Arts & Entertainment Preview | April 2001 | Sponsored by Chrysler
by Ella Taylor
The 2000 Ella Awards
The new movie century began as a blah year for American independent film, a great time for Asian cinema, and a banner year for Steven Soderbergh, who made two out of the three Oscar-worthy studio films of the year. For once, the Academy of Motion Pictures and I are almost in agreement. Almost.
Steven Soderbergh's Traffic
Best Picture:Traffic, a stylish, soulful policier about the forest of ignorance, confusion, and self-serving that is American drug policy, is a triumph of formal invention for Soderbergh. This egg-headed wunderkind of American independent cinema has distinguished himself as a thinking person's Hollywood showman who crafts brainy, beautiful social-issue dramas that double up as fun nights out at the multiplex. Soderbergh's work recalls a more generous era of American film, when Hollywood and the intellectuals saw no reason to shun one another, or to disdain their audiences. Runners-Up: Curtis Hanson's graceful, intelligent
Wonder Boys, based on the novel by Michael Chabon, returns honor to that debased form, the literary adaptation, as does Terence Davies's haunting, operatic reading of Edith Wharton's The House of Mirth, and Before Night Falls, Julian Schnabel's vibrantly free interpretation of a memoir by Cuban novelist and poet Reinaldo Arenas.
The Fresh Talent Award goes to David Gordon Green for his achingly lovely George Washington, about kids surviving, and more, in a run-down North Carolina town. Runner-Up: Lynne Ramsay, for the bleak beauty of Ratcatcher, about kids surviving, and more, in a Glasgow slum.
Best Foreign-Language Picture: Raul Ruiz's masterpiece, Time Regained, has the audacity to give visual form to the inner life of a genius. Passing from room to room of the posh, vicious salons of belle epoque Paris, Marcel Proust simultaneously passes through the chambers of his memory, embroidering and reinventing as he goes, until at last the singular voice of an artist is sprung from his ailing body. Runners-Up: Edward Yang's three-hour Yi Yi parses the undoing of a Taiwanese family through the quiet rhythms of jazz; Ang Lee's Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon wrings poetry and dance from the martial arts picture; Israeli director Amos Gitai's somber Kippur makes high drama out of the routinized tedium of war; Patrice Leconte's Girl on the Bridge works up a head of romantic steam between two lost-soul knife throwers.
Best Nonfiction Film: Marc Singer's fine Dark Days turns an unobtrusive, sympathetic, unsentimental eye on the lives of people who make their homes beneath the New York railway. Runners-Up: By the end of My Best Friend, Werner Herzog's account of his relationship with the actor Klaus Kinski, it's hard to tell which of the two is the greater lunatic; Josh Aronson's Sound and Fury examines the hope and heartbreak inspired by technologies to improve the hearing of the deaf.
Best Actor: With the sheer range of his bold, jittery performance as Cuban writer Reinaldo Arenas, Spanish actor Javier Bardem transformed Before Night Falls from an interesting movie into a great one. Runners-Up: Michael Douglas can do rakes and rogues in his sleep, but Wonder Boys—in which he plays a bedraggled professor unhinged by midlife crisis—asked of him much more, and got it in spades; Mark Ruffalo's gruff restraint as an errant younger brother set the subtle tone of Kenneth Lonergan's chamber piece, You Can Count on Me.
Julia Roberts, in Erin Brockovich
Best Actress: Julia Roberts was a gifted ham and a romantic lead coasting on her easy charm until Erin Brockovich, which turned her into a loudmouthed activist single mother—and made of her, at last, an actress. Runners-Up: Gillian Anderson, radiant with suffering and big hair, as the tormented Lily Bart, in The House of Mirth; Laura Linney, prim but bursting with sexual potential, as a repressed bank clerk, in You Can Count on Me.
Best Supporting Actor: Few young actors since James Dean have projected the smoldering intensity and sleepy intelligence emitted by Benicio del Toro as an honest cop caught in a drug war, in Traffic.Runners-Up: Robert Downey, Jr., for his febrile, diligently lascivious book editor, in Wonder Boys; Joaquin Phoenix, for his desperate dignity as a beleaguered liberal priest, in the otherwise daft Quills; Philip Seymour Hoffman, for his quietly mad turn as rock critic Lester Bangs, in Almost Famous.
Best Supporting Actress: In Pollock, Marcia Gay Harden brings a brittle, hectoring vitality to her role as the painter Lee Krasner, who was also Jackson Pollock's ranting, devoted wife. Runners-Up: Frances McDormand, for her wry authority both as Michael Douglas's lover, in Wonder Boys, and as the rock journalist's bulldozing mother, in Almost Famous; Lupe Ontiveros, for her deadpan solidity as a theater manager with playwright potential, in Chuck & Buck.
