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.”

Matthew Broderick and Reese Witherspoon in “Election,” directed by Alexander Payne.CreditParamount Pictures
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.

George Clooney, left, Mark Wahlberg and Ice Cube in David O. Russell's ''Three Kings.''CreditMurray Close/Warner Brothers
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 “A.D.D.-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.”)