In a recent New York Times article on the tenth anniversary of Fight Club, Dennis Lim compared the volatile mixed responses that greeted the movie back then with its cult-classic status now. But even at the time, Fight Club was part of an American movie scene that, after a largely somnolent twenty years or so, suddenly seemed to be at full boil. 1999 isn’t far enough away to inspire a lot of nostalgia. But I didn’t know any hardcore movie lovers then who didn’t feel that something exciting was going on, behind the newsmagazine covers and box-office reports celebrating the return of the Star Wars franchise and the get-rich-quick scheme that was The Blair Witch Project. If you need a reminder of why it felt unusual, you need only think back on what we’ve seen so far of 2009. But whither the Class of ’99 themselves? What have they done in the ten years since? The answers, as you might expect, are all over the road:
DAVID FINCHER: By Fight Club, Fincher had proven himself as gifted an audiovisual stylist as any director of his generation, but there were reasons to wonder about whether his ears and eyes were hooked up to some kind of larger thinking apparatus. Alien³ and The Game were dazzling-looking examples of their respective genres, but those genres remained “lousy sequel” and “cheap mindfuck.” Fincher’s biggest success prior to Fight Club, Se7en, was so visually powerful and doomy that it actually sold its seven-deadlies gimmick as a serious inquiry into good and evil, but the fact that Fincher himself was capable of taking it that seriously didn’t speak well for his grey matter. That Fight Club was accused of carrying some kind of neo-fascist message suggests that many people had trouble accepting the possibility that so stylish a director might have nothing coherent to say at all.
Fincher’s first movie of the new millennium, Panic Room, was a cinematic “NOBODY HOME” sign, a mechanical thriller and exercise in pure plot machinery. More recently, Fincher re-teamed with Brad Pitt to give us The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, a three-hour CGI-augmented lump. In between, though, Fincher staged a surprise comeback with the best work of his career, Zodiac, a complex, thoughtful, boldly unglamorous look at serial killers that’s all the more admirable for the way it punctures the ghoulish pretensions of Se7en. GRADE: A-
PAUL THOMAS ANDERSON: Anderson’s Magnolia was Fight Club‘s only real challenger for the 1999 “love it or hate it” crown. Anderson had already been acclaimed as a wunderkind after his epic Boogie Nights, a film almost as sprawling as Magnolia but not as richly felt, and Hard Eight, a character study almost as impassioned as Magnolia but much more compact. Although Magnolia‘s strongest fans took it deeply to heart, the movie was greeted with enough abuse and open ridicule to inspire a behind-the-scenes snippet included on the DVD in which Anderson’s then-girlfriend, Fiona Apple, apparently representing the movie, does a little dance for her maker’s approval while he berates her for being the child who didn’t make good.
Since then, Anderson has made only two more features, but of all the Class of ’99, he may have done the most to shore up his reputation as a proven talent with a claim to master status. 2002’s Punch-Drunk Love was an instant cult item, a remarkable mixture of tone poem and comedy that found a way to use Adam Sandler for good instead of glop. It inspired fascination even as it was guaranteed to lose money and bewilder multiplex audiences from coast to coast. But There Will Be Blood, a rough-souled frame for Daniel Day-Lewis’s broad strokes and detailed brushwork, shocked those critics still snickering over Magnolia‘s rain of frogs and served notice that P.T.A. remains a man to watch. GRADE: A+
DAVID O. RUSSELL: In 1999, Russell’s Three Kings seemed to come out of nowhere, even to those who’d loved the director’s domestic comedies Spanking the Monkey and Flirting with Disaster. Already established as a gutsy major talent, Russell swung for the trees with his black-humored Gulf War movie, the kind of movie that so respects both its audience’s intelligence and desire to be entertained that its inevitable failure in theaters can only leave you wondering what’s the point of it all. Given its handling of a subject that turned out to be a lot timelier than we dared to dread, future generations will have a hard time believing it bombed at the moment that it seems to embody.
Since then, Russell has spent ten years solidly establishing himself as… the guy who made Three Kings. His one feature completed since then, I Heart Huckabees, is his Brewster McCloud, a brilliant and surreal mistake that nobody else could have made and that nobody especially needed to. Its major legacy remains a YouTube video of Russell shrieking at Lily Tomlin, a public embarrassment that fortified his already solid reputation for hotheadedness. As the Bush years made Three Kings look more and more prophetic, he also co-directed Soldiers Pay, a short documentary about the second Iraq War that was supposed to be included with a 2004 DVD edition of Three Kings that never appeared. Subsequently, Russell embarked on Nailed, a “political comedy” starring Jessica Biel and Jake Gyllenhaal. No release date has been set, but Russell has since gone on to his next project, a boxing biopic starring Mark Wahlberg and Christian Bale. GRADE: B-
SPIKE JONZE: Jonze’s first movie, Being John Malkovich, raised the profiles of both Jonze and his screenwriter, Charlie Kaufman, two guys with enthusiastic cult followings. It was a triumph for a couple of flaky originals who few thought could extend their prankish talents to feature length. The hero’s welcome that greeted their next collaboration, 2002’s Adaptation, was partly a reaction based on the thrill of seeing the boys back together. When the smoke cleared, though, it was the Michel Gondry-directed Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind that probably stands as the best movie yet drawn from Kaufman’s tragicomic sensibility. And the misguided Where the Wild Things Are reveals that Jonze is way more dependent on his screenwriting collaborators than one might once have guessed. The saddest thing about the inaccurately titled Wild Things is that it reveals an unsuspected yearning for squishy artistic respectability inside the co-creator of Jackass. Those who’d rather remember his brilliant, carefree youth are directed to the music-video DVD compilation The Work of Director Spike Jonze. GRADE: B+
WES ANDERSON: With his second feature, Rushmore — a late-’98 release that went wide in the early months of 1999 — Anderson moved past the slender, homey charms of his 1996 debut, Bottle Rocket, and perfected the style that would make him perhaps the most polarizing young filmmaker of the past decade. With each step of the way through a body of work that now includes The Royal Tenenbaums, The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, and The Darjeeling Limited, he has continued to perfect a sensibility his fans see as infinitely, beautifully, delicately sad and funny, even as others of us wish we could tell him to stop wiggling his ears and pull his head out of his navel. For his latest trick, he’s managed to confuse the issue by releasing the stop-motion animation feature Fantastic Mr. Fox, a Roald Dahl adaptation that turns out to be everything his live-action movies are supposed to be. GRADE: B+
LARRY AND ANDY WACHOWSKI: After the tautly plotted Bound (1996), the Wachowski brothers delivered The Matrix, a movie that re-invented sci-fi action in a way that made the Star Wars prequels look even mustier. The sky seemed to be the limit for the brothers, and they crashed right into it with the second and third installments of the inevitable trilogy, which inflated The Matrix‘s pseudo-religious pretensions to a degree beyond even George Lucas’s dreams of glory. If you can forget about what came after it, the first film still holds up, and can now be watched in a universe where somebody isn’t parodying Keanu Reeves’s bullet-dodging act every ten minutes. As for the brothers, the closest they’ve come to duplicating its success has been with V for Vendetta, an adaptation of the Alan Moore comic that they wrote and produced but handed off to James McTeigue to direct. The reaction to their comeback vehicle, 2008’s Speed Racer, can best be summed up as, “No, please, go away again.” GRADE: C+
ALEXANDER PAYNE: Coming after 1996’s Citizen Ruth, his imperfect but bracing abortion-hysteria satire starring a heroic Laura Dern, Payne’s adaptation of Tom Perrotta’s Election established him as a wizard of character studies and social satire and a terrific actors’ director, a standing that he’s maintained with About Schmidt (2002) and Sideways (2004). How does he make movies like these and stay afloat in Hollywood? He and his writing partner Jim Taylor also have screen credits on Jurassic Park III and I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry. Take a tip, starving artists. For real. GRADE: A
M. NIGHT SHYAMALAN: Powered by a heavy sense of unease and beautiful performances by Bruce Willis, Haley Joel Osment, and Toni Collette, The Sixth Sense turned out to be the sleeper of 1999, earning its director the comparisons to Hitchcock given to anyone who delivers a twist ending without humiliating himself. Shyamalan remained “interesting” with 2000’s Unbreakable, but the draggy, morose film inspired many a reviewer to suggest that Shyamalan might consider taking his allegiance to the O. Henry Gotcha! Storytelling Handbook a little less solemnly. His humorless conviction regarding the importance of his own claptrap came across strongly enough to make the 2002 Signs a big hit, but Shyamalan was already flirting with self-parody, and with each successive film — The Village, Lady in the Water, and The Happening — he’s managed to fall a little further into it. His next scheduled release is The Last Airbender, the first in a planned trilogy based on an animated TV series. On the plus side, it at least sounds weird. But unless he pulls off something way unexpected, he seems unlikely to reverse his transformation into a punchline. GRADE: C-