MET EXPECTATIONS | PAGE 1, 2
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4. "Two Girls and a Guy"
James Toback's film (released after being the subject of ratings board harassment for months -- and now uncut on video) begins as a hip little urban sex farce and builds to a bittersweet wallop. Toback is trawling his favorite territory here: the irresistible, unresolvable, maddening tension between men and women. But there's a new confidence to his approach. And the acting couldn't be better. Heather Graham and Natasha Gregson Wagner play off each other expertly. And as the boyfriend they discover they share, Robert Downey Jr. is astonishing. Drawing on the personal hell he's been through in the last few years, the most gifted farceur of his generation switches gears to reveal the emotional wreckage of a young Lothario who no longer has his seducer's bag of tricks to fall back on. This is the performance of the year.
5. "Out of Sight"
What more could the audiences who ignored this funky,
sexy entertainment have wanted? Scott Frank wrote a sharp, tricky
adaptation of Elmore Leonard's novel; Steven Soderbergh directed it with
sly, relaxed confidence; George Clooney and Jennifer Lopez brought a
mixture of lust and longing as flawlessly proportioned as the ingredients in a perfect cocktail, and they were backed up by a sprightly pack of jokers: Ving Rhames, Don Cheadle, Viola Davis, Katharine Keener, Luis Guzman, Dennis Farina, Albert Brooks, Nancy Allen and the inimitable Steve Zahn. The joke is on everyone who missed out. Put it this way: "Out of Sight" may have an afterlife akin to Woodstock. Years from now you'll be running into people who'll assure you they were hip enough to be there the first time.
6. "A Simple Plan"
Devastating. Sam Raimi's snowbound Midwestern noir
about three men trying to keep a secret that won't stay hidden holds you in a state of horrified empathy. Rejecting the shallow cartoon misanthropy that's fashionable in movies right now, Raimi has made a tragedy in which the violence is a betrayal of the characters' humanity, not a blasé confirmation that they're scum. As the everyman lead, Bill Paxton plunges us into the horror of a decent man realizing just what he is capable of doing. And Billy Bob Thornton is heartbreaking as Paxton's brother, a man with a painful awareness of his limitations, and a rock-solid, tragic knowledge of exactly who he is.
7. "The Truman Show"
The backlash had set in almost before Peter Weir's film had opened. And then it was misread as merely a satire on the media, or on suburbia. But the soul of this movie lies with ranters and visionary crackpots, not satirists. Within the frame of their perfectly worked-out premise, Weir and screenwriter Andrew Niccol made a movie that encouraged the audience to question every assumption of their culture, and finally everything we assume to be unchangeable. Jim Carrey, in the role he
was born to play, channels his usual freneticism into something like ardor. By the end of the summer, the joke of the movie was undeniable. With Ken Starr, the punditocracy and the Republicans of the House Judiciary Committee insisting, Christof-like, that their version of morality and law was "the way the world should be," and the public insisting that there was something beyond what we were being told, we all had a taste of what it is to be Truman Burbank.
8. "Under the Skin"
Made with a novelist's eye for detail and a quietly impassioned visual flair, Carine Adler's film about a young woman who mourns her dead mother by embarking on a self-destructive odyssey features a harrowing performance by 20-year-old Samantha Morton in her film debut. She's in almost every scene, and she's phenomenal, completely unprotected without once losing her control as an actress. Though at times, Adler relies on her whirling camera to do the work of the
script, she matches her leading actress for sheer bravery, and her taste for expressionism defeats any potential kitchen-sink dreariness. This is the most aptly titled picture of the year, alive with an overwhelmingly physical sense of peril and exhilaration.
9. "The Mask of Zorro"
Eschewing action-movie bombast
for wonderfully staged sequences featuring some doozies of stunts,
director Martin Campbell gets exactly the right mixture of seriousness, frivolity and sexiness. In the title role, Anthony Hopkins has never shown the sheer joy in performing that he does here. And as the bandit to whom he passes on the role of Zorro, Antonio Banderas recovers the knockabout humor that made him so sexy to begin with. Stunningly beautiful Welsh actress Catherine Zeta-Jones is an impassioned match for the pair of them. Enthralling in ways we don't expect movies to be anymore, "The Mask of Zorro" makes the very idea of movie heroes seem possible again.
10. "I Went Down"
Director Paddy Breathnach and screenwriter Conor McPherson are the talent behind this warm, hard-nosed Irish comedy -- half road-movie, half noir -- about two ex-cons who undertake a shady errand to get themselves out of a gangster's debt. The heart of the movie is the relationship between the young Git (Peter McDonald) and the older Bunny (Brendan Gleeson), two men so mismatched they're bound to be friends. Breathnach's relaxed, anecdotal approach catches you by surprise again and again.
SALON | Dec. 24, 1998
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