Why 1999 was Hollywood’s greatest year

Cinema’s best year ever? For decades, Old Hollywood purists have argued for 1939, which brought us “Gone With the Wind,” “Stagecoach,” “The Women,” “The Wizard of Oz,” “Mr Smith Goes to Washington,” “Dark Victory,” “Intermezzo” and many more. Others plant the flag for 19-seventy-9; lately, the writer Rich Cohen has been churning out essays on Medium in praise of that year’s bounty: “Apocalypse Now,” “Mad Max,” “Being There,” “Alien,” “All That Jazz” and comedies such as “The Jerk,” “The In-Laws,” “Life of Brian” and “Real Life.”

Now comes the culture critic Brian Raftery with “Best Movie Year Ever: How 1999 Blew Up the Big Screen.” He focuses on a bumper crop of breakthrough, subversive, auteur-driven movies — virtually all of which were released theatrically in 1999 — quoting the actor Edward Norton (of 1999’s “Fight Club”), who is hard pressed to name any other 12-month span “that had more really original young filmmakers tapping into the zeitgeist.”

Raftery makes a persuasive, entertaining case for the enduring impact of a passel of classics, from “American Beauty” to “American Movie” to “American Pie.” Among them: “The Matrix,” “The Sixth Sense,” “Boys Don’t Cry,” “Three Kings,” “Being John Malkovich,” “The Best Man,” “The Insider,” “The Virgin Suicides,” “Magnolia” and “Election.” He weaves together film history and cheeky anecdotes from Hollywood insiders, recounting a midnight rave here, a nude ski run there. His tone, like the period’s, is jaunty but jaundiced. When “The Matrix” was conceived, he observes, “the mainstream web was still in its modem-wheezing early days.” “Fight Club,” he contends, had “the proper alchemy of madcap and menace.” Raftery’s voice and thesis suit today’s craving for Nineties Nostalgia.

Matthew Broderick and Reese Witherspoon in “Election,” directed by Alexander Payne. The New York Times

In what the author describes as a cinematic counterinsurgency, many Class of ’99 filmmakers — weaned on TV remotes, joysticks, music videos and the web — dispensed with linear narratives and incorporated the “ADD-addled storytelling of modern nonfiction television.” Chronology was crunched in the ecstasy-laced “Go,” the micro-budgeted “Following” and “Run Lola Run,” which played out like a video game. Lana and Lilly Wachowski’s “The Matrix,” as Raftery sees it, tapped into the idea that “online, reality was becoming bendable,” a concept encapsulated in a revolutionary CGI sequence in which Neo (Keanu Reeves) miraculously evades a hurtling bullet. “‘The Matrix,’” Raftery writes, “nudged viewers to develop their own slowed-down, omniscient, bullet-time view of the world around them: Who controls my life?” Indeed, the themes of “The Matrix,” including our quest to decipher hidden, alternative realities, still bewitch us. (A few months ago, in fact, New York magazine published “19 Things ‘The Matrix’ Predicted About Life in 2019.”)

Heather Donahue in “The Blair Witch Project,” directed by Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez.  The New York Times

These maverick directors borrowed from hacker and web culture, their films foreshadowing social media’s dark descent. The internet colors Spike Jonze’s “Being John Malkovich,” in which sojourners adopt the actor John Malkovich’s body as their avatar. According to Malkovich himself, Charlie Kaufman’s script addressed the media-fueled “need we have … to lead sort of virtual lives.” This compulsion to recast one’s identity was also at the twisted core of 1999’s “The Talented Mr. Ripley” as well as “Man on the Moon,” in which Jim Carrey essentially transformed himself (on set and off) into the gonzo performance artist-comedian Andy Kaufman. Without the web, there would have been no “Blair Witch Project,” the homemade sham-snuff horror movie that became a case study in online promotion. The indie film’s faux vérité shared the fraudulent authenticity of a new genre, reality TV. And once “Blair Witch” went viral, as Raftery puts it, it helped “fringe fears go mainstream,” a fright-wig stepchild of Oliver Stone movies and “The X-Files.”

Many of the movies, Raftery points out, came with a fin de siècle edge: a pervading apocalyptic angst. The story lines, with their aggrieved outsiders and collapsing families, prophesied our current condition, post-9/11 — plagued as we are by forever wars, increasing wealth disparity and the oppressive rise of the autocrat, the bigot, the corporate state. Frogs rain from the sky in “Magnolia.” The Burnham household implodes in “American Beauty.” Sexual obsession and decadence envelop “Eyes Wide Shut.” Angry young white guys rage against the machine in “Fight Club,” whose release was postponed in the wake of the killings at Columbine. “Boys Don’t Cry,” which recounts the murder of Brandon Teena, a transgender man, was filmed, Raftery says, just as “Matthew Shepard was kidnapped, pistol-whipped and tied to a fence in … Wyoming.”

George Clooney, left, Mark Wahlberg and Ice Cube in David O. Russell's ''Three Kings.'' The New York Times

For all this, the book has its hiccups. Raftery, despite a nice shout-out to John Hughes, favors ’90s kids-in-crisis films over “crummier Reagan-era teen movies.” There’s no mention of “Quiet: We Live in Public,” the dystopian social experiment webcammed 24/7 on the eve of the new millennium — until the cops shut it down. That said, Raftery dares to think bigger than the big screen. He explains that once HBO rolled out “The Sopranos” in January 1999, its influence would prove seismic: Thereafter, a generation’s most engaging onscreen stories would be serials, viewed in our homes or on our phones. He notes, as well, that in 1999, when AOL began its $165 billion play for the Time Warner colossus, the deal presaged the current Digital Ice Age, in which tech (Netflix, Amazon et al) is slowly slaying the Hollywood dinosaur.

Al Pacino, left, and Russell Crowe appear in the Michael Mann film “The Insider.” The New York Times

Raftery’s right. Nineteen-ninety-nine did rewire how we tell stories in moving pictures. Morpheus, we’re not in Kansas anymore. Then again, “Best Movie Year Ever” may also be biased, inflating the significance of the cultural touchstones of its author’s youth. In that regard, I’d like to speak up for 1968, which turned out “2001: A Space Odyssey,” “Rosemary’s Baby,” “Yellow Submarine,” “The Producers,” “Bullitt,” “The Lion in Winter,” “Night of the Living Dead”.

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