1990 was a lamentable year for the movies that somehow found room for several great films.
I don`t really know how to distinguish among the movies on the first half of this list, each of which seems to me a major accomplishment in the careers of their creators. They are all potential classics, waiting for the judgment of time.
Instead, I`ve put on top the one film that is still playing commercially in Chicago (at the Fine Arts Theater), in the dim hope that it might encourage a few more people to see it. The other four already are out on home video, and if you didn`t see them theatrically (with their limited release patterns, they were easy to miss), they are worth a look even in shrunken, electronic reproduction.
The good news is that these movies exist and were commercially released
(to make this list, a movie must have played at least one week in a Chicago for-profit theater); the bad news is that they were very much exceptions to the current standardized, industrial process of filmmaking rather than signs that the system might be changing.
The American movies on this list are almost all the work of strongly independent (and even inflexible) filmmakers, who coincidentally were able to find financing this year (generally from outside the studio system). The difficulty in unearthing that money is suggested by how long these directors have had to wait between projects: For Charles Burnett, it has been eight years since his last film; for Paul Brickman seven, for Andrew Bergman nine and George Armitage no less than 14. This is not a good use of our national artistic resources.
1. To Sleep with Anger, Charles Burnett, director. Burnett`s magical, metaphorical family drama achieves a rare level of thematic and emotional complexity behind its deceptively plain-spoken style. The film was the subject of many hand-wringing articles in the national press-why wasn`t the black audience supporting this superb piece of African-American art?-though relatively few attempts to penetrate its dense weave of allusions (to black cultural history) and insights (into the current status of the black middle class). The film is an extremely ambitious attempt to chart the moral destiny of an entire people, using the twin poles of the church and the blues as navigational aids. Danny Glover, in a performance that will forgive any number of ”Lethal Weapon” sequels, stands at the head of an extraordinary ensemble cast that includes Paul Butler, Mary Alice, Carl Lumbly and Vonetta McGee.
2. Where the Heart Is, John Boorman. Boorman, the most visionary of contemporary filmmakers (”The Emerald Forest,” ”Hope and Glory”), created the year`s most abstractly beautiful, sensuous film, a ravishing study in cinematic movement and color centered on Shakespearean themes (it begins as
”King Lear” and ends as ”A Midsummer Night`s Dream”). Touchstone Pictures` decision to sell the film as a Dabney Coleman sitcom did nothing to help this resolutely uncommercial project, which refused current standards of screen realism in favor of a lyrical, subjective and freely constructed study of a New York family`s grim self-destruction and luminous, revolutionary rebirth. There are effects of light and gesture here, especially as concentrated in the dazzling final reel, that are as stunning as any the cinema has produced.
3. Sweetie, Jane Campion. Another family study, this time from Australia and centered on the chaos wrought by a dangerously childlike, self-involved sibling, ”Sweetie” marked the feature debut of filmmaker Jane Campion, who is already displaying a style more fully developed and distinctive than 90 percent of the directors working today. Her sense of color and composition may look no more than fashionably eccentric at first, but it turns out to be very strictly tied to the expressive needs of her subject. ”An Angel at My Table,” Campion`s new film, is equally brilliant in an entirely different register.
4. Men Don`t Leave, Paul Brickman. Seven years after his runaway hit
”Risky Business,” writer-director Brickman returns with this meticulously constructed melodrama about an unheroic woman (Jessica Lange) and her attempts to retain the loyalty and affection of her two sons after the accidental death of her husband. Brickman blends vivid, sharply observed emotions with an undercurrent of dreamlike, surrealistic details-surges of lyricism that reveal the characters` deepest fears and most profound longings. A film of tremendous ambitions that manages to hide, perhaps too effectively for its own good, behind genre traditions, it was also the best and most honestly earned cry of 1990.
5. Story of Women, Claude Chabrol. One of the founding members of the French New Wave movement of the 1960s, Chabrol returns to the glacial irony of his early features with this flinty, devastating study of a struggling housewife (Isabelle Huppert) who supports her family during the German occupation of France by performing abortions on her kitchen table. Colo Tavernier O`Hagan`s screenplay, based on the true story of the last woman to go to the guillotine, intelligently handles an impressive range of themes, from sexual politics to the sacrificial aspect of social justice, while Chabrol`s staging casts the proceedings in the cold, gray cold, gray light of a national moral eclipse.
6. White Hunter, Black Heart, Clint Eastwood. Eastwood continues the role-playing themes of his most recent films with this epic attempt to reimagine himself as John Huston-a filmmaker who, in his egomania,
extravagance and romantic drive, was Eastwood`s exact opposite. As in
”Bird,” the urge to create is seen as inextricably intertwined with the need to destroy: The Huston figure, named John Wilson and shooting a movie strikingly similar to ”The African Queen,” comes to believe that killing an elephant is the only way to overcome his creative block.
7. GoodFellas, Martin Scorsese. Scorsese`s companion piece to ”The Last Temptation of Christ” is an examination of a purely evil, conscience-less character-a minor mob functionary, but in essence Satan himself. This character proves how entertaining and attractive amorality can be (a point the audience helped Scorsese reinforce by making the movie, unlike the pious
”Temptation,” one of his biggest hits). The most fervidly Catholic of contemporary filmmakers, Scorsese here imagines a world without the slightest notion of sin, a fantasy he finds both thrilling and appalling.
8. The Freshman, Andrew Bergman. This screwball comedy of the classic stripe is made unforgettable by Marlon Brando`s joyful, subtle turn as a Mafia don with an oddly familiar face. The performance is not so much self-parody as a reinvention of the Godfather in comic terms-adjusting his gestures by only a few millimeters, Brando turns a monumental, authoritarian figure into an engaging eccentric, a little scary but somehow immensely likable. With excellent partnering by Matthew Broderick, Penelope Ann Miller and the deft Bruno Kirby.
9. Miami Blues, George Armitage. Fourteen years after his last theatrical film (”Vigilante Force”), director Armitage returns to the helm and seems, if anything, more in control of his effects and refined in his perceptions than ever. Based on a thriller by Charles Willeford, this is a cops-and-robbers tale set in the garish greater Miami area in which the moral compass points never seem to stop spinning: There`s a cop (Fred Ward) who looks like a creep and a killer (Alec Baldwin) who, after he steals the cop`s badge, does a pretty good job of enforcing the law. Armitage still has one of the best eyes for place in American film, and ”Miami Blues” beautifully captures the great, meaningless buzz of energy generated by our urban centers. 10. Monsieur Hire, Patrice Leconte. A dark, brooding and madly romantic tale of self-destructive love, this French film marks a major turning point in the careers of a director and a star, Patrice Leconte and Michel Blanc; their work until now has been more in the range of bumptuous sex comedy (one of their films was called ”The Sun-Tanned Ones Go Skiing”).
One thinks of the metaphysical masochism of Hitchcock`s ”Vertigo,”
Rossen`s ”Lilith” and Ophuls` ”Letter from an Unknown Woman”: It`s a movie that flies in the face of contemporary pop psychological sunniness, suggesting that an unhappy ending can still be the most satisfying for characters and audience alike.
1990 featured at least five more films that, in a year of less intense competition, would have found high places on a 10-best list: Joe Dante`s fizzy, manic ”Gremlins 2”; Bertrand Tavernier`s stately and grave ”Life and Nothing But”; David Lynch`s amazingly extroverted ”Wild at Heart”; Roger Corman`s uncanny return to full form, after 20 years of directorial inactivity, with ”Frankenstein Unbound”; and Barbet Schroeder`s showcase for the glinting creativity of Jeremy Irons (for me, the year`s best actor) in
”Reversal of Fortune.”
