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"American Beauty"
Best Movie 1999
By Jay Carr
1. "American Beauty"
2. "Being John Malkovich"
3. "Boys Don't Cry"
4. "The Buena Vista Social Club"
5. (tie)"An Ideal Husband," "Mansfield Park"
6. (tie)"The Dreamlife of Angels," "Rosetta"
7. "Mr. Death"
8. "Cradle Will Rock"
9. "Princess Mononoke"
10. "The Talented Mr. Ripley"
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t must have been a good year for film, a better year than usual. I can tell because I feel really grumpy about leaving certain films off the annual list of 10 best. Who invented these absurd, tyrannical lists anyway? Some years they could stop at five films. Some years, they should expand to 20. In addition to my Top 10, one can as easily argue for ''Magnolia,'' ''The Straight Story,'' ''Three Kings,'' ''The Cider House Rules,'' ''All About My Mother,'' ''The Emperor and the Assassin,'' ''Run Lola Run,'' ''Election,'' ''The Winslow Boy,'' ''The War Zone,'' ''Snow Falling on Cedars,'' ''Autumn Tale,'' ''The King of Masks,'' ''Rosie,'' ''My Son the Fanatic,'' ''Tumbleweeds,'' and ''Xiu-Xiu: The Sent-Down Girl.'' How many is that? 30? Did I mention that I hate lists?
No matter how long the list, ''American Beauty'' has to head it. It's classic black humor driven by Kevin Spacey, Annette Bening, and Sam Mendes in his directing debut. All come from the world of the stage and enjoyed a long rehearsal period that paid off. Spacey's platonic essence of midlife crisis, Bening's angry wife expressing her rage in terrifying orderliness, even the alienated teen characters - all are brilliant and riveting. Perhaps that's what is most remarkable. Films about kids usually are about 20 years behind in their references, and don't really care about kids anyway. ''American Beauty'' is the most invigorating American film since ''L. A. Confidential.''
''Being John Malkovich'' is the most original, not only for its ability to goof on an imagined meeting place between our consumer culture and our materialist culture, where you buy your 15 minutes of fame by getting inside the head of someone famous, in this case Malkovich. There's almost nothing in it that isn't dazzling, starting with John Cusack's alienated puppeteer reinventing ''Petruchka,'' Catherine Keener's barbed-wire entrepreneur, Cameron Diaz's frumped-down do-gooder making neurotic animals even more neurotic, and Orson Bean giving the film the ''Alice in Wonderland'' quality it's after by ushering us into the portal that takes us inside John Malkovich's head and spits us out on the New Jersey Turnpike.
''Boys Don't Cry'' has rightly attracted kudos for Hilary Swank's performance as Brandon Teena, a woman trying to live as a man in small-town Nebraska and for Chloe Sevigny's portrayal of the local girl whose dreams are awakened by Teena. But it's got more, including enough texture to impart a sense of mounting dread at what you can see coming and Teena can't. ''The Buena Vista Social Club'' is just the opposite, the year's purest filmic excursion into joy. It's not just Wim Wenders's and Ry Cooder's ability to recapture the soaring high spirits in the music-making of Cuban musicians put on ice for three decades by Castro, then reawakened as if by magic. It's also a matter of Wenders's camerawork capturing a Cuba of crumbling grandeur turned hauntingly beautiful by coral-colored sunsets in a land where cars are held together with duct tape and baling wire.
''An Ideal Husband'' sublimely restores to us Oscar Wilde's glittering language and underappreciated humanism, with sterling performances by Rupert Everett as an aristocratic idler trying not to let his goodheartedness get him into trouble and Julianne Moore as a femme not quite fatale. ''An Ideal Husband'' subtly masks its editing of Wilde's text.
''Mansfield Park'' all but flaunts its departures from Jane Austen's third novel. But if it tweaks the letter, it's true to the spirit of all Austen's novels. The thing that makes them so modern is their way of making their Austen surrogates choose between love and money. Frances O'Connor, filled with quicksilver beauty, is as deftly intelligent as any of Austen's heroines. Director-adapter Patricia Rozema makes it ever so clear that its rich family's money comes from the slave trade. Another piece of inspired casting: Harold Pinter's understandably gloomy paterfamilias.
Erick Zonca's ''The Dreamlife of Angels'' from France and Luc and Jean-Paul Dardenne's ''Rosetta'' from Belgium are the two best, most compassionate, most urgent, most memorable working-girl films. Or, rather, they would be if the young women at the center of each could find work. But they can't. How this shapes their lives is something the performances of Elodie Bouchez and Emilie Dequenne won't let you forget. Unemployment - not yet called downsizing - is the issue animating Tim Robbins's marvelous ''Cradle Will Rock.'' Rather than stage the entire agitprop opera of that name, which would have been a mistake because it's too simplistic, Robbins wraps the entire world of the '30s around it, not always convincingly, but always pungently, with the same mix of art and politics and passion that made that decade our most artistically vibrant one.
Just ahead of it is another documentary, Errol Morris's ''Mr. Death: The Rise and Fall of Fred A. Leuchter Jr.'' There's simply nothing like this riveting study of a nerdy electric-chair, gas-chamber, and lethal-injection whiz, recruited by neo-Nazis to bolster their Holocaust-denying. You can all but hear Morris's investigative acuity and stylistic originality click into place in this film that reminds you that ''Schindler's List'' did not have the last word on the Holocaust.
It also has been a vintage year for animation. ''Toy Story 2'' you know about. It deserves the praise it has drawn, here and elsewhere. If you missed ''Iron Giant,'' too bad. It was impressive, but came and went and is now on video. Ditto for Disney's treetop-surfing ''Tarzan.'' Most impressive of all the 1999 arrivals, however, is the Japanese import, ''Princess Mononoke.'' If any single work will mainstream Japanese anime, it's this one. It's got a multitiered story line, a hardly revolutionary but markedly different drawing style and a way of making nature part of its world that you won't find in any American counterpart. It's grander, fuller, deeper, more reverberant than all but a few feature films.
That brings us to the coveted 10th and last spot, which I have no hesitation in ceding to Anthony Minghella's slick, twisty take on Patricia Highsmith's ''The Talented Mr. Ripley.'' The news here will be Matt Damon playing a gay schemer, but the whole cast - Gwyneth Paltrow, Jude Law, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Cate Blanchett - is top-notch. Effortlessly, they conjure up the Europe of the 1950s, when it was a playground for rich Americans and a breeding ground for those determined to fleece them. This probably is also the place to say that while I thought ''The Blair Witch Project'' wasn't as terrific a film as its numbers indicated, I love the fact that it shook up the monoliths because it was so big and they didn't have a single finger in the pie. I love that. But I can't stand lists. Did I say that?
