Welcome to the fifth instalment of the Noughts Report. Each entry revisits a year in film from the 2000s, highlighting movies big and small and the careers and genres and trends that ignited or flamed out along the way. This attempted kaleidoscope is 100% subjective and AI-free, so if I bag or barely mention a film you love, or orate at length or heap praise upon a film you loathe, I apologise.
Read Part 1: 2001, Part 2: 2002, Part 3: 2003, and Part 4: 2004.
The Star Wars prequel trilogy wrapped in 2005 with Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith. It didn’t quite end with a whimper, grossing circa $850 million worldwide compared to The Phantom Menace’s $924 million six years earlier, only around 8% less than that juggernaut. But The Phantom Menace was the only juggernaut of its ilk in 1999; in the six-year interim, three Lord of the Rings films, three Harry Potter films, and two Spider-Man films had joined Star Wars’ elite blockbuster ranks and sucked some of that oxygen up. Revenge of the Sith, while indisputably an event, felt like less of an event.
Of course, in the last twelve years we’ve seen as many new Star Wars films released as there were between 1997 and 2005: six new films, three great, one good, one bad, and one I haven’t seen, in that release order. This sextet also forms two trilogies, one another unofficial ‘prequel’ trilogy comprising disconnected instalments all set at different points before A New Hope. And of the five I’ve seen (and I’ll safely assume the sixth), none of them have the ambition or vision of the awkwardly acted, creakily written, sometimes boring, often brilliant Revenge of the Sith.
2005 also marked the launch and upload of the first-ever YouTube video, humbly titled “Me at the Zoo”. Two decades later, feature filmmaking talent nurtured by YouTube—as MTV and advertising similarly bred and farmed talent in the decades before—would thrash The Mandalorian and Grogu at the 2026 box office, with Obsession and Backrooms outgrossing that benign Star Wars spinoff. These tales of exponential cultural domination (YouTube) and gentle brand depreciation (Star Wars) are neither neatly parallel nor necessarily intertwined, but there’s some undeniable symbolism there.
It remains to be seen whether YouTube creators will continue to infiltrate the Hollywood ranks, and whether they’ll do so outside spooky fare. Nonetheless, looking at some of the glossy, boilerplate commercial baubles in theatres in 2005—including Stealth, about an AI fighter jet that goes rogue; Sahara, an adventure romp headlined by Matthew McCoughnehay and helmed by Breck (son of Disney CEO Michael) Eisner; The Island, Michael Bay’s take on Logan’s Run with his patented Bayhem; and Mr & Mrs Smith, with Brad Pitt and Angelia Jolie as married assassins—it’s inarguable that some form of reckoning was a long time coming.
Of those titles, Mr and Mrs Smith and The Island are the best, and I wouldn’t say either was particularly good, though the former led to a very healthy marriage between its stars that was perfectly normal and nothing more to see there. French film Secret Agents, headlined by then-married Monica Belucci and Vincent Cassell, also dabbles in the crossfire of marriage and espionage, albeit more grounded and less flashy.
Lucas’s longtime pal and collaborator Steven Spielberg released two films in this calendar year—as he’s done multiple times, including 2002—with War of the Worlds and Munich. Both tremendous, superbly made films. Whilst I was dismissive of Spielberg’s previous film The Terminal, that film forms a trilogy of sorts with these titles, all grappling to some degree with 911, as indeed would other films of 2005, the seal on that national tragedy seemingly broken.
Where The Terminal depicts American xenophobia following 911 in the form of unctuous airport overlord Stanley Tucci—with said xenophobia ultimately toothless since its target is a cuddly Tom Hanks—War of the Worlds dramatizes the terror attacks of 911, cannily appropriating that striking imagery while transplanting blame to alien perpetrators. In Munich, the perpetrators of terror are markedly human, as depicted in the film’s opening scenes of terror against Jewish athletes at the Munich Olympics, and the film—very finely scripted by Angels in America playwright Tony Kushner—grapples with the aftermath and implications of eye-for-an-eye retribution as a special Mossad taskforce hunts the Palestinian perpetrators. New York’s twin towers, visible in the final shots of this period film, highlight that this moral wrestling continues.
Both films are intimate in focus, despite the earth-annihilating mayhem and globe-trotting spy games they respectively depict: War of the Worlds is fixed upon Tom Cruise’s deadbeat dad and his two children travelling cross-country, while Eric Bana’s Mossad agent is the gravitational and philosophical centre of Munich. Cruise subverts his persona playing a weasel forced into heroism, while still harnessing that star baggage to compellingly hold the centre of the mayhem, while Bana’s lack of such baggage—at least to global audiences who never saw him play Poida on Full Frontal—casts him as inscrutable avatar, appropriate given the moral murkiness of the drama. They’re both very savvy casting decisions. Obligatory clip of Bana playing Cruise on Full Frontal below.
The Scott Brothers, Ridley and Tony, also filed a pair of films between them in 2005, one also dabbling in post-911 rumination. Ridley Scott is one of those atheist directors who really wants you to know he’s an atheist, contributing to some of the questionable story calls that curdle Prometheus and Exodus: Gods and Kings. In Kingdom of Heaven, about the Third Crusade to reclaim Jerusalem in the late 1100s, the crusaders are depicted as bloodthirsty, unattractive warmongers, conveying Scott’s disdain for the faithful but also, discernibly, some commentary on the US’s post-911 engagements in Afghanistan and Iraq.
I remain in awe of Scott’s ability to wrestle these muscular, large-scale historical epics to screen, but star Orlando Bloom—in contrast to Cruise and Bana in the above titles—proves a very slight frame to carry the story, exacerbated by the gravitas on tap surrounding him in the form of Liam Neeson, Jeremy Irons, Brendan Gleeson, David Thewlis, Eva Green, and a masked Edward Norton as the Leper King.
Tony Scott’s Domino was a disappointment on my single viewing two decades ago. I haven’t revisited it, though penning this piece and thinking about Scott’s arc this decade—and the too few films made after this—has reignited my curiosity. My favourite speed of Tony Scott is The Last Boy Scout/True Romance, stripped of military hardware and vehicular mayhem, playing a little meaner and dirtier with smart, witty, foul-mouthed scripts with ground-level stakes —by Shane Black and Quentin Tarantino respectively—and shooting said scripts with his indelible visual style. With a script by the ascendant Richard Kelly (post-Donnie Darko) riffing on the odd subject matter of Laurence Harvey’s upper crust daughter Domino Harvey becoming a bounty hunter, I’d hoped Domino might scratch that itch. However, Scott’s aesthetic had evolved, becoming—as noted of last year’s Man on Fire—hyper-stylised and overly caffeinated, and the busy visual style and twitchy editing rhythms, paired with a very busy script, makes for a very busy film.
Richard Kelly said working with Scott on Domino was “like getting in a dune-buggy and heading to Las Vegas with your rock-star uncle”. I think I’d rather watch that film than Domino. And though I admire Keira Knightley and so much of her other work this decade—including another 2005 release, discussed later in this piece—she does not provide the anchor Scott needs to bring some balance to this whirling dervish aesthetic; it’s notable that Scott’s final three films would star Denzel Washington, as sturdy an anchor as you could cast.
Terry Gilliam also released two new movies in 2005, his first since Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: The Brothers Grimm and Tideland. The former—imagining the titular fairy-tale scribes, played by Matt Damon and Heath Ledger, as con artists who stumble into a genuinely supernatural situation—was fruit of a fraught production experience with Miramax, a scenario not uncommon for either Gilliam or Miramax. On Tideland, a disturbing film about the fantasy world a young girl conjures following her parents’ death, Gilliam was largely left to his own devices. Both are solid, neither fish nor fowl nor among his best.
The Brothers Grimm was notable as one of four Heath Ledger titles this year. Where Jude Law suffered from overexposure with his six 2004 releases, Ledger emerged unscathed and largely acclaimed. I remember Casanova being a bit of fluff, but Ledger brings some eccentricity to his roles in Brothers Grimm and true story Lords of Dogtown, and excels opposite an equally strong Jake Gyllenhal in Brokeback Mountain, Ang Lee’s melancholic period love story about two cowboys forced to maintain a secret relationship over decades. Lee was anointed Best Director by the Academy, but the Best Picture Oscar went to Crash, a decent if unremarkable multi-character network drama.
Another noted animator turned mainstream surrealist, Tim Burton, also released two films that year: Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and The Corpse Bride. Both are very much on-brand, signalling—alongside the growing appreciation of The Nightmare Before Christmas—the increasing commodification of Burton as a brand. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory also solidified Johnny Depp’s A-list stardom for the next decade plus with his retrograde, mugging performance as Willy Wonka. The film is awful—worse than Planet of the Apes, albeit less dispassionately executed—and its success remains puzzling to me. The Corpse Bride is fine.
In my last piece, I highlighted Hellboy as an example of a director ticking popcorn cinema boxes while smuggling his own fetishes and preoccupations into the mainstream; ditto for Batman Begins, the first Batman film in eight years and first of Christopher Nolan’s three films about the Dark Knight. Batman Begins hits all the requisite blockbuster beats—Hero’s journey, wise mentor, escalating action set-pieces at regular intervals, a healthy dose of wisecracks, love interest (albeit the bare minimum) —while being unmistakably a Nolan film.
The last time audiences saw Batman in 1997, he was dodging Mr Freeze’s freeze gun and freeze puns and Poison Ivy’s toxic affections in a merchandise-minded family film engineered to win the hearts and minds of four quadrants and winning none; tonally, Batman Begins was a radical departure. It feels more mainstream and less revelatory today than it did in 2005, perhaps accentuated by the boldness of Nolan’s later work, including sequel The Dark Knight. Nonetheless, it remains a terrific piece of populist entertainment.
Marvel’s dispatches of 2005, Fantastic Four and Daredevil spinoff Elektra, are both thoroughly mediocre, even without the unflattering comparison to Batman Begins. Much more fun is Sky High, a superhero family film not drawn from comic book source material but playing in that sandbox. Also more interesting were the various non-superhero, maturer-skewing comic book adaptations that year: Constantine, a supernatural actioner based on the long-running Vertigo series Hellblazer, which irked some by casting Keanu Reeves rather than a British blonde guy like Tim Roth, but is generally effective; V for Vendetta, about a freedom fighter in dystopian Britain, based on an early Alan Moore opus and the first major post-Matrix work from the Wachowskis, albeit helmed by James McTigue; and A History of Violence, a quiet triumph from David Cronenberg, where a former hitman (Viggo Mortensen) sees his past resurface following a heroic act.
I found Sin City phenomenal on its theatrical release; subsequent viewings have revealed Robert Rodriguez’s approach—recreating Frank Miller’s stylised black & white source material shot for shot—was perhaps not built for posterity, but I admire Rodriguez’s chutzpah, the film’s style and gallows humour, and a number of the performances, especially Clive Owen and Mickey Rourke, the latter riding a revival between this and Domino that would culminate in critical acclaim for The Wrestler a few years later (and nosedive thereafter).
Both Batman Begins and Fantastic Four would spawn sequels that decade, and both properties would be rebooted in the 2010s and again in the 2020s. The sequels of 2005 are an altogether more modest bunch: XXX: State of the Union, substituting Ice Cube for Vin Diesel; The Legend of Zorro, good but not as great as The Mask of Zorro; The Transporter 2, good and on par with The Transporter; Be Cool, not good and a huge downgrade from Get Shorty; and Herbie: Fully Loaded, fine for what it is, perhaps most notable for casting Michael Keaton—booking gigs but still in a wilderness stretch—as patriarch of a red state racing family with a smidgen of MAGA energy. There was also Left Behind: World at War, operating on a different scale and wavelength to these Hollywood releases, albeit for a more dedicated audience than anyone buying tickets for Be Cool.
The highest-profile sequel of the year would be Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, with Mike Newell (Four Weddings and a Funeral, Donnie Brasco) the first British director taking the reins of the series for this tournament-focused instalment. My agnosticism toward this beloved franchise has been documented, but I’m partial to this entry. Notable one-off appearances are clocked by Robert Pattinson and David Tenant, who’d both essay iconic characters elsewhere in the coming years.
Two fantasy films hoping to catch some of Potter’s gold dust were Zathura and The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. The former transplants some Amblin Entertainment flavour to the 2000s and is skilfully helmed by Jon Favreau. The latter is the first of three adaptations of C.S. Lewis’s beloved Narnia books. With its New Zealand-shot locations and battle scenes featuring a menagerie of creatures, there’s a whiff of Lord of the Rings to this ostensibly more family-focused entertainment.
Lord of the Rings engineer Peter Jackson, meanwhile, delivered his other passion project in King Kong, a remake of the 1933 classic. This fetish film revels in recreating and expanding upon the set-pieces of the original (Jackson’s favourite movie), adopting a more-is-more approach entirely befitting the Oscar-minted director of three commercial juggernauts. Jackson’s love of the material, evident in every frame, stands in stark contrast to his indentured servitude on The Hobbit trilogy the following decade.
Othe releases drawn from previous source material included two remakes of well-liked if not pedigree 70s titles: Fun with Dick and Jane, subbing Jim Carrey and Tea Leoni for George Segal and Jane Fonda, and The Longest Yard, subbing Adam Sandler for Burt Reynolds but also co-starring Reynolds. The latter was the second Robert Aldrich remake in as many years after 2004’s Flight of the Phoenix. While still a giant star and hugely talented, the punk spirit and dangerous edge of Jim Carrey’s 1994–96 heyday—Ace Ventura: Pet Detective through The Cable Guy—had been sanded down (see also Robin Williams, Eddie Murphy, and countless others before), with Carrey now seemingly specialising more in normie guys that anarchic comedy happens to (see Fun with Dick and Jane, Bruce Almighty previously, Yes Man later) as opposed to inherently anarchic figures like Ace Ventura, Dumb and Dumber’s Lloyd, or The Cable Guy’s Chip.
Another vintage property, TV staple Bewitched, got a misconceived meta treatment from Nora Ephron, while Joss Whedon made his feature debut with the engaging Serenity, continuing his cancelled sci-fi Western series Firefly. MTV animation Aeon Flux got a misbegotten live-action treatment from Karyn Kusama starring Charlize Theron (not their fault), and claymation duo Wallace and Gromit made their theatrical debut with Wallace & Gromit: Curse of the Were-Rabbit.
Horror remakes of 2005 included House of Wax, The Amityville Horror, and Dark Water, a pivot for The Motorcycle Diaries director Walter Salles. There was also remake-sequel The Ring 2; the schlocky Feast, Gingerdead Man, and Mortuary; more pedigree Exorcism of Emily Rose; new works from the Splat Pack cabal in The Descent, The Devil’s Rejects, Saw II, and Hostel, the latter dramatizing post-911 stranger danger; and Michael Keaton gifted a hefty-ish lead role in White Noise. Stuart Gordon’s Edmond adapted David Mamet’s provocative play with Mamet regulars William H. Macy, Joe Mantegna, Rebecca Pigeon, and Julia Stiles; it’s not a horror film per se, but grim and disquieting and darkly comic character study. Wes Craven released the aptly titled Cursed—fruit of a troubled production with Miramax, to replay that tune—and Red Eye, which unfolds at a lean, economical 85 minutes and gets the job done, though could never live up to its high-concept teaser trailer.
The year heralded George A. Romero’s return to the zombie movie genre he created (but, fatally, never copyrighted) with class-conscious Land of the Dead. The success of Resident Evil, 28 Days Later, Shaun of the Dead, and remake Dawn of the Dead all paved the way for Romero’s return, but also proved Land of the Dead’s monkey’s paw, with Romero’s style, once cutting edge, feeling a step behind his imitators. Uwe Boll’s follow-ups to the maligned House of the Dead—Alone in the Dark and Bloodrayne, likewise action-horror video game adaptations—were equally maligned. Another video game adaptation was Doom, a few years too late to really make bank, but serviceable.
Australian thriller Wolf Creek and period Western The Proposition are nihilistic works that unfold in the Australian outback and tap into primal anxieties. The cast of the latter is high-profile and import-heavy, with Britons Ray Winstone, Emily Watson, Danny Huston, and John Hurt alongside locals Guy Pearce and David Wenham in this evocative morality play, where Pearce’s outlaw is dispatched to kill his older brother to save their youngest sibling from execution.
Pessimism pervades other, contemporary-set Australian films of 2005, albeit with germs of hope, exemplified by Sarah Watt’s lovely multi-character network drama Look Both Ways, where the protagonists—nicely essayed by Justine Clarke and William McInnes—are plagued by visions of accidental death and cancer respectively but find companionship. Ditto Rowan Woods’ Little Fish and Robert Connolly’s Three Dollars, grappling with addiction and financial hardship respectively but finding threads of optimism. Both films are bolstered considerably by quality name casts.
The year also marked the prolific Kriv Stenders’ feature debut, The Illustrated Family Doctor, starring Samuel Johnson as a book editor abridging a massive medical tome; as he edits, the ailments he reads about begin to manifest. The film is emblematic of a very particular type of obtuse, urban-set Australian art film: frugal productions with thought-provoking but slightly undercooked ingredients, anchored by not entirely sympathetic navel-gazing leads, unfolding on a dramatic plateau, never quite adding up to the sum of their parts. In The Illustrated Family Doctor, characters behave like alien beings and their motivations are often perplexing and head-scratching, though in the film’s defence this could all be interpreted through the subjectivity of a deeply unwell character. Having said that, with its clinical, chilly style and fascination with the disintegration of the human body, The Illustrated Family Doctor is a curio as, tonally, the closest I’ve seen to a David Cronenberg vibe in an Australian movie.
From New Zealand, Vincent Ward returned to the screens after a seven-year absence with well-crafted period drama River Queen, like The Proposition combining local and starry imported players, while The World’s Fastest Indian is one of journeyman Roger Donaldson’s most enjoyable movies, depicting with wit and warmth an eccentric Kiwi motorcycle racer’s (Anthony Hopkins) record-setting exploits.
A few other biopics and true stories from 2005 were The Notorious Bettie Page, Walk the Line, Good Night and Good Luck, and Capote. Mary Harron’s biopic of pinup Bettie Page is by the numbers compared to her rattling I Shot Andy Warhol, but captures its subject’s spirit and lack of guile—nicely essayed by Gretchen Mol—amidst the seedy industry she toils in. James Magnold’s biopic of Johnny Cash (Joaquin Phoenix) and his romance with June Carter (Reese Witherspoon, Oscar-minted) walks and plays between the lines established by past musician biopics, but is impeccably made. Unlike more recent entries in the genre (Bohemian Rhapsody, Rocketman, Michael), it does not feel like it glosses or contorts or distorts its subject to ensure music rights, appease stakeholders, grind axes, settle scores, or omit inconveniences.
Good Night and Good Luck is objectively George Clooney’s finest work as director, dramatizing newscaster Edward R. Murrow’s television crusade against the McCarthy witch-hunts with the directness and lack of adornment of its subject, filmed in a vintage style evoking the likes of Sidney Lumet’s Fail Safe (which Clooney steered as a live teleplay a few years earlier). Finally, Capote depicts the titular author’s (Phillip Seymour Hoffman, Oscar-minted) penning of In Cold Blood and friendships with convict Perry Smith (Clifton Collins Jr) and peer Harper Lee (Catherine Keener, Oscar-minted); the same ground would be tilled the following year in Infamous. Not a true story but dabbling in the same milieu of crime and showbiz scandal is Atom Egoyan’s characteristically chilly Where the Truth Lies, casting Colin Firth and Kevin Bacon as a Martin & Lewis-style comedy act involved in misdeeds.
Another true story was retold in Joyeux Noel, a thoughtful wartime drama about the 1914 ceasefire on the Western Front. Less benevolent seasonal shenanigans can be found in Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang, the directorial debut of Shane Black, screenwriter of Lethal Weapon, The Last Boy Scout, and The Long Kiss Goodnight. The film shares tropes with those titles—a whip-smart operator, dare I say a lethal weapon (Val Kilmer), teamed with a beta offsider (Robert Downey Jnr), a Christmas setting, wisecracks and artfully-honed sweary dialogue—but where those films hammer their pulpy plots into formulaic shape, Kiss Kiss feels like a yarn being unspooled by a master storyteller, complete with meta asides. Black’s less proficient an action director than Richard Donner, Tony Scott, or Renny Harlin, but the character banter is the main draw.
Also Christmas-set is The Family Stone, led by the late, great Diane Keaton and without a weak link in the ensemble. This family of misfits is indisputably comprised of types, but those types are so varied and vividly drawn, their individual and familial arcs so satisfyingly rounded, that even likeable planks like Luke Wilson, Dermot Mulroney, and Craig T. Nelson feel multi-dimensional, though the MVPs are Keaton, Sarah Jessica Parker, a glowing Claire Danes, and a charming Rachel McAdams. I’d rate this gem well above Polar Express, Love Actually, and Elf in the annals of Christmas movies of the noughts.
McAdams also appears in Wedding Crashers as Owen Wilson’s love interest, though the MVPs are Wilson’s fellow wedding crasher Vince Vaughan and an unleashed-on-Hollywood Isla Fisher. The 40-Year-Old Virgin—the directorial debut of Judd Apatow—was another Frat Pack success, effectively milking its premise without ever feeling cruel. Waiting and Deuce Bigalow: European Gigolo, in contrast, are cruel and retrograde, but I’ll concede I laughed at both.
Smarter comedy is mined in Thank You for Smoking, Jason Reitman’s debut and the movie I thought would make Aaron Eckhart a bigger star. Black comedies of 2005 included Thumbsucker, bolstered by its gifted cast; The Ice Harvest, from Harold Ramis; Matador, not an Almodovar remake but one of Pierce Brosnan’s post-Bond vehicles skewering his 007 persona; and The Squid and the Whale, a cutting, precision-tooled discomfort machine from Noah Baumbach
Kicking and Screaming, though sharing a title with an earlier Baumbach dramedy, is about Will Ferrell coaching little league soccer and doing pratfalls. It’s one of several Ferrell-headlined sports comedies of the noughts; before the decade is out, he’d also take on race-car driving, figure skating, and basketball with varied results.
I like Keeping Mum for Rowan Atkinson-related reasons, though I’ll concede I remain a big fan of Rowan Atkinson largely due to not watching his movies more than once. I don’t care for Hitch or Monster-in-Law, the latter Jane Fonda’s return to features after fifteen years and a stereotypical diva role unbefitting the former star of Klute, Coming Home, and The China Syndrome.
More melancholic comedy can be found in In Her Shoes and The Upside of Anger. The former—a pivot for Curtis Hanson after male-dominated projects LA Confidential, Wonder Boys, and 8 Mile—is a dramedy about two diametrically opposed sisters (Cameron Diaz and Toni Collette) and their grandmother (Shirley MacLaine). I haven’t really touched in this series on Cameron Diaz, who like Bridget Fonda would down tools and check out of acting—albeit in the mid-2010s—and is missed by this author (I don’t consider Back in Action a real movie). Though I’m hot and cold on Diaz’s movie choices, I loved that she gravitated towards oddball projects in the mid to late 90s, and during her commercial peak this decade would continue to take swings on films like Vanilla Sky.
The Upside of Anger, from Mike Binder, revolves around a mother of three—Joan Allen, raising Keri Russell, Evan Rachel Wood, and Erika Christensen—who finds a drinking companion in her retired baseball player neighbour (Kevin Costner) after her husband ups & leaves. Binder’s film is equally lacerating and warm, and I love this speed of Costner, who gets to chill and charm in support after belatedly chasing Pulp Fiction’s tail in 3000 Miles to Graceland and The Sixth Sense’s tail in Dragonfly.
In my 90s All Over Me piece on 2000, I referred to Cruise, Gibson, and Costner as three heads occupying the Mount Rushmore of Hollywood leading men of the 90s, able to work across action and comedy and romance and drama. As their careers scatter in very different directions over this decade and beyond, it’s nice to see Costner in this type of rumpled role that Cruise wouldn’t do—being increasingly tethered to his action heroics—and Gibson couldn’t do, being on hiatus and coming back to acting at decade’s end with a bit of a scumbum veneer.
Costner also shows up in Rumour Has It, as does Shirley MacLaine—making bank between this and In Her Shoes and Bewitched, largely coasting on innate greatness in all three—as the inspirations for The Graduate’s Benjamin Braddock and Mrs Robinson, as discovered by MacLaine’s granddaughter Jennifer Aniston. I love The Graduate, but director Rob Reiner—like Barry Levinson a 90s mainstream master on a downward trajectory, with all due respect to the late great—and company overestimate that film’s cultural pervasiveness as a point of reference, while overreaching in positioning their own film as a worthwhile companion text.
Two more titles dabble in melancholic comedy, both featuring major comedy stars of previous decades: Broken Flowers and Shopgirl. Shopgirl sees Claire Danes as the titular retail worker torn between Jason Schwartzman’s neglectful young suitor and Steve Martin’s thoughtful, affluent older suitor. Broken Flowers, directed by Jim Jarmusch, sees Bill Murray as a Don Juan type who revisits five ex-girlfriends to discern who penned him a secret note revealing he has an adult son.
Jarmusch is a gentle, literate soul and his minimalist sensibility pervades Broken Flowers; after two genre exercises in Dead Man and Ghost Dog: Way of the Samurai, this feels like him tapping back into the vibe of Night on Earth and Mystery Train; not an eccentric anthology per se, but characters interacting in different settings, ruminating on the same theme, and the tonal wrinkles this elicits, glued together here by Murray’s romantic detective. Murray is great, as are the actresses playing his past love interests, especially Sharon Stone.
Shopgirl was based on a book by Martin while Broken Flowers takes its cues from the Don Juan archetype. Other literary adaptations of 2005 included Oliver Twist, Pride and Prejudice, Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story, The Constant Gardener, and Memoirs of a Geisha. Oliver Twist and Pride and Prejudice—adaptations of both canonical AND popular works—hailed from directors at very different ends of their career spectrum: Roman Polanski, recently Oscar-minted for The Pianist and in his fifth decade as a filmmaker, and Joe Wright, making his feature debut ahead of a very curious two decades to follow. Both are handsome films, but there’s a whiff of taxidermy to Oliver Twist; it retells Dickens’ tale well, and Ben Kingsley is more memorable here than Bloodrayne, but it feels very familiar.
In contrast, Pride and Prejudice feels lively, lived-in, earthy, and spunky, and despite abridging Austen’s source novel—running just a smidgen over two hours compared to the beloved BBC series’ five hours—it’s very satisfying and rounded. There’s some exquisite filmmaking and craft on display, Keira Knightley and Matthew Macfadyen are excellent—the latter growing with subsequent viewings—and Dario Marianelli’s score is exquisite.
When I wrote about 9 Songs, I noted that while few filmmakers can make whatever they want whenever they want, Michael Winterbottom looks like he can and brings a certain big dick energy to his projects. A case in point: Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story, which takes an Adaptation-like approach to its source text by depicting the production of a film of Laurence Sterne’s nine-volume unfilmable novel from the mid-1700s. While I can’t say it works overall, it has more reason to be pleased with itself as paratext than Rumour Has It, and it’s always fun seeing Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon bouncing off each other.
The Constant Gardener and Memoirs of a Geisha are drawn from contemporary works: the former, helmed by City of God director Fernando Meirelles, adapts John le Carre’s thriller about a British diplomat (Ralph Fiennes) in Kenya investigating the death of his activist wife (Rachel Weisz, Oscar-minted). While not a “fun” film, it’s executed with style and there’s pleasure to be found in watching Fiennes’s finely calibrated turn as a company man, all stillness and poise at film’s start, unravelling over its runtime.
Memoirs of a Geisha tasks an American director (Rob Marshall) and Chinese actresses performing in English (Ziyi Zhang, Michelle Yeoh, and a game Gong Li) with telling its very Japanese story, albeit adapted from American Arthur Golden’s novel. It feels very Westernised, very travelogue, unlike, say, The Last Emperor, which manages to feel authentic despite its concessions to Western audiences (though that may well be illusory, a product of the story’s refraction through its Italian director’s European worldview). Either way, Memoirs is gorgeous, earnestly acted, and thoroughly meh.
Rob Marshall scored his Memoirs gig off the back of Chicago’s success. 2005 musicals following in Chicago’s wake included Broadway adaptations Rent and The Producers, while Hustle and Flow offered music-centred drama. Of the two Broadway adaptations, I enjoy Rent; the musical’s acolytes were less impressed, but as someone unfamiliar with the stage source I rolled with Chris Columbus’s energetic, slick gloss on the production, an unexpected one-for-me after two Harry Potter films.
In contrast, I found very little entertaining in The Producers, the Broadway musical based on Mel Brooks’s classic 1967 comedy, and based on the filmed evidence I’m hard-pressed to conceive how this ever could have been a Broadway sensation. Nathan Lane and Matthew Broderick were showered with adoration and awards for their stage roles, and props to them, but they’re also screen pros and it’s infuriating that they never recalibrated their broad performances for film.
Woody Allen—a world-class creep but also a world-class filmmaker, who like Mel Brooks gigged on Sid Caesar programs in the 1950s—also returned to a creative well in Match Point—a man in a comfortable marriage driven to murder his mistress, as seen in Crimes & Misdemeanours—but transplanted the action from native New York to London’s upper crust. The saying “Change is as good as a holiday” proves very true here, yielding some of Allen’s freshest work and his best film of the decade, as well as initiating a new course for the filmmaker, with many of his films over the remainder of the noughts and into the 2010s filmed and set in Europe.
Match Point is tense, involving, thematically intriguing, and features some of Scarlett Johanson’s finest work and, hands down, Jonathan Rhys-Myers’s finest work. He’s not playing the typical Allen surrogate, though to the degree that Allen gravitates repeatedly to stories about guys with skeletons in their closets (see also Crimes & Misdemeanours, Cassandra’s Dream, Irrational Man) he may well be.
Two other veterans with new features were Sydney Pollack with The Interpreter, his final film, and Terrence Malick with The New World. The Interpreter is a somewhat dull film to close a career encompassing The Way We Were, Three Days of the Condor, Tootsie, and The Firm (to name a handful of favourites), though Pollack’s direction is reliable as ever and Sean Penn and Nicole Kidman diligently perform, albeit never boosting the material. The film just hangs there, never tapping into the same immediacy or drama that elevate Munich or The Constant Gardener.
Malick’s film—his sole release for the decade, though he would more than double his then-thirty-year output over the next fifteen years—is wonderful. The film dramatizes the encounter and relationship between Native American princess Pocahontas (Q'orianka Kilcher) and sailor John Smith (Colin Farrell)—which received the Disney digest treatment a decade earlier—and its aftermath, including her subsequent marriage to a tobacco farmer (Christian Bale). Malick deploys his bag of tricks—I don’t say this derogatively—to compelling effect here, evoking time and place, a clash of cultures, a bond that transcends said cultures, the encroachment of Western culture and industry on native America, and the membrane between the earthly and spiritual.
At the opposite end of the career spectrum, a handful of directors made notable debuts: Rian Johnson with Brick, David Slade with Hard Candy, David Ayer with Harsh Times—after chalking up numerous, characteristically macho credits as a screenwriter—and though directed by Darren Grant, Tyler Perry as chief creative force on Diary of a Mad Black Woman.
Brick is far too cute and affected for its own good, but Johnson’s talent is evident. Hard Candy, a skilfully executed two-hander between Patrick Wilson’s predator-turned-prey and Ellen (now Eliot) Page’s prey-turned-predator, expertly ratchets the tension and made me excited to follow Slade as a director; I did not follow him into The Twilight Saga: Eclipse. Though smaller in scope and more antic tonally, Harsh Times is of a piece with Ayer’s filmography; it’s mostly of interest to watch Christian Bale, showcasing Swiss army knife versatility across Batman Begins, The New World, and his dirtbag role here.
Diary of a Mad Black Woman is also of a piece with Tyler Perry’s body of work, which similarly can be described as having antic disposition and lacking tonal control. A number of Perry’s recurring rogue’s gallery of characters—several played by him, including matriarch Madea—are introduced here, as well as the wild swings between broad comedy, dark drama, overwrought melodrama, and pieties for the faithful. Perry at his height is a fascinating phenomenon, comparable perhaps only to Woody Allen as an actor-writer-director able to produce a film or two a year—dramatic or comedic or both—for a dedicated audience, albeit in Perry’s case wearing a dress half the time, not unlike Ginger Rogers doing everything Fred Astaire did but backwards and in heels.
Cultivating a sturdy career is no small feat—career trajectories rise and fall, hit peaks and valleys, are thrashed this way and that by changing fashions—and several filmmakers had rough 2005s professionally. Cameron Crowe’s Elizabethtown is neither fish nor fowl, and like Kingdom of Heaven is handicapped by Orlando Bloom’s dreamy blandness. Peter Hyams’ A Sound of Thunder had its budget halved and was released with unfinished, almost-DIY visual effects—not good when a movie is a sci-fi actioner involving time travel and dinosaurs—curtailing the consistently sure run of this great multi-hyphenate genre journeyman.
I don’t remember Guy Ritchie’s Revolver very well, so won’t indulge the groupthink generalisations that it’s a creative misfire, but there’s probably some germ of truth there. Following the one-two knockout of this and Swept Away, Ritchie would bounce back later in the decade with the terrific RocknRolla, reverting to laddish romps with artful doodling around the edges, rather than artfully doodling where a laddish romp should be.
A particular facet of career management I find fascinating is leveraging post-Oscar success; some do it well, others questionably. There are no disasters in this next quartet of titles, but also nothing really exciting. Two films removed from Shakespeare in Love, John Madden’s Proof adapts David Auburn’s Pulitzer-winning play with a gifted cast, but neither shakes the play’s theatrical origins—despite chopping up scenes and settings—nor harnesses what made the stage material click. Sam Mendes, two films removed from American Beauty, and Stephan Gaghan, Oscar-minted for his Traffic screenplay, helmed Jarhead and Syriana respectively, both films about American interventions in real and imagined Middle Eastern enterprises, adding to the year’s pervasive post-911 commentary. Gaghan would later direct Dolittle. A low-hanging, insensitive joke could be inserted here about Dolittle being worse than 911, but I’ll leave that to hack writers. And Ron Howard, two films removed from A Beautiful Mind, delivered Cinderella Man, a Depression-era boxing drama delivered with Howard’s typical polish and assuredness at manipulation.
Adding to the aura of Oscar cliquey-ness, these four films are all headlined by Oscar winners or nominees, both recent and breaking—Gwyneth Paltrow, Anthony Hopkins, Jake Gyllenhal (x2), Jamie Foxx, Matt Damon, George Clooney, Russell Crowe, Renee Zellweger, Paul Giamatti—suggesting the Academy is an elaborate form of Hollywood Masonry.
Guy Ritchie’s arthouse-inflected Revolver may have curried more favour if not for the incredible Asian thrillers of 2005 it couldn’t hold a candle to: Chan-Wook Park’s Sympathy for Lady Vengeance, Kim Jee-Woon’s A Bittersweet Life, and Johnnie To’s Election. At the time, I was disappointed with Sympathy for Lady Vengeance after Oldboy, which is like being disappointed with The Birds after Psycho or The Conversation after The Godfather, highlighting that cinema is wasted on the young.
Among martial arts releases that year, Tony Jaa hunted the criminals who stole his village’s elephant in The Protector, Jackie Chan bored me dreadfully in the boring The Myth, and Donnie Yen and director Wilson Yip delivered a one-two punch with SPL and Dragon Tiger Gate, the former sublime, the latter ridiculous, both very entertaining. Yen’s face-offs with Wu Jing and Sammo Hung in SPL are among the best of his already stacked career. Jet Li also headlined Unleashed, in some regions known as Danny the Dog, one of the better titles from Luc Besson’s genre film factory.
Among American thrillers, Two for the Money and Flight Plan are fairly forgettable, though Jodie Foster is admirably determined in the latter; ditto Stay and The Jacket, both executed with an artsier veneer. Hostage and Four Brothers are rock-solid programmers, the latter John Singleton’s penultimate movie.
I do not, largely on principle, care for Jean-Francois Richet’s remake of John Carpenter’s Assault on Precinct 13, despite its capable cast and execution. Commentators praised the film as surprisingly good, which it is. Nobody praised it as a taut masterwork in low-budget filmmaking, engrossing siege action, economical storytelling, or precision characterisation, all of which Carpenter’s original showcases. This was the first of four Carpenter remakes over a half dozen years—followed by The Fog, Halloween, and prequel/remake The Thing, three different shades of bad—which kept Carpenter in income and off directing duty. Whatever problems I have with Ghosts of Mars or Escape from New York, they brim with personality, and I’d have taken one more of those over four of these.
I’ll end with eight titles with no particular connective tissue. Dave McKean is a talented visual artist, but his film Mirrormask is hard to look at and like. In Manderlay, his companion piece to Dogville, Lars Von Trier wants America to take a long hard look at itself, but moreso a long hard look at Lars Von Trier’s big dick energy. Game Six, though only moderately accomplished, feels like an oasis of good material for Michael Keaton in a desert of opportunities this decade; of the three Keaton releases this year, it trumps Herbie: Fully Loaded and White Noise. Two French releases from 2005 were Angel A and Cache, the former a characteristically stylish, slight, loopy dispatch from Luc Besson, the latter a characteristically obtuse work from Michael Haneke. Two excellent, impactful films were Tommy Lee Jones’s directorial debut Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada and South African director Gavin Hood’s Tsotsi. Finally, Ballad of Jack and Rose was not a love letter to the leads of Titanic, but a thoughtful father-daughter drama from Rebecca Miller, with Daniel Day-Lewis in a muted mode—always intriguing—between his commanding greatest-show-on-Earth turns in Gangs of New York and There Will Be Blood.
I have not seen March of the Penguins or The Adventures of Sharkboy and Lava Girl, despite both being nominated for Best Documentary by the Academy.
That’s a wrap on 2005. We’ll be back for 2006, with two competing period-set magician movies, two companion Clint Eastwood-helmed World War II movies, and the returns of Superman, James Bond, Rocky Balboa, and Inspector Clouseau. Til then …