Looking back on the year in movies beats the hell out of looking back on the year in money. By mid-December, according to the New York Times, 2.8 million Americans had lost their jobs in 2008, and the Federal Reserve was predicting that by the end of the year home foreclosures would total 2.25 million. Some 46 million of us have no health insurance, the Congressional Budget Office estimates that 28 million are relying on food stamps—an all-time high—and the U.S. Conference of Mayors reports that hunger and homelessness are rising in most big cities. And the coming year looks even worse: economists are predicting that as many as one in nine Americans will find themselves out of work in 2009. People at the top of the ladder can dicker all they like over whether this is the second coming of the Great Depression or just a long, deep recession; for people at the bottom, it’s just a matter of semantics.
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Of course the Great Depression turned out to be a rich period for American movies, and, not surprisingly, money was a major preoccupation. In escapist comedies like Lady for a Day (1933), My Man Godfrey (1936), and Easy Living (1937), poor people found themselves catapulted by chance events into the world of wealth and leisure. That fairy-tale ethos is alive and well in Danny Boyle’s British import Slumdog Millionaire, an art-house smash in the U.S. that looks to be 2008’s Little Miss Sunshine—the small movie that muscles its way into the Oscar ranks alongside the privileged big-studio projects. In Slumdog, a poor young man becomes an overnight sensation on the Indian version of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?, and each quiz question triggers a flashback to his grim past as an orphan on the streets of Mumbai. I’m not as gaga over the film as most of my peers —it didn’t even make my top 25—but I can see the allure of a movie where the deserving hero gets the girl and 20 million rupees and the end credits are intercut with a dance number reminiscent of Busby Berkeley.
Following are my other nine favorite films that premiered in Chicago between January 1 and December 31, 2008, plus 15 honorable mentions and my genre picks for the year:
- The Edge of Heaven Born in Hamburg to Turkish immigrants, writer-director Fatih Akin has spent much of his career pondering his culture in relation to his parents’. This masterful drama takes his preoccupation to a more profound level, equating nationality with the inseparable bond between parent and child. Its two linked stories involve a young man shamed by his father’s act of violence and an old woman helpless to prevent her daughter’s folly; when these two characters meet over coffee at the end, their pain is remarkably similar.
Honorable Mention
Best Thriller Tell No One. Runner-up: London to Brighton.
