I spent a bit of time in 2012 doing a 10-year lookback on films from 2002. I was blessed and rewarded by the experience. Here are my personal favorites from what I saw :
1. In America
This is really one of my favorite films from any year. I always seem to be drawn to movies about families, and In America captures so many of the sorrows, mysteries, and beauties that run through all families. It is so right that In America was included on the Arts & Faith Top 25 List for best films about marriage, though the way it speaks of marriage is only one of its many riches. Here also is so much about parenthood, about sibling relationships, about childhood, about the family’s relationship to outsiders, about the family as it deals with grief, about the family’s faith or lack of it. The lovely thing about the film, though, is that you don’t ever feel it straining to be about all of these things. As you watch, you simply experience this family itself. It is able to be “about” all of those things because of the bracing immediacy with which it is about this family. It is well known that 80 or 90% of this film is auto-biographical for director Jim Sheridan. I think the way he looks at himself and his own family so fearlessly, and with such joy, is why this is the best film of 2002.
(One of my favorite scenes in any movie year is found here. It begins with Johnny playing a game with his kids involving a blindfold, then zigzags from childs’ play to haunting grief to playacting to an open marriage wound to a kind of mending of that wound all within about 1 minute. The family’s entire world is caught in this scene, a world in which the past overshadows the present but does not overwhelm it, a world in which the characters teeter on edge between hope and despair. This is, of course, the world of most of us as well.)
2. Stevie
There is so much pain here, perhaps more than in any film on this list. So how could it possibly be that there is so much hope here as well? How is it that the intermittent scenes of hope rise so high in the viewer’s heart? Perhaps it is because they are a picture of loving the “unlovable.” In a striking way, we are invited by this documentary to consider loving one who should be supremely unlovable. Invited to approve of him and his actions, no. Yet there is an invitation to love him nonetheless. And so, perhaps, to learn what it means to love those who are like him.
3. Russian Ark
Surely the most audacious experiment in a film year filled with them, this one-shot jaunt through Russian history succeeds because the experiment is at the service of something so adventurous, profound, and even funny. There are deep rewards here for anyone who loves the intersection of art, faith, and history.
4. Whale Rider
Of all the 2002 movies I saw for the first time as I focused my watching on that year, I was most surprised with what I came away with here. Whale Rider does not star the directionless Keisha Castle-Hughes of The Nativity Story. It stars the Keisha Castle-Hughes who draws the whole film around her center of gravity, her screen presence lending great power to the captivating mysteries of the film’s third act. Considering the daring destination the film chooses to head for in that third act, it is quite astonishing how beautifully it makes it there.
5. The Son
As my affection for the Dardenne brothers has increased with their more recent films, I desperately want to see this again (most recent viewing was over a decade ago). I remember most vividly the final scenes of discovery and crisis. I have a feeling that my experience of this movie will deepen immensely now that I am a father of three children.
6. Minority Report
7. 25th Hour
8. Spellbound
9. The Pianist
10. Hero