Was 1995 as bad a movie year as many critics — and non-critics — said?
Yes and no. Like any other movie year, 1995 was a mix. There were extremes — of high and low quality — with most films falling into the great gray spaces in between.
1995 was unique, though, for the passions it aroused, particularly along the presidential campaign trail. It also was unique for the technological wonders it displayed — particularly in its prime batch of spectacular children’s fantasies.
And if the lows — like “Johnny Mnemonic,” “Showgirls,” “Ace Ventura: When Nature Calls,” “The Scarlet Letter,” “Cutthroat Island” and “Mallrats” — sometimes seemed preposterous, the highs could carry you to places unusual in their richness, exciting in their range:
“Casino,” with its glittering anatomy of Las Vegas crime and decadence. “Apollo 13,” with its white-knuckled re-creation of deep-space technological breakdown. “The Secret of Roan Inish,” with its transcendent Gaelic lyricism. “Clockers” and “Smoke,” with their knowing yet compassionate New York grittiness. “Nixon,” with its gutsy historical iconoclasm. All these are movie achievements that probably wouldn’t have been attained in most previous years.
1995 was a year, as Gene Siskel noted last Sunday, when adventurous talents and staggering technology were employed in marvelous computerized or mechanized high-tech children’s movies, such as “Toy Story,” “Babe,” “The City of Lost Children,” “Pocahontas” and “Casper.”
But it also was a year when computer-themed movies (“Johnny Mnemonic,” “The Net,” “Hackers”) for adults and teens — movies that tried to take us inside technology — fell with an almost audible crash.
It was the year, it seemed, of Brad Pitt — who proved, with the visually splashy serial-killer thriller “Seven,” that he could help make a huge hit of a movie that is so dark, creepy and violent — if brilliantly visualized — that you might have expected more audiences to object.
1995 was the year, once again, of Jim Carrey, the rubber-faced, double-jointed ex-TV comic who sometimes makes Jerry Lewis look like Sir Alec Guinness, and whose starmaking string in 1994 (“Ace Ventura: Pet Detective,” “The Mask,” “Dumb and Dumber”) continued, lucratively, in ’95 with “Batman Forever” (in which Carrey impersonated master crook The Riddler) and “Ace Ventura: When Nature Calls” (in which Carrey was excreted from a mechanical rhinoceros). Does “Ace Two” indicate that Carrey should pause and reflect, that no bubble lasts forever? You’d hope so.
1995 also was the year, again, of Tom Hanks, who continued his personal hot streak with “Apollo 13,” a celebration of America’s space program at its seemingly worst moment, during the aborted 1970 moon mission. Hanks’ timing seemed impeccable — just as it seemed in 1993, with his portrayal of an AIDs-stricken lawyer in “Philadelphia,” and, in 1994, with his second Oscar turn as America’s lovable slow-witted everyman “Forrest Gump.”
It was the year of that ravishing smiler Sandra Bullock (“The Net,” “While You Were Sleeping”); of Emma Thompson, literary actress supreme; of Brando’s heirs Nicolas Cage, Harvey Keitel, Al Pacino and Robert De Niro (who gave us a brace of expert performances); and of wonderful local retrospectives on filmmakers Federico Fellini, Jean Renoir, Michael Powell, Nanni Moretti and Marcel Pagnol.
It was a year that seemed, for a while, on the verge of a major quality breakthrough in big-studio African-American films, with three first-rate, offbeat efforts by young black filmmakers: Spike Lee’s “Clockers,” Carl Franklin’s “Devil in a Blue Dress” and Allen and Albert Hughes’ “Dead Presidents.”
Yet all of them, despite good reviews, somehow missed the biggest audiences. At year’s end, “Waiting to Exhale,” a tart modern comedy romance from Terry McMillan’s bestseller, co-scripted by McMillan and directed by Forest Whitaker, may succeed commercially where the others failed.
And the legacy of Lee, Franklin and Hughes movies may lie, immediately, in the strong supporting-actor candidates they introduced: Delroy Lindo as the fatherly Brooklyn dealer-entrepreneur of “Clockers,” Keith David as the pool-hall king of “Dead Presidents” and Don Cheadle as the unstoppable Mouse in “Devil in a Blue Dress.”
It was the year when William Shakespeare and Jane Austen staged heavy comebacks as cinematic authors. This was hardly amazing for the Bard, whose often-filmed works supplied us with another spell-bindingly acted “Othello” (with Laurence Fishburne and Kenneth Branagh) and the promise of more to come (“Richard III” and “Hamlet”) next year. But it was new for Austen, a previously infrequent movie inspiration. (The 1940 MGM “Pride and Prejudice,” with Greer Garson and Laurence Olivier, was once the best-known).
This year, two Austen-derived films played simultaneously in big-city movie theaters: a wonderfully rough-featured, emotional, Ingmar Bergman-inspired version of “Persuasion” (Austen’s last complete novel), directed by Roger Michell, and a more classical, lushly appointed, big-star version of “Sense and Sensibility” (her first novel), written by leading lady Emma Thompson and directed by young Taiwanese filmmaker Ang Lee. And we’re not even mentioning “Clueless,” the hit Beverly Hills teen comedy with Alicia Silverstone, now being repackaged as a TV series, which writer-director Amy Heckerling claims is based on Austen’s “Emma.” (“Emma” is due out in a more faithful adaptation next year.)
1995 was the year of a resurgence in that classical, much-analyzed Hollywood mode, film noir. Noir had returned last year with the huge critical hit “Pulp Fiction” and two minor hits from director John Dahl, “Red Rock West” and “The Last Seduction.” But in ’95 we got remakes of old classic noirs: “Kiss of Death” (based on the 1947 original) and “The Underneath” (based on 1949’s heist thriller “Criss Cross”).
There was a new heist epic, the three-hour Michael Mann-Al Pacino-Robert De Niro “Heat.” There was the odd, affecting, low-budget “Bulletproof Heart,” about a hit man in love with his victim. There was the gangsters-in-movieland comedy “Get Shorty” and the virtuosic “The Usual Suspects,” another heist thriller, which confirms Bryan Singer as a major young talent.
And, at year’s end, there was one of the finest of all gangster sagas, the fact-based, Las Vegas rise-and-fall drama “Casino,” from Martin Scorsese, Nicholas Pileggi, De Niro and Joe Pesci.
Speaking of Las Vegas, it was a city both well and badly — but always memorably — served in 1995.
“Casino,” my own favorite, was hard, cool, racy and violent, a portrayal of the upper echelons of the mob-dominated Stardust casino (renamed the Tangiers) that blended exhaustive detail with Scorsese’s usual emotional pyrotechnics. It had all his trademarks: passion, violence, scintillating style, moral fury and a deep, knowing look at America’s underside. Only its timing, in a year when movies were suddenly told to clean up their image — or else — was probably off.
By contrast, the much despised “Showgirls” — from director Paul Verhoeven and screenwriter Joe Eszterhas — seems everybody’s favorite movie to dump on. This “42nd Street” ripoff had all the over-glittery, over-confident, hard-edged, sleazy feel of a glossy nudie magazine layout — which, considering the acreage of female flesh exposed, it often resembled. No 1995 movie script was more extravagantly silly, which probably relieved critics, who were able to slam this NC-17 film without remorse.
And, last, there was Mike Figgis’ “Leaving Las Vegas,” already the big winner in the year-end critics groups’ awards, with best picture citations from New York and Los Angeles, and best actor citations from both groups for Nicolas Cage (who’s been there before, in “Honeymoon in Vegas”). Cage — woundingly vulnerable as a hopelessly alcoholic ex-movie executive, drinking himself to death with a compassionate hooker (Elisabeth Shue) — got him the notices he’s always deserved.
Here, the view of Vegas is wistful and lacerating. The city has the neon dreamy feel of a night where everything’s gone blurry, the apprehensive shiver of a party where nobody will arrive on time.
I’m still ambivalent about “Leaving Las Vegas,” for all its painfully real emotions and shimmery evocation of a life on the slide. But I’m happy for Cage and Shue. And, with its sweetness and romanticism, it’s the right movie for critics who want to vote for something tough and dark but would like to avoid another “Pulp Fiction.”
That darkness was also the subject of a furious 1995 controversy. “Are Music and Movies Killing America’s Soul?” asked a Time magazine cover story on June 12. And since I see far more than 300 movies a year, I suppose I should wonder if my own soul is in jeopardy. Have a steady diet of murder, mayhem and sexual abandon dulled my senses? Darkened my spirit? Scrambled my brains?
Yet, after surviving this onslaught (which included many more family-friendly movies than the attackers suspect exist), and after sorting through my reactions, I find myself, like Holden Caulfield in “A Catcher in the Rye,” nostalgic for even some of the worst of it. After all, unlike Sen. Bob Dole, who triggered the debate with his speech in Los Angeles, I actually saw all those movies — including the carefully selected blockbusters Dole recommended or deplored but didn’t bother watching himself.
I don’t think a year that included pictures like “Casino,” “Nobody’s Fool,” “The Secret of Roan Inish,” “Lamerica,” “Burnt by the Sun,” “Nixon,” “Apollo 13,” “The Bridges of Madison County,” “Voices of the Moon” and “Valley of Abraham” — and at least a dozen others in that category — could be considered a failure.
Remember: As brilliant a movie critic as James Agee once thoroughly misperceived the state of films in his own time when he started reviewing in The Nation in 1943 — calling the years just previous the nadir of Hollywood. We now regard that period (especially 1939-41) as the apogee of the old studio system. Years from now, we may be surprised by what people think of the movies (and politicians) of 1995.
