A convenient anniversary hardly makes for a cultural golden age.
“We are not going back!” is something like the signature line of the Harris-Walz campaign, and for all of its vacuous dullness, the sentiment certainly encapsulates the progressive left’s prevailing philosophy.
As the left sees it, a society is not a constellation of permanent things but is itself malleable. History, tradition, and passed-down values are merely things to be corrected or canceled. Long-held and fairly self-evident ideas—such as, for example, that there are only two genders, or that price controls have proven calamitous—can be forsaken for the woke ideology du jour.
Yet, in at least one department, our cultural commissars are hopeless sentimentalists: When it comes to the movies, the recent past is apparently an inexhaustible treasure chest.
In recent weeks, the New York Times has been running articles trumpeting the movies released in 1999. Sample: “The Year Tom Cruise Gave Not One but Two Dangerously Vulnerable Performances.” Or: “10 Unforgettable Songs From 1999 Movies.” We are informed that the cinematic offerings of 25 years ago were unusually good and hold up especially well. Citing the mixture of pre-millennium optimism and dread, the Times movie critic Alissa Wilkinson wrote, “That collective mood—one of hope and fear mashed together—made 1999 an incredible year at the movies.”
Although this sort of talk has picked up during the quarter-century anniversary of that alleged golden year, multiplex wistfulness for the last year of the last century is nothing new: As far back as 2019, an entire book advancing this thesis was published by Simon & Schuster: Brian Raftery’s Best. Movie. Year. Ever.: How 1999 Blew Up the Big Screen. Such screeds tend to persuade because of Americans’ addiction to nostalgia: Anything, including the record of once-disliked presidents, can look appealing when regarded in the rearview mirror.
Dear reader, I was an avid moviegoer in 1999, and while I do not necessarily endorse all or even most of my opinions as a 16-year-old, I am confident in my assessment of the movie scene just before the turn of the millennium: I would have said then, and I say now, that 1999 was no great shakes.
Let us start with the claims of those arguing in favor of the year’s alleged cinematic greatness.
“Just look at the list: Fight Club. The Matrix. Toy Story 2. Eyes Wide Shut. Office Space. Shakespeare in Love. Magnolia. The Green Mile. The Blair Witch Project. Being John Malkovich. The Virgin Suicides,” Wilkinson wrote, throwing titles at us as though their greatness is self-evident.
Some of these are fine movies, but none can plausibly be said to equal the greatest works of the art form. Is the deadening coolness of Fight Club the equal of the invigorating humanism of The Rules of the Game? Do the cheapo thrills of Blair Witch compare to the spiritually rigorous soul-searching of Vertigo? Does the dime-store sentiment of The Green Mile measure up to the operatic expressiveness of Douglas Sirk melodramas? For heaven’s sake, does the dreary technical proficiency of the Toy Story sequel come within a country mile of the old Looney Tunes cartoons? Let’s keep some perspective here, people.
In fact, several of the best-remembered movies from 1999 suggest that our present troubles had emerged earlier than we might have imagined. For example, Paul Thomas Anderson’s extravagant epic Magnolia, another film mentioned by Wilkinson, could easily pass for a movie of today: From Tom Cruise blubbering over his ornery dying father to the principal cast members engaging in mass karaoke to an Aimee Mann song to the climactic scene of frogs pelting down, the movie is a harbinger of 21st-century-style spiritual-but-not-religious touchy-feeliness. Even the retro-casting of old-timey supporting players like Philip Baker Hall or Melinda Dillon (the mom in Close Encounters!) anticipates the very nostalgia craze that elevates the movie today.
Similarly, the postmodern mumbo-jumbo of Being John Malkovich and the techno soullessness of The Matrix—to which sequels are still being produced—feel all too familiar.
The 1999 release that eventually won the Oscar for Best Picture, American Beauty, indulges in an early, and easy, attack on the American normal entirely in keeping with contemporary sentiments: Middle-class suburbia was portrayed as a sham to be uncovered and a hellscape from which to escape. Apart from the presence of its now-canceled star Kevin Spacey, the movie would still appeal to our cultural gatekeepers.
Wilkinson goes on to call the entirely disposable Runaway Bride “a great rom-com” and the utterly profane American Pie “a teen classic,” at which point she loses even the pretense of critical seriousness. If these were the highlights of 1999, what were the lowlights?
I liked plenty of movies in 1999, but then, as now, they were not the ones that broke box-office records, accumulated glowing notices, or would later occasion fond reappraisals in the New York Times. I especially admired David Mamet’s British legal drama The Winslow Boy, Neil Jordan’s lovely adaptation of Graham Greene’s The End of the Affair, and Robert Altman’s digressive Southern reverie Cookie’s Fortune. I liked the latest films by Clint Eastwood (True Crime), Woody Allen (Sweet and Lowdown), and Steven Soderbergh (The Limey), too.
Yet I would not use this personal pantheon to argue that 1999 was an exceptionally consequential year in moviemaking. To do so is to suggest that the mere passage of time alone confers greatness; by that reckoning, the filmic junk of 2024—say, Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga or Drive-Away Dolls—might look good in 2049. I beg to differ. To “want to go back” to an earlier, more wholesome era in American civic life is entirely salutary, but to romanticize the slop Hollywood produces one year over another? Thanks, but no thanks.
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