Chris Not Chris

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Top 20 Films of the Decade by Ryan Perez

Every year, I indulge an old habit of pretending to be a film critic by making a list of the year’s best films. The decade’s end offers a compounded opportunity for this sort of reflection, so I simply couldn’t resist putting it all into perspective using the trusty “Best of” list form. I apologize in advance: this assessment is not academically exhaustive, but rather personal. I don’t claim to have seen every important film, but like any opinionated man with a keyboard, I feel compelled to write about the ones I loved.

But first, a few thoughts on the film decade in general:

Non-adjusted box office record breaking excluded, this has been a relatively unremarkable ten years of cinema. When all the retrospectives are finally turned in, I suspect you’ll find more than a few critics willing to declare the ‘00s the worst decade in film since the inception of the medium. And, begrudgingly, I would have to agree with them. Since I measure much of my happiness through the movies, it’s been an excruciating ten years toward which I feel surprisingly little attachment. For previous generations, media may have not been part and parcel with memory. But for this generation, quality of life seems indelibly linked to quality of movies. (Or at least it feels that way to me.)

The decade began with a celebration of mediocrity (Gladiator) and ended with an even bigger celebration of an even more embarrassing mediocrity (Avatar). In between, American studio cinema was dominated by franchise pictures, independent cinema lost much of the leverage it gained in the ‘90s, and international films struggled harder than ever to find exhibition on American screens. We saw the loss of several directors who had helped sustain a high mean standard of quality since the ‘70s. Cinema’s angriest man, Robert Altman, made his last great movie, 2001’s Gosford Park, and died a few films later. For all intents and purposes, Woody Allen died as a vital American voice shortly after 1999’s masterpiece Sweet and Lowdown, producing a string of films that ranged from bland to unwatchable. The new wave of critical darlings introduced at the end the ’90s failed to live up to their promise by either making disappointingly few films (Spike Jonze, David O. Russell) or just plain disappointing films (see The Wachowskis, M. Night Shyamalan).

The decade’s most celebrated movies left me curiously unmoved. Traffic, Crash, Babel, Pan’s Labyrinth, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, Good Night and Good Luck, and Slumdog Millionaire had all the hallmarks of importance, but they have already evaporated from my memory. The Lord of the Rings trilogy was an impressively profitable financial gamble, but always struck me as a queasily war-mongering epic for a war-mongering age. The decade’s preeminent directorial “discovery”, Jason Reitman was the perfect representative of the millennial fatigue. He’s the George W. Bush of filmmmaking, an artistically fallow director for an artistically fallow decade, an uninspired benefactor of institutional nepotism who gave us easy messages with only the superficial appearance of profundity. Thank You for Smoking, Juno and Up in the Air all contain the elements of slick “professional” filmmaking- adequate craftsmanship, passable performances- but their characters were barely sketch-deep.

For as much editorial ink was spilled over Netflix, reality TV, Hulu, and 3D screens, there was one massively underreported story about media consumption- the prevalence of internet pornography. In the last ten years, the global audience was fragmented into secret fetishists and entertainment scrambled to cater to them. This sort of niche marketing started with advent of cable television, but kicked into hyperdrive in the YouPorn Age. The shift has finally hit cinema, largely evident in the year’s second highest grosser, Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, which borrowed porn imagery and pacing to trounce coherent entertainments (Up, Star Trek) by hundreds of millions worldwide. Meanwhile, the Twilight films break box office records teaching teenage girls the same masturbatory gaze. Nancy Meyers makes more mature, but no less kinky fare for older female audiences, who make a bi-yearly Christmas Day tradition of watching her characters eat handsome food inside handsome homes.

Meanwhile, actual sex has all but been banished from the mainstream. John Cameron Mitchell’s Shortbus, Michael Winterbottom’s 9 Songs, Vincent Gallo’s The Brown Bunny were limp mid-decade attempts to weave real sexuality into narrative cinema, but we had already seen every taboo they had to offer from the safety of our laptos. Similarly the most boring and sexless stars of the last ten years (Kate Hudson, Jake Gyllenhaal, Reese Witherspoon)- survived and thrived, while talented young actors who projected a modicum of authentic and dangerous sexuality, (Heath Ledger, Brittany Murphy), died.

The filmgoing public fragmented. Critics split from audiences. Audiences split from audiences. Viewers split from themselves within the span of two hours. The ’00s saw niche markets parsed into pieces so small they couldn’t sustain themselves, moving toward a day when the theatergoing experience will consist of 300 different iPods playing 300 different movies and/or music videos.

Of course, this (overdramatic) vision should be repellant to anyone who loves the cinema. As an art form, movies are dependent on connecting to large groups. Films are expensive to make, and in many ways, their survival is dependent on the ability for people to occasionally agree that one is fantastic. On that note, one of the humblest, but most hopeful triumphs of the decade was Napoleon Dynamite, a comedy made on a shoestring that won its way into public consciousness. Pixar contributed its share the audience reunification, churning out films that felt at once cutting edge and traditional, employing state-of-the-art animation to appeal to our better angels of construction, preservation, and creation. And huff and puff all you want about it, but Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ drew mass audiences to a fundamentally anti-violence message in the midst of a major war. There may never be another film so ravenously politicized, but the work itself was pure, independent, and resonant.

That brings me to my 20 favorites of the 2000s. The following list skews more mainstream than I would have liked. (Every wannabe critic aspires the highest level of esoterica they can muster, and I’m no exception.) But ultimately, my heart was with films that took the biggest swing to connect to larger audiences. So, here are twenty pockets of greatness from the last ten years, ranked in ascending order, with as much commentary as I felt necessary:

20. Grizzly Man (2005)

Documentaries are, by their very nature, works of grace. Their quality is often less dependent on directorial prowess on than luck. In documentary, the auteur is demoted to observer and the film is judged on how movingly and/or ethically the observation is presented. At their height, the Maysles brothers made the world’s most riveting documentaries largely by staying out of the way. With the advent of videotape, it was only a matter of time till found footage removed the documentarian from the shooting process almost entirely. Such was the case with the decade’s two best documentaries, Andrew Jarecki’s Capturing the Friedmans (2003) and Werner Herzog’s Grizzly Man. I could have chosen either for this list, but I gave the edge to Herzog for two reasons: 1) His film is less despairing and more rewatchable than the Friedmans, and 2) When push came to shove, Herzog stubbornly found a way to the make his film his own.

I have now seen Grizzly Man three times. The first time, it played like a pure comedy to me. It was as if Herzog had spotted his spiritual opposite in bear-loving Timothy Treadwell and decided to ridicule the raw footage from Treadwell’s Crocodile Hunter-meets-Gentle Ben spec with the most existential, somnolent narration he could muster. Treadwell himself came off as a man whose naiveté was so profound, his inevitable demise played out like a cartoon. The second time I saw Grizzly Man, the movie was still funny, but the beauty of the Alaskan wilderness and its inhabitants stuck with me. In Treadwell’s world, the animals have souls and his abiding trust in them seemed less ridiculous. The third time round, yes, the movie was still funny. However, the sadness and severity of Treadwell’s isolation from humanity outweighed everything. Here is a man who found his salvation in nature, only to have the natural world indifferently snuff him out. But I still laughed at it more than most comedies because Treadwell and Herzog are like the Felix and Oscar of the philosophical realm. Grizzly Man is an equally frightening and funny debate between a man who has nothing but faith in the world and a man who only has faith in its indifference.

19. The Lives of Others (2006)

Florian Henckel von Donnermarck’s feature debut requires little justification on any “best of” list. This story of a dull East German bureaucrat sympathizing with the couple he’s been tasked to surveil remains one of the decade’s unqualified masterpieces, grounded by an astonishing lead performance from Ulrch Mühe, who passed away not long after this film won wide acclaim. The Lives of Others is a deft thriller, but it lives in my memory as a sneakily optimistic story of a man quietly changed for the better. If my description makes the film sound cloying, trust that Donnersmarck somehow finds a way to make it anything but. In a time that brought some of the most depressing mainstream pictures in history, this was a serious drama with genuine uplift, all culminating in the best final line of the decade.

18. Still Walking (2008)

In the span of 15 years, Japan’s Koreeda Hirokazu has cemented himself as one of current cinema’s undeniable masters with films like After Life, Nobody Knows, and my personal favorite, Still Walking. Released in America earlier this year, it is a brilliantly subtle film about grief, guilt, and shifting family dynamics. It is one of the most emotional movies I’ve seen in years, but it eschews overt drama in favor of micro-level nuance. Hirokazu has been plumbing the depths of small moments for a while and I think he finally made his masterpiece. The highest praise I can offer Still Walking is that it reminded me of my favorite Mike Leigh dramas of the 90s, (though Ozu is Hirokazu’s true predecessor.) Whoever influenced Hirokazu is beside the point. He’s created one of the best contemporary family dramas in years and it deserves to be seen by everyone.

17. Idiocracy (2006)

I’ll freely admit the narrative inelegance of Mike Judge’s comedy, but there wasnt a more trenchant satire this decade. Buried by 20th Century Fox with a tiny, short-lived theatrical release in September of 2006, Idiocracy has risen to esteem in the never-ending aftermarket of DVD and cable. With any luck, it will be considered a classic in a few more years. How else can I describe Idiocracy other than to say it’s 90 minutes of the dumbest, most vile behavior in film history, capped by a final scene that makes me cry. For such a garish, ugly-as-sin production, the movie has an easy charm, due mostly to Luke Wilson’s relaxed lead performance. But the film’s best comic creation is President Comacho, (played by Terry Crews in a hugely underrated performance), the charismatic and joyous leader of a free world gone to shit. Judge’s low key approach to brilliant material left critics basically ignoring a premise they would later herald in Disney/Pixar wrapping paper, (to be fair, Wall-E didn’t steal directly from Idiocracy, but Idiocracy painted it’s indelible dystopia first.) In a dumb decade, there was no darker vision of intellectual de-evolution or a more hopeful reminder of the simple civility we crave.

16. A Serious Man (2009)

Walking into A Serious Man, I had heard that it was a “personal” Coen brothers movie, and my expectations adjusted to something less Coens-ey than their usual films. Needless to say, I was wrong. A Serious Man is the most “Coen brothers” Coen brothers movie since Barton Fink- funny, meticulously-crafted, bewildering, and utterly uncompromising. Without the benefit of multiple viewings, I have a hard time comparing this film to the other rest of their filmography, let alone everything else I saw this decade. But I will say that I enjoyed it immensely more than No Country for Old Men, (a film that I’ve always felt appeals strongest to non-Coen fans). But back to A Serious Man. There are too many great moments- the film’s puzzling preamble, the saga of the goy’s teeth, Larry Gopnick’s frightening neighbors, EVERY moment with Sy Ableman, the tense, funny, sweet bar mitzvah set piece gorgeously photographed by Roger Deakins, and the ending- Oh, that ending! What I’ll think of this film after years of reflection has yet to be determined, but I know no serious discussion of the ‘00s will be complete without it.

15. Broken Flowers (2005)

The rap on Jim Jarmusch’s Broken Flowers was that it seemed all too familiar upon it’s release. By 2005, we’d already seen Bill Murray play a disaffected smartass discovering paternal craving thrice (once for Sofia Coppola, twice for Wes Anderson). However, whatever Jarmusch lacked in a wholly fresh premise, he made up for in the depths to which he ventured. In movies before (Mystery Train) and since (Limits of Control), Jarmusch’s laconic pacing worked against him, but here the relaxed tempo was wholly essential to conveying a main character whose staid existence leaves him effectively paralyzed.

The film’s knockout moment is a small one- Murray gazing into the face of a young flower shop clerk (Pell James) and recalling the youthful grace of every woman he’s loved. (At least, that’s what I took that moment to mean.) At once, a philosophical can or worms burst open. The film’s last 20 minutes finds Jarmusch and Murray working at the peak of their powers as Murray befriends a young drifter who might be his son. Murray conveys the genuine hope for fatherhood, but more importantly, a sudden desire for meaning that snaps him conscious. The resolution is ambiguous, but it points us in the direction of much great mysteries of family, love and existence. Whether or not we asked for it, Broken Flowers was one the decade’s few movies made with eternity in mind.

14. Love Liza (2002)

Phillip Seymour Hoffman earned his rightful place as one of the best actors of the aughts, delivering one great performance after another in films as diverse as Capote, Owning Mahoney, Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead, The Savages, and Synechdoche, New York. But this is the flat out best Hoffman performance from the ‘00s. Todd Luiso’s small scale drama (based on a script by Philip’s brother, Gordy), is exceptionally funny and knowing portrait of grief and addiction. The addiction, in this case, is huffing gasoline, and the way Luiso conveys it feels just right- desperate, dangerous, but sort of fun. This is not a drug comedy of the Pineapple Express variety or an overheated cautionary tale like the decade’s biggest bummer, Requiem for a Dream. It’s a character study that draws sharp parallels between the hazes of addiction, depression and mourning. It gets across the craving for narcotic escape, not escape to a land of distorted lenses and colors, but escape from time itself. Love Liza is the kind of low budget, performance-driven Sundance entry that audiences have slowly lost interest in because they’ve seen it done badly so many times. But, I swear, this one is different! This one worked!

13. Year of the Dog (2007)

Had Mike White not dipped so far into the mainstream, you might be reading more assessments of him as the great screenwriting hope of the ‘00s. Between 2000’s Chuck & Buck, 2002’s The Good Girl, and 2003’s School of Rock, he seemed set to become the new King of Dramady. A few disappointments (Orange County, Nacho Libre) unfairly devalued his stock, leaving critics to overlook Year of the Dog, his masterpiece. That White somehow navigated pitfalls in development, production, and distribution to tell such a disquieting tale of such a strange person is remarkable.

Year of the Dog is- more than anything- a conversion story. The film addresses a moral code which I admire, but do not follow. I am not a vegan and I don’t love the film for reasons particularly vegan in nature. What I do love is how the film portrays the highs and lows of moral, ethical and spiritual transformation so honestly. This movie is about zealotry, mania, and the inexpressibly sublime glow that comes from discovering a new worldview. Molly Shannon’s performance as the dog-adoring Peggy is the kind of stunningly subtle work that made me want to go back and watch every Saturday Night Live sketch she ever did for fear that I may have overlooked the work of a truly great actress. Her emotional range- from subdued grief to elation to full-blown frenzy- is startling. Shannon’s Peggy typifies a familiar kind of solitary woman, and seeing the character born again into a deeper understanding of her own longing is a strange experience. It is a performance completely lacking in vanity or posturing, and Shannon is enthralling in every scene. The film borrows its climactic sequence from similar scene in John Cassavetes’ Love Streams. It’s hard to not see Year of the Dog as a sunnier descendant of Cassavetes’ chaotic human comedies in which pain, insanity, and love converge into overpowering moments of insight.

Yet, even as I write this, I realize that bestowing such praise on a seemingly featherweight movie must make me come off a little Mickey Mouse. I am nothing if not honest about what movies I love, and I argue that Year of the Dog is anything but featherweight. It explores dangerous terrain with a skip in its step. Rarely do directors evidence this sort of fervor, and even more rarely are they so good-natured about it.

12. Ghost World (2001)

This is a film I revisited habitually between 2001 and 2004 and never tired of. Formally, there is nothing particularly special about Terry Zwigoff’s Crumb follow-up. At first glance, it’s a hipster bait and we’ve all seen that before. But Ghost World is less a hipster movie than a deeply aching and funny movie about the practical application of hipsterism in the real world. It takes a character we’ve come to know in the ‘00s, the delightfully acerbic pixie princess, and examines her functionality as a real human being. Daniel Clowes’ Enid (played wonderfully by Thora Birch) doesn’t live in the safely of Hipster Land. She must contend with the obnoxiousness of modern life- bad haircuts, tacky fashion, stupid movies, an all white band called Blueshammer that promises to deliver “way down in the delta blues.” She wants a life as interesting as art, and life doesn’t measure up. Her connection with a record collector, Seymour (Steve Buscemi great as always) presents her with a friendship so genuine, she has no choice but to feel something. But a human relationship doesn’t allow for irony, distance, or viewing yourself as the hero of your own story. In the end, everyone gets hurt.

Like High Fidelty, another fine early-decade movie about music obsession, Ghost World is about all those questions we spend much of our lives thinking about, but never see on screen- “Am I cool?”, “Do others think I’m cool?”, and “Does it even matter?”

11. O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000)

The best musical of the decade was also the one that integrated music seamlessly into it’s narrative. Joel and Ethan Coen’s O Brother, Where Art Thou? makes the imaginative hedging of Rob Marshall’s Chicago seem gutless by comparison. In the Coens’ world, music is alive, real, and most importantly, functional. (For an earlier example of this hearty approach, lake a look at Terence Davies Distant Voice, Still Lives.) O Brother is also something of an apotheosis of the emerging Southern film that started in the 90s with Sling Blade and The Apostle and has since slowed down. It’s one of the most flat-out memorable screenplays in history and, thanks to the supervision of cinematographer Roger Deakins, it’s one of the decade’s few films where digital tweaking actually improved the look of a movie. (Side note: More than any director, Deakins was the driving master behind the best looking movies of the last ten years. For further evidence, look no further than 2007’s The Assassination of Jesse James By the Coward Robert Ford, the most beautifully-photographed movie I have ever seen.)

10. Seabiscuit (2003)

I don’t have a single friend who doesn’t ridicule me for loving this movie, but in the last ten years, I have rarely loved a movie more. I’m convinced we will one day look back on Gary Ross’s Seabiscuit as a paradigm of classical American filmmaking. It moves quicker and delves deeper than a million films like it. It deserved every accolade and award the year of it’s release, but garnered almost none because it was portrayed as too eager for awards consideration. (Brokeback Mountain was another classically made drama accused of being Oscar bait that would have easily made my list of favorites if the entire film was half as profound as the final 20 minutes.) Just examine the first half hour of Seabiscuit if you want to see an astonishing example of narrative efficiency. Three characters live entire back stories before we even get to the starting line of the first horserace. Every aspect of the production excels- but let’s be honest- production value isn’t what makes an audience weep. Seabiscuit simply tells a great redemption story, lock, stock and tomahawk. Laura Hillenbrand recognized it when she wrote a book about it, and Ross recognized it with his adaptation. And sometimes, a good story is all you need.

9. I Heart Huckabees (2004)

David O. Russell’s I Heart Huckabees was the decade’s biggest risk, with no close competition. Say what you want about Film X’s innovative structure or Film Y’s unconventional casting, I Heart Huckabees traded in nothing short of philosophy, the most boring and pretentious subject a filmmaker can dare to tackle. But Huckabees is no pretentious bore. It’s a mind-boggling, sun-drenched screwball comedy about panic-inducing existential crises. It’s big, daring, often embarrassing movie that didn’t just record the depression of the ‘00s, but attempted to exorcise it by answering questions with questions on top of questions.

On the short list of my favorite scenes from the decade is one where the Jude Law’s glad-handing exec Brad is forced to listen to an anecdote he constantly repeats until it moves him to the point of vomiting. It is the kind of film moment that only Russell seems interested in achieving- at once spontaneous and calculated, profound and scatological, cruel and kind. But there are countless moments of near equal impact: Mark Whalberg’s firefighter Tommy debating petroleum with a conservative family, Naomi Watts’ Dawn suffering a mental breakdown over the prospect that her beauty won’t stave off death, Jason Schwartzman’s Albert and Isabelle Huppert’s Catherine having despair sex in the mud. These are weird, nervy moments that I have not forgotten in six years. It’s only fitting that the YouTube clips of Russell arguing with his cast have since overshadowed the film- only a movie this crazy could inspire such boundless frustration.

8. Catch Me If You Can (2002)

Catch Me If You Can saw Steven Spielberg in top form, creating a populist romp every bit as entertaining as his ‘80s fantasies. It’s a swift, but terribly sad movie about the exhilaration and heartbreak of youth. Jeff Nathanson’s script uses divorce as a catalyst for a chase picture, and Spielberg (the most deeply scarred-by-divorce filmmaker of the boomer generation) hits the topic head on, capturing Frank Abegnale’s panic, aimlessness, and need to grow up fast. Spielberg is at his strongest when he addresses abandonment explicitly rather than implicitly, also evidenced by Artificial Intelligence, the director’s other film about the transcendent quest for parental love which provided one of the decade’s most underrated entertainments. Catch Me If You Can is also my favorite Christmas movie of the last ten years, using the holiday to mark the characters’ perennial loneliness. Leonardo DiCaprio’s performance here is as plugged into loneliness as his work in Titanic was brimming with charm. It’s an indication of great and troubling roles to come. For a filmgoer like me, who has fallen in and out of love with Spielberg, Catch Me If You Can felt like a return to the protagonist’s ever-illusive destination- home.

7. Punch-Drunk Love (2002)

An old Hitchcock adage goes something like: “Film your murders like love scenes and film your love scenes like murders.” This philosophy might as well have been employed in making Punch-Drunk Love, as no love story before or since has so resembled a thriller. Paul Thomas Anderson crafted a romance about how love can simultaneously addle the brain with anxiety while rescuing the heart from self-imposed exile. Punch-Drunk Love is a sweet film for nervous times, but thats not necessarily what draws me to it again and again. I find myself revisiting Punch-Drunk Love because it is a true blue stylistic original.

Style, as any film fan knows, is where filmmakers most easily tire and repeat themselves. It’s exhausting and risky to develop a new looks, new modes, new languages when the old ones are working just fine. Here, Anderson approaches a relatively simple story with an eagerness for battle, busting out an arsenal of lens flares, dolllies, abrupt tonal shifts, LOUD sound effects, and a brilliant score by Jon Brion, (I’ll go ahead and call it the best score of the decade.) The film is an genuinely optimistic vision of romance, a stylistic triumph unrivaled since, and a portrait of beautiful things happening in the San Fernando Valley. In it’s quiet way, Punch-Drunk Love is a film for all time.

6. The Man Who Wasn’t There (2001)

I have the feeling that Joel and Ethan Coen’s The Man Who Wasn’t There may come as close as we ever get to a perfect existentialist movie. The film is an exemplary neo-noir, and unlike classic noir, its philosophical currents are explicit rather than buried deep between the lines. (Todd Haynes’ Far From Heaven pulled the same trick with traditionally hidden sexual morality to wonderful effect.) At the center of the story is Ed Crane, embodied by Billy Bob Thornton in a wonderfully stoic performance. Ed is a silent barber so far removed from his action and inaction, we can barely hold him accountable for the havoc that unfolds around him. The inimitable genius Roger Deakins photographs the most beautiful black and white film since Raging Bull. The underrated Michael Badalucco embodies one of the all-time great Coen supporting characters (and there are many) as Ed’s oddly formal, yet moronic brother-in-law. The Coens deliver one of their most idiosyncratic screenplays ever, (“I’m gonna take this hair and throw it out in the dirt… I want to mingle it with common house dirt.”) I realize this is the third Coen brothers title on this list, which even I’ll admit is overzealous. But, to me, no filmmakers achieved greater or more consistent triumphs this decade by exploring the simple joys of cinematic language. The Coens are often accused of maintaining a cold distance from the audience, but they actually work harder than most filmmakers to communicate clearly and effectively. They never pander, but they always work to please. In ten years, they made one celebrated thriller (No Country for Old Men) three underrated comedies (The Ladykillers, Intolerable Cruelty, Burn After Reading), and three out-and-out masterpieces. The Man Who Wasn’t There was my favorite of them all.

5. The Aviator (2004)

In an astounding act of audacity, Marin Scorsese made his biggest, most expensive picture through the eyes of a sick, desperate man. And the result is something all too rare- an epic of deep feeling and intelligence, traditional yet experimental. The Aviator is really several movies in one: Scorsese’s ode to American industriousness, a highly personal take on the benefits and drawbacks of obsession, and a loopy psychological tragicomedy. (Do you not find it the least bit funny that Hughes could fly the fastest planes ever but couldn’t leave the bathroom?) It was a thrill to see The Aviator twice in pack theaters - hearing audiences wince at the sight of stained handkerchiefs and ominous door knobs. Though the movie’s popularity made film snobs uneasy, Scorsese should have been applauded for communicating the flavor of real mental illness to a mass audience. Leonardo DiCaprio pulled off every OCD with the accuracy and Cate Blanchett pulled off the impossible- a peerless impersonation of Katherine Hepburn that ultimately transcends impersonation.

The Aviator is hardly Scorsese’s best film. However, there are moments in it unlike anything I’ve seen in a Scorsese film: Hughes gazing at Hepburn as the couple flies over Los Angeles, the night providing a luminous backlight as Benny Goodman’s version of “Moonglow” plays gently; planes whipping around the sky in rhythmic formations as Hughes directs Hell’s Angels from a cockpit; Hughes secluding himself in his screening room and watching dailies from The Outlaw, remarking “I like the desert. Its hot, but its clean.” No small coincidence the last line recalls a similar one said by Peter O’Toole in Lawrence of Arabia. T.E. Lawrence and Howard Hughes are virtual clones in their mad daring and mania. The highest praise I can pay The Aviator is that it may well fill a double bill with David Lean’s greatest feat of daring.

4. About Schmidt (2002)

Before I extol the virtues of Alexander Payne’s comedy, allow me a quick diversion:

If there is an area where I feel self-conscious as a film fan, it’s in the department of international cinema. I see a fair number of foreign language titles every year, but never as many as I feel like I should. And while I count many foreign titles amongst my favorites of the decade (Fernando Meirelles’ City of God from Brazil, Kim ki-Duk’s Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter… and Spring from South Korea, ), my list of favorites boasts a paltry ratio of one foreign title to every ten American. There is an obvious reason for this: I am an American. The films I tend to relate to are American. The humor that communicates strongest to me is in the English language. If I were writing a more objective list on the decade’s best pictures, I might admit a slew of foreign titles I enjoyed despite the fact that I missed out on their cultural context at some level. But this list is personal, and therefore, largely American.

This relates to About Schmidt in two ways. Firstly, About Schmidt is the most American film of the decade. That’s one of the reasons I love it so much. Secondly, despite it’s inherent American-ness, About Schmidt moves at a pace that could best be described as “Asian” (read: glacial). Hence, we have something interesting, a movie that is clearly influenced by the last quarter century of sad, slow Asian cinema, but is also the quintessential American comedy. Thus, I am appreciating foreign influence, but only in English. But what makes Schmidt so American? The film is essentially about the moment in American life where work ethic is no longer the driving force of purpose. For Warren Schmidt (Jack Nicholson), retirement is like death (even more so than real death) and the movie is about his stages of grief, all conveyed through voice-over narration directed to an African sponsor child named Ndugu. This film marks one of the best and most unconventional Nicholson performances, playing completely against type by simply playing his own age.

Throughout, we are given moments alternating from riotously funny to dead serious, but leave it to Payne to reveal the film’s ultimate meaning in the last two minutes. After failing to stop his daughter from marrying an idiot, Warren returns to the now-empty home he once shared with his wife. Crestfallen, he reads a letter written by a nun in Ndugu’s village and unfolds an accompanying drawing. The simple drawing somehow encapsulates everything Schmidt has been stressing out over for the entire film- parental connection, his life’s purpose, loss, acceptance. It’s the best ending of the decade.

3. There Will Be Blood (2007)

Two years have passed since Paul Thomas Anderson unveiled his gruesome epic and there are no newly discovered flaws to defend. The film is still meticulous, sprawling, tragic and endlessly rewatchable. Daniel Day-Lewis’s performance is still the best of the last ten years. The film’s dissection of boundless, oil-grubbing pride is more relevant today than it was even two years ago. The only thing that’s changed is my reaction to it. Initially, I saw There Will Be Blood as Anderson’s attempt to follow the stylistic example of Stanley Kubrick. Now, I see the film as something slightly more impressive- a furious original, from start to finish.

2. The Departed (2006)

If There Will Be Blood channeled the darker impulses of the decade’s quest for oil, The Departed was a more subtle critique of life during wartime. Martin Scorsese has said as much without spelling it out directly and practically every scene of William Monahan’s script is about shell shock of one form or another. Granted, the battle is on home turf, but the soldiers still want to come home.

Next to The Dark Knight, The Departed was the ‘00’s most widely adored crime picture, and to me, it was the decade’s most entertaining movie by a long shot. Based on Andrew Lau’s 2002 Infernal Affairs, the film built a web of mixed identities and alliances that took a few viewings to fully appreciate. Like previous Scorsese films, it was accused of macho posturing, but those criticisms missed the point. Almost every Scorsese film since Mean Streets has been about macho posturing. That’s what he makes movies about- little boys putting on big boy clothes and yelling at each other. The Departed deconstructs toughness as incisively as Goodfellas, except in the guise of a genre story. Beneath the huffing and puffing and empty threats, the cops and robbers in The Departed are doing what they always do- putting on an act. As Leonardo DiCaprio’s Billy Costigan says: “There is no one more full of shit than a cop, except a cop on TV.”

How else do you explain the fact that The Departed was a crime thriller with only a minimal amount of action? The fake climax was a judiciously edited shootout that’s practically over before it starts. The real climax comes 20 minutes later, and it’s a dramatic, not pyrotechnic, triumph. (On that note, has there ever been a more brilliantly twisted cinematic quotation than the shot of Vera Farmiga walking past Matt Damon in the cemetery much in the same manner as the final shot of The Third Man?)

The cast was roundly outstanding, but the The Departed is ultimately DiCaprio’s film. This is the third DiCaprio performance in this top ten, and it’s also the best. Billy Costigan is the perfect cinematic hero of the new century: conflicted, exhausted and ultimately redeemed. Addicted to his dead mother’s Oxycontin and playing a thug to earn his stripes, he trudges through a moral wasteland to emerge an uncompromising hero, his soul and mind in tact. He is a survivor. Until he isn’t.

1. The Royal Tenenbaums (2001)

My favorite film of the decade was, plain and simple, the the most quietly overwhelming. The achievements of Wes Anderson’s film can be summarized concisely: Firstly, it advanced cinematic style by delivering us something completely different- frames popping with detail, meticulously composed peds and pans, characters wearing the same thing from scene to scene in a manner not unlike cartoons. Secondly, the script (by Anderson and Owen Wilson) was genuinely funny. This sounds easy, but if the decade has proved anything, it’s not. Thirdly, the film’s cast. I’ll forego listing the merits of every performance and simply say I’m glad to have been alive in a time when I could sit in a movie theater and watch the kitchen scene between Gene Hackman and Danny Glover, two actors at the top of their game, as equally matched as two actors ever were.

I’ve now written almost 6,000 words on the films of the decade without a single mention of September 11, 2001. You can understand why I want to avoid it. It’s gauche to sincerely invoke 9/11, especially when you’re talking about movies. Some writers have gone out of their way to heap praise on the decade’s most explicit reactions to it (the best of which were Spike Lee’s The 25th Hour and Paul Greengrass’s United 93). I would have been happy to leave the subject alone. However, it pertains to my favorite film of the decade in two ways. First of all, The Royal Tenenbaums was released a mere three months after September 11th. Secondly, it’s a great New York movie. And in the wake of atrocity, it played like a restorative tribute to the city. It had more to say about American diversity and familial love than any film we could have hoped for. It was a gentle, sane film for harsh, strange days.

I’ll wrap up this decade’s inventory with one of my favorite quotes from The Royal Tenenbaums. It’s a line that, to me, crystallizes the post-traumatic clarity of September 11th. It comes shortly after Royal has been found out for faking stomach cancer. He stands outside in the snow and has this exchange with his son Richie. He is clearly disgraced, but oddly optimistic:

Royal: Richie, this illness, this closeness to death… it’s had a profound affect on me. I feel like a different person, I really do.

Richie: Dad, you were never dying.

Royal: … But I’m gonna live.

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