If you wanted to escape in 2009, you weren’t alone. In a year of recession, war and melting polar ice caps, audiences sought relief — if only for a few hours — at the movies.
In mid-December, box-office receipts were up 8% from 2008, while attendance was up 4.5%.
What was not so good? That while ticket sales soared, quality sagged. Case in point: Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen. That well-assembled junk was 2009’s highest-grossing movie on the day Avatar was released in mid-December. (Go, Avatar!)
So what character better to personify this yearning for escapism than Ryan Bingham, George Clooney’s corporate grim reaper in Jason Reitman’s seamless Up in the Air? Bingham literally stays above the fray of life — at home only when he’s on a plane, beyond the reach of day-to-day drudgery.
Also seeking refuge in the clear blue yonder? Carl, the 78-year-old protagonist of Pixar’s dazzling Up (No. 2), who lifts off the ground in his balloon-tethered house, hoping to rip away from the moorings of his life.
Of course, some truths you can’t escape, no matter how scarring. In Kathryn Bigelow’s heart-stopping The Hurt Locker (No. 3), Jeremy Renner’s elite bomb technician grapples with the psychological addiction of war. And in Louie Psihoyos’s documentary The Cove (No. 4), former Flipper trainer Richard O’Barry seeks redemption by joining environmental activists in a daring, Bourne-style raid on a Japanese town that slaughters bloody wave after bloody wave of dolphins every year.
Even the year’s best genre films tangled with dark themes. For all its awe and soap opera emotionalism, James Cameron’s Avatar (No. 6) also imagines a future in which humanity has destroyed its own home and now has its sights on obliterating an alien paradise. Similarly Neill Blomkamp’s District 9 (No. 5) takes place in an alternative present-day — in which extraterrestrials have crash-landed on Earth — that mirrors our planet’s barbaric, xenophobic history.
On a decidedly more optimistic note, and not so much recalling history as rewriting it, was Quentin Tarantino’s hell-raising Inglourious Basterds (No. 9). Another band of brothers starred in the year’s hilariously cruel comedy, The Hangover (No. 7). Also funny, if decidedly cheerier, was Marc Webb’s charming 500 Days of Summer (8).
Lastly, speaking of charming, there was Carey Mulligan, delivering the breakout performance of 2009 as a teenager longing to escape her middle class life in 1960s pre-Beatles London in Lone Scherfig’s An Education (No. 10). In the end, she discovers the future belongs to her. So, I suspect, will Mulligan.
KEVIN’S TOP 10 MOVIES
1. Up in the Air
2. Up
3. The Hurt Locker
4. The Cove
5. District 9
6. Avatar
7. The Hangover
8. 500 Days of Summer
9. Inglourious Basterds
10. An Education
