was the essential Watergate movie, time strengthened my belief, and if back then I was lukewarm on Oliver Stone’s “Any Given Sunday,” time has allowed me to see it as the definitive American football movie, and if back then I really liked, even loved, Michael Mann’s “The Insider,” time has cemented it as a masterpiece, an aesthetic work of art, and of the innumerable movies I have so far seen over the years, quite possibly the best.

We didn’t have Vibes in 1999, but there were feelings and sensations and there were eerie, unsettling ones in the air, maybe owing to the impending Y2K Armageddon that ultimately fizzled, or perhaps just a natural uncertainty that goes hand-in-hand with the end of a century. If it was unmooring, so many filmmakers also found it inspiring, etching cinematic documents to capture their moods during that moment in time. Grandmaster Martin Scorsese deployed Nicolas Cage’s haunted eyes in “Bringing Out the Dead” to seemingly carry the entire weight of the previous hundred years. Paul Thomas Anderson sought to provide absolution in the form of frogs raining from the sky in “Magnolia” while “Fight Club,” on the other hand, ended with David Fincher calling for revolution. In “Office Space,” Mike Judge conveyed apocalyptic anxiety as indistinguishable from white collar tedium while “American Beauty,” getting one more account of suburban malaise that so often seemed to define the last half of the 20th century in just under the wire, sought to infuse our tedious reality with meaning. “The Matrix,” “Being John Malkovich,” “Run Lola Run,” and “Eyes Wide Shut” all questioned reality itself. Compared to this, “The Insider” felt more traditional, drawing from real events by telling the story of Jeffrey Wigand (Russell Crowe) blowing the whistle on Big Tobacco on 60 Minutes and Lowell Bergman (Al Pacino) and the news program’s herculean efforts to air the story. 

If it was classical storytelling, it also epitomized that 1999 sense of upheaval by upending those classical inclinations by handing the narrative from one character to another mid-stream and ended with a victory that felt so much more like defeat. Facts and reality are left distorted, journalism bends to corporations, truth becomes negotiable, doing the right thing only brings reprisals, rendering an upside-down world that comes across an awful lot like the one we are all enduring right now. It might have been pointing toward what laid ahead, but being based on recent events suggested that what ails us now was always in the American bloodstream, and is why, like Gordinier wrote, if in a different manner than he meant, “The Insider” was already living in the future.