Feb. 25, 2009 - Issue #697: Shout It Out Loud

Best Films of the 2000s: Reel Life

As the 21st century’s teen years approach, this baby decade is growing away from us. But even if we don’t know what to call it—the Zeroes? ugly, but maybe appropriate as the recession deepens—there were films that helped define its moods, anxieties and struggles. And there were some simply amazing debuts, cinematic bursts of imagination and gripping screen-stories. So for the next ten months, online only, Josef Braun and I, Vue’s longtime critics (since 2000 and 2002) will look back, thematically, at some of the very best of the last 10 years of film, leading up to our ultimate 2000s Top Ten in January 2010.

Playing at the Metro Cinema this week, Lukas Moodysson’s Lilja 4-Ever, one of the most wrenching films of the last 10 years, provides a searing launch into social-realist films of the waning decade.

Moodysson’s 2004 film, with its Rammstein-roar of music and raging bleakness, looks at a girl abandoned by her mother in a Russian republic left adrift by the breakup of the Soviet Union.

Post-Communist Romania, for all its similarly dilapidated buildings and crumbling social supports, proved a fertile ground for social-realist drama. Cristi Puiu’s darkest of comedies, The Death of Mr Lazarescu (2005), follows a dying man (Ion Fiscuteanu) through the bureaucratic coldness of the country’s health system http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OB5BktF00_Y. If the name echoes Lazarus, it’s only to emphasize that there is no coming back from the dead for this man as he’s shunted from hospital to hospital, moving ever closer to the grave.

And Cristian Mungiu’s abortion drama 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days (2007), set in the final years of Ceaucescu’s rule, is a film where simple conversations—at a hotel desk, or a dinner table, or by a restaurant window—can crackle with a tense repression of what’s about to be done, gulped down with bitter knowingness, or cut through by unspoken loss. (In this scene, even if you haven’t seen the movie, the tension is palpable: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dbAYPt1mpgI. The young women at its heart, played to perfection by Laura Vasiliu and Anamaria Marinca, are pals yet opposing poles of hopeful naïveté and darkening cynicism.

Social realism didn’t come much more pedestrian or historical than another story involving abortion, Vera Drake (2004). Mike Leigh’s film is a steadily engrossing look at one woman’s (Imelda Staunton) quiet efforts to help out women who feel trapped in a “family way” in 1950s London. The letter of the law is blindly followed, brutally confronting the most kindly laid plans of this wife and mother. All or Nothing (2002), Leigh’s look at a modern-day family—anchored by Timothy Spall’s Phil, a cab driver, and Lesley Manville’s Penny, a supermarket cashier—was even better, a gleaming kitchen-sink drama, wry and tender http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZiuVfsfjX0w.

Shane Meadows’ take on a 1980s skinhead childhood, This Is England (2006), will likely stand as his masterpiece http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H0jkv2bRFgQ. Leigh’s contemporary, Ken Loach, often maligned for a more politically on-his-sleeve approach, nonetheless made some of his subtlest and most complex films this decade. Sweet Sixteen http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WWEpdJ8zcXI&feature=related is his 2002 tale of a Scottish teen’s (the searing Martin Compston) efforts to earn money in order to begin again with his mother, just released from prison. It’s almost as if the boy of Loach’s classic ’60s film Kes were stumbling into manhood. Compston appeared again as a rowdy Celtics fan in Loach’s tour-de-force instalment of the tripartite Tickets (2006), set on a train bound for Milan. But Loach and his regular screenwriter, Paul Laverty, crowned their work together with The Wind That Shakes The Barley, the 2006 Cannes Palme d’Or winner. With its quick entries into every fray between English soldiers and Irish Republicans or between peace-keeping brother and still-fighting brother, and with its urgent debates as heated as the senseless, panicked skirmishes, the film rejected Irish lyricism and dipped into a cold, bloody pool of compromised ideals and anguished loyalties http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O30G91jarhA&feature=related.

A nomadic family in contemporary Ireland starred in one of the great debuts and hidden gems of the decade. Perry Ogden’s first film Pavee Lackeen (2005) settles down for a while with Winnie Maughan, playing herself, and the rest of her family (most of them, too, playing themselves), who are Irish Travellers, an itinerant people with their own language and culture http://www.youtube.com/watch?=NcDe9xz_PZ8. Long denigrated, they are given their due here through a dogged attention, Ogden tracking them in a documentary approach. The film’s elegant spareness and small scope have perhaps led to it being as sadly overlooked and underappreciated as the people it follows.

The man who is Lodge Kerrigan’s Keane (2004) is restless and searching because of what he’s lost—his daughter. Keane’s (Damian Lewis) schizophrenia, his jerking moods, is startlingly expressed by John Foster’s camerawork. Kerrigan made the film about child abduction after his first effort at it was itself stolen—the negative destroyed in a film-lab accident. The DVD features a more experimental cut by executive producer Steven Soderbergh.

Blind Shaft (2003), Li Yang’s debut, had its share of troubles in getting made, too. The crew was harassed and threatened during filming around coal-mine areas in the country’s north. A dark-eyed drama with all the suspense of a thriller, digs into the mercenary free-market mentality of an increasingly individualistic, money-obsessed China. A dark-eyed drama with all the suspense of a thriller, it digs into the mercenary free-market mentality of an increasingly individualistic, money-obsessed China.

Children reflect the flaws of their society in Yang's film and in Laurent Cantet's The Class (2008), where a teacher asks his students for self-portraits. The larger self-portrait that emerges is of modern France, a struggling democracy where not everyone feels included, bureaucracy and elitism get in the way of merit and authority can be abused.

The best American work of social realism—a fast-burning descent into a hazy inferno fuelled by drugs—was Darren Aronofsky’s Requiem for a Dream (2000). Montage-rich, with over 2000 cuts, it’s a halting, sickening slide into addiction as made by Jared Leto’s Harry, Jennifer Connolly’s Marion and Ellen Burstyn’s Sara, this was, like Lilya 4-Ever, a film you may only be able to get through once. Aronofsky’s recent The Wrestler (2008) was also good, if a bit predictable, like a too-obviously choreographed bout in the ring.

With its trailer-park setting and Christ-like, suffering protagonist, The Wrestler was most reminiscent of Rosetta (1999), by the perfecters of social-realism over the last dozen years, Belgium’s Dardenne brothers. Their latest, Lorna’s Silence, has yet to come out here. But 2002 saw The Son http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2NKTLnPamK0, where grief, regret, and anger slowly and surely stalk a carpenter and his apprentice, while 2005’s L’Enfant http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HunOx8ZKj78 turned a lowly, coltish father’s ultimate sell-out into a chilling chase after redress and redemption. Its final moment can be seen as a small, precarious plea for forgiveness, yet it rings louder than any other gesture in the brothers’ score-less canon of already classic films. V 

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