In 1988, for instance, all five films eventually nominated for the best-picture Oscar were released in December. And of all the movies figuring prominently in the 2002 awards race, only "Far From Heaven" came out as long ago as ... November.
My own picks for top 2002 releases didn't break into the final tallies of the Seattle Film Critics Awards, being given this year for the first time (see Page 14). But I recommend them as serious, challenging and deeply satisfying film experiences.
"About Schmidt" is an uncategorizable movie that sneaks up on you, occasionally seems ready to settle into an identifiable niche or complacent attitude, then surprises - and enriches - you by quietly walking away from doing the expected.
Warren Schmidt is a complete departure for the charismatic, sometimes overweening star Jack Nicholson. When we first see him, 60-ish Omaha insurance actuary Warren is sitting at his bare desk, watching the clock tick off the last seconds of his career. What he will do with the rest of his life is probably not something he has thought much about.
His wife, Helen (June Squibb), has that covered. She's nudged Warren into buying a Greyhound-sized RV, in which they will take trips around the country the way retired couples are expected to do. About the time Warren begins to realize he has no idea how his wife came to be such a dull, oppressive presence in his life, she's abruptly out of the picture. Soon Warren, who was never that sold on RV motoring, is climbing aboard to face something he wouldn't think to call an existential crisis. And life, like this brave, singular movie, begins to get more interesting.
No, that does not mean that the movie starts serving up zany characters, outré situations and uplifting experiences that help Warren discover his inner child and find true meaning. Well, okay, there are a couple of zany characters and at least one outré situation.
But "About Schmidt" doesn't formulaically introduce characters for the purposes of being zany. They're just who they are, and from minute to minute they - particularly the mother (the superb Kathy Bates) and son (the follically challenged Dermot Mulroney) soon to become Warren's inlaws - disclose aspects and qualities and feelings we would not, on first acquaintance, have expected them to possess.
The same goes for Warren. Even before his road trip, Warren had begun reexamining his life in the process of composing obligatory letters to a 6-year-old Tanzanian orphan named Ndugu, whom he is supporting in response to a charity form letter. The discrepancies between the people and behavior Warren encounters and the way his letters charac-terize them, and himself, are funny, sad, scathing and illuminating.
So is the film, written by Alexander Payne (who also directed) and Jim Taylor and brilliantly centered by Jack Nicholson. The actor has never been subtler, quite possibly never been better. "About Schmidt" is the one masterpiece among the American films of 2002.
That leaves room to propose that "The Pianist" is also a master-piece, since the only American thing about it is its star, Adrien Brody.
You may not know Brody; most of his scenes in 1998's "The Thin Red Line" ended up on the cutting-room floor. However, he does an excellent job playing a character who, apart from being an accomplished and celebrated pianist - Wladyslaw Szpilman - is no more a conventional film hero than Warren Schmidt.
A Polish Jew caught up in the obscenity of the Holocaust, Szpilman shows determination and occasional resourcefulness in staying two steps ahead of the death that is chasing him - for years. But though he's trapped in the Warsaw Ghetto, whose inhabitants famously resisted the Nazis to the last, Szpilman commits no act of heroism, rallies no fellow Jews to rebel, achieves nothing of importance. It's merely that, from one day to the next, he does not die. And in the circumstances, that is heroic importance enough.
"The Pianist" was made by another Polish Jew who barely escaped murder as a child of war: Roman Polanski (who decades later barely escaped murder when his wife, unborn child and several friends were slaughtered by the Manson cult). Watching the dramatic, yet eerily mundane, progression of historical events in the film, one wonders again and again whether Polanski himself witnessed certain chilling details in real life. The question is neither facetious nor morbid. This is a movie by someone who knows how matter-of-factly terrible life, luck and arrant inhumanity can be.
Another film demanding attention - and an adventurous audience - is "Adaptation." This is a comedy from the Twilight Zone. It's a measure of the film's daffy, complex inventiveness that its writing could be nominated as an original screenplay and best, er, adaptation.
Charlie Kaufman (who wrote "Being John Malkovich") was hired to adapt Susan Orlean's book "The Orchid Thief" into a movie script. Fascinated yet stymied, he instead produced a screenplay about a screenwriter named Charlie Kaufman trying to lick the adaptation of "The Orchid Thief" and becoming erotically fixated on its author, Susan Orlean. For her part, Susan (Meryl Streep) is seen gravitating "offscreen" to the titular orchid thief and eco-buccaneer (Chris Cooper).
Besides stalking Susan from afar, Charlie, played by Nicolas Cage, is coping with exasperation and jealousy that his idiot brother, Donald, is beginning to have a more lucrative screenwriting career than he himself enjoys. Donald Kaufman, too, is played by Nicolas Cage, and although Donald Kaufman does not exist in real life - despite having a co-screenplay credit on this movie - Cage's performance(s) is so acute that you always know which Kaufman has just entered the room.
"Adaptation." (sic - the period is part of the title) was directed by "Malkovich"'s Spike Jonze, who covers the script's coming-and-going, snake-swallowing-its-tail narrative with awesome deftness.
"The Hours" is another challenging stratification of separate stories and realities. Adapted by David Hare from Michael Cunningham's novel, the film opens with the 1941 suicide of Virginia Woolf (an uncanny Nicole Kidman), then intercuts scenes of one day in the lives of three women in different eras and locales.
There's Woolf herself in 1920s England, closing in on writing the novel "Mrs. Dalloway"; a housewife and mother (Julianne Moore) in post-World War II Los Angeles, reading "Mrs. Dalloway" as she quietly sets about her own suicide; and a stylish, present-day Manhattan version of Mrs. Dalloway (Meryl Streep) getting ready to throw a literary party for her AIDS-afflicted lover of long ago.
All this could have made for one of those fussy, banal prestige pictures no sensible moviegoer would want to come near. Instead it's a riveting film, a sharply focused study in desperation and beleaguered decency. Stephen Daldry directed. The first-rate supporting cast includes Ed Harris, Toni Collette, John C. Reilly, Allison Janney, Stephen Dillane and Miranda Richardson.
Surprisingly, it's "Gangs of New York," the latest from the tempestuously personal Martin "GoodFellas" Scorsese, that runs into prestige-picture problems. Maybe that's the price of going to Rome to re-create the New York City of the mid-19th century. (The title - which suggests a movie Scorsese has already made several times - would have applied more provocatively to the director's previous period picture, that underrated study in high-society totem and taboo, "Age of Innocence.")
Leonardo DiCaprio stars as young roughneck "Amsterdam" Vallon, bent on avenging the death of his father (Liam Neeson) 17 years earlier. The leader of an Irish-immigrant community, the father was carved up by "Bill the Butcher" (Daniel Day-Lewis), a nativist hooligan who has become, among other things, the string-pulling boss of Gotham politico "Boss" Tweed (Jim Broadbent).
Like a streetwise Hamlet, Amsterdam takes a long time to act, even appearing to come under the spell of the man he would destroy. There are also echoes of Christ, Satan, Magdalene (saucy pick-pocket Cameron Diaz) and Judas (Henry Thomas) left over from Scorsese's "The Last Temptation of Christ." Too much rewriting or trimming, or both, have muddled the dynamics, but Scorsese was gutsy to have the personal showdown be upstaged by larger, historical catastrophe.
DiCaprio's other year-end showcase, "Catch Me If You Can," is Steven Spielberg's second 2002 movie (after "Minority Report"). Its real-life protagonist is a high-school-age marvel who, over a couple of years in the 1960s, managed to pass himself off as an airline pilot, teacher, doctor and lawyer - and steal several million dollars while doing so. The film, overlong and gratingly cute, winds up concentrating on his pursuit by a dedicated F.B.I. agent (Tom Hanks overdoing the nerd routine), but the best scenes involve the kid's failed-conman father (a rich, lovely job by Christopher Walken).
I am advised by discerning friends that "Chicago" is an improvement on the stage musical, so I pass that opinion along. This is not my genre.
Bob Fosse and Fred Ebb based their 1975 show on the (nonmusical) '20s play about a dame named Roxie Hart who shoots her boyfriend, goes free thanks to a shyster mouthpiece and becomes a show-business phenomenon. That's still the deal, and there is no creature on earth more adorable than Renée Zellweger - though she's outdanced by leggy Catherine Zeta-Jones as another death-row darling. (Richard Gere is utterly charmless as shyster Billy Flynn.)
Bob Fosse could probably have made the movie work. Choreographer-director Rob Marshall makes it an anti-movie, Mix-Mastering it into such a rat-a-tat series of chopped-up images that I wanted to reach for a machine gun. Prediction: "Chicago" will be nominated for, and may win, the best-editing Oscar - like such previous irritants as "Fame" and "JFK," which won on the basis of "most editing."
Let's wrap on a high note. "The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers" is absolutely swell. No surprise there: last Christmas's "The Fellowship of the Ring" was an enchanting toybox of superior legend-spinning and awesome filmcraft, and part two was shot at the same time by the same enormously talented specimens of humankind (and maybe an elf or two).
I can venture no clearer index of personal joy than this: In the darker, more ferocious "The Two Towers," as in "Fellowship," director Peter Jackson pulls off 70 or 80 "impossible" shots - landscape, light, color, motion and emotion all in perfectly orchestrated phase - I've been waiting my whole life to see.[[In-content Ad]]
