3. “The Piano Teacher”
Leave it to implacable fear monger Michael Haneke to deliver one of the decade’s most scorching portraits of human suffering and emotional incarceration, one bordering on a psychic breakdown. Known for his psychologically disturbing works, the misanthropic filmmaker renders yet another austere tale about a submissive piano teacher (a spectacularly emotionally ravaged Isabelle Huppert) who is systematically damaged by her malevolent mother. Her humanity practically buried under years of mental abuse, Huppert’s character only reprieve with respect to feeling something is ventilated by cruelty to her students or brutal moments of self-inflicted genital mutilation (“Antichrist” has nothing on this). Things get even worse (if you can even imagine) when she becomes obsessed with one of her 17-year-old students. Abhorrent yet fascinating, the picture is like a blunt-instrument striking the head, a film we carefully admire from afar but never want to be forced to watch again.
2. “Mulholland Drive”
David Lynch’s puzzle box narrative seems to be about a hopeful Hollywood newcomer (Naomi Watts) who stumbles wide-eyed into a haunting mystery to which there are no coherent answers. But the hallucinatory nature of the story gives way to a deeper plumbing of the dreamscape —Lynch invites the viewer farther down the rabbit hole than previously thought possible. In the end, the fable, originally created as an ABC pilot, diverges into two distinctly different narratives, one real and one imagined, but not always in that order. Keep a scorecard handy for Lynch’s scariest film yet.
1. “The Man Who Wasn’t There”
The Coen Brothers‘ achingly beautiful neo-noir (filmed in velvety black-and-white) was the polar opposite of their previous film, the jubilant “O Brother, Where Art Thou?” Dour, smoky, and draped in period atmosphere (it takes place in the late 1940s), this tale of a barber (Billy Bob Thornton) becoming embroiled in a convoluted scheme involving murder, blackmail, UFOs and the burgeoning technology of dry cleaning is one of the Brothers’ most inscrutable, underrated, and deeply felt films. It’s a movie whose characters are hollow (hollowed out by suburbia and by World War II), and the visual texture enriched by those long, inky shadows, echo this marvelously. It’s a movie whose gorgeous starkness haunts you long after you finish watching.
Honorable Mention:
Perhaps what many will see as a glaring oversight is Wes Anderson‘s “The Royal Tenenbaums” which was a bone of contention amongst some of the staff, but the prevailing Playlist wisdom is that this film isn’t the masterpiece many think it is and suffers from too much caricature (one-note performances, costumes and an ungainly slathering of music) that was enough to keep it off this list. To be clear, it does have some heart and is very watchable. Other pictures that didn’t quite make the cut were Baz Luhrmann‘s gaudy yet entertaining musical, “Moulin Rouge,” Alejandro Amenábar‘s spellbinding ghost story “The Others,” starring a strong performance by Nicole Kidman (when you look at the decade as a whole you realize she’s been in several great films), Kiyoshi Kurosawa‘s psychological-j-horror film, “Kairo” and Todd Field‘s harrowing family drama, “In The Bedroom.”
If you’re wondering where films like “Ali,” “Donnie Darko,” “Black Hawk Down” or “Vanilla Sky” well, they were discussed but didn’t make the cut. Thoughts? Your 2001 picks?
— Kevin Jagernauth, Rodrigo Perez, Drew Taylor, Katie Walsh, Astrud Sands, Gabe Toro,