In 1997,
Madeline Albright became the first female United States Secretary of State;
Heaven’s Gate committed ritualistic mass suicide in San Diego;
Tony Blair became Prime Minister of the United Kingdom;
Deep Blue defeated Gary Kasparov in a chess match;
The WNBA debuted; Hong Kong was returned to Chinese control;
Two billion people watched Princess Diana’s funeral;
The television ratings system debuted; Ellen’s character came out on The Ellen Show;
The Montreal Screwjob launched the WWE’s Attitude era;
Antiques Roadshow, King of the Hill, The Chris Rock Show, Daria, Just Shoot Me!, The Practice, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Port Charles, Oz, Johnny Bravo, Win Ben Stein’s Money, Stargate SG-1, The View, South Park, Behind the Music, Ally McBeal, Dharma & Greg, Veronica’s Closet, debuted on American television;
Martin, Coach, Roseanne, Wings, Married… with Children, Lois and Clark: The New Adventures of Superman, X-Men, Beavis Butt-Head, The Magic School Bus, and Hee Haw ended their original runs;
Ronald Acuna Jr., Kylie Jenner, Jake Paul, Jungkook, Camila Cabello, Sydney Sweeney, Bella Poarch, Lisa, Megan Moroney, Simone Biles, Jacob Elordi, Becky G, KJ Apa, and Bella Thorne were born;
While Paul Tsongas, Curt Flood, Colonel Tom Parker, The Notorious B.I.G., Fred Zinnemann, Willem de Kooning, Mike Royko, Jeff Buckley, Richard Jaeckel, Betty Shabazz, Brian Keith, Israel Kamakawiwo’ole, William Hickey, Robert Mitchum, James Stewart, Gianni Versace, Ben Hogan, William S. Burroughs, Brandon Tartikoff, Diana – Princes of Wales, Mother Theresa, Burgess Meredith, Red Skelton, Rich Mullins, Brian Pillman, Johnny Vander Meer, John Denver, Eddie Arcaro, Chris Farley, Jimmy Rogers, and Denver Pyle died.
The following is a list of my ten favorite films released in 1997:
10) Mrs. Brown
After several years of depression and reclusion following the death of her husband Albert, Queen Victoria’s staff and family consult a former confidante of the late Prince, Mr. John Brown, in hopes he can cajole the monarch back to reality.
Brown’s unorthodox and straightforward manner is a shock to the system and gets the Queen to reengage, but rubs everyone around her the wrong way. They complain he’s uncouth and lacks a deferential manner. The situation between John Brown and the Queen may (or may not) have been romantic, but it was nonetheless scandalous. As rumors swirl his relationship with the Queen is more than friendly, her family plots to have him removed.
The public image of Victoria is very much set as a prudish, well mannered woman. Victorian has become a byword for stiff, awkward, sexual repression. One hundred years after her death, it’s hard to imagine Victoria as a real woman and this fascinating film does quite a bit to make her real and more than a caricature.
I love this glimpse of the Queen as a real person. Judi Dench is amazing as the famed queen, earning her first Oscar nomination for the role.
BiIlly Connolly is a revelation as John Brown. He’s long been known as an incredible comedian, but showed he had a range and an ability to portray great pathos as well.
This is a lovely film which embodies the adage, life goes on (even for the Queen of England). Embracing the future does not mean forgetting or disrespecting the past. Living in the past, however, means forgetting and disrespecting the future.
When the President of the United States is embroiled in sex scandal with an underage girl shortly before the election, he calls Conrad Brean (Robert DeNiro) to manage the crisis. Brean enlists film producer Stanley Motts (Dustin Hoffman) to stage a fake war with Albania as a distraction from the scandal, but their plan is plagued with difficulties.
This cynical movie argues the political process is simply a game to the people in power; making an impassioned explanation for your beliefs is beside the point in contemporary politics.
It also explores the nature of art, particularly the collaborative process. Motts gladly agrees to help, but cannot imagine not getting credit for his work.
This movie has no moral center, no hero struggling to do the right thing. These people are very good at what they do, but they’re not very good people.
This updated Dr. Strangelove is a fascinating movie because of how little outrage it provokes.
8) Amistad
Black slaves revolt on a ship near Cuba, but are caught by an American vessel and charged with murder. While the criminal charges are quickly dismissed, a civil suit supported by the Spanish monarchy aims to have the slaves returned to their Spanish captors. As the case winds its way through the American court system, it becomes a proxy battle for US involvement in the slave trade, the peculiar institution which defined the first century of the United States.
Anthony Hopkins is fantastic as former president John Quincy Adams who’s cajoled into representing the rebellious slaves in front of the US Supreme Court.
Nigel Hawthorne is lovely as the embattled current US President Martin van Buren, whose presidency is at risk of being overwhelmed by the budding international crisis.
In retrospect, this feels like a foretaste of some of the themes Spielberg would return to in Lincoln, a focus on 19th century US and the way the reckoning over slavery would shape the course of the nation.
Morgan Freeman and Matthew McConaughey are great, but Djimon Honsou’s debut performance was indelible and presaged a major talent who would be around for a long time to come.
It’s really cool Spielberg cast actual Supreme Court Kustice Harry Blackmun as former Justice Joseph Story who wrote the opinion setting the Amistad slaves free and justifying their revolt.
After the steel mills in Sheffield close, several former workers, including Gaz (Robert Carlyle) and Dave (Mark Addy) devise a plan to raise money to pay Gaz’s child support payments: forming a burlesque group which will outdo the Chippendales by going completely nude, the “full monty.”
As they work towards putting on a show, they’re met with several obstacles, including an arrest for indecent exposure.
Tom Wilkinson is great and this film launched the character actor into the heart of the Hollywood A list.
It could have been a raunchy comedy (a la American Pie), but instead this is a surprisingly sweet film about brotherhood, family (real and created), perseverance and the difficulties of changing economies.
6) Contact
Inspired by her late father, Dr. Ellie Arroway (Jodie Foster) works at the SETI program to determine if there is extraterrestrial life in the universe. When she discovers extra-terrestirial communication, she becomes a unwitting celebrity.
Upon decoding the message, she realizes it’s a blueprint for a transportation device, but is passed over as the representative to go through the resulting portal because she’s insufficiently religious.
However, when a suicide bomber destroys the device and kills the first choice, a billionaire investor reveals he commissioned a back up device and asks her to go through. While Arroway disappears for only a few seconds, she experiences eighteen hours with an alien creature disguised as her deceased father.
The multiple cameos from mainstream media types gives the film a degree of verisimilitude.
Matthew McConaughey is as charming as ever as Arroway’s foil / love interest Palmer Joss.
John Hurt, Tom Skerritt, William Fitcher, and Angela Bassett are fine in supporting roles, but this movie rests on Foster shoulders and she delivers, offering a steely resolve which never borders into caricature. While she is clearly an archetype, her struggle seems real and relatable.
Writer Carl Sagan was no fan of religion and a big proponent of logic as the ultimate good, but he recognized the comfort many found in faith and wrote a beautiful story which never ridiculed or undermined the legitimate faith many cling to.
I love Robert Zemeckis and his work is often overlooked as an auteur and dismissed as an innovator, a poor man’s Spielberg, who fused new technologies with filmmaking: from painting on film in Who Framed Roger Rabbit to motion capture in Polar Express and A Christmas Carol, to CGI in Forrest Gump. Auteur or not, his films are among the defining films of my childhood and this is another excellent entry in his filmography.
5) Liar Liar
Fletcher Reade (Jim Carrey) is an unscrupulous divorce attorney who loves his son, Max, but often puts him on the back burner in favor of his career.
When Fletcher misses another birthday party, Max uses his birthday wish to temporarily make Fletcher incapable of lying.
Despite numerous professional difficulties for Fletcher, his experience ultimately teaches him how to be the father Max needs.
The movie isn’t particularly deep, but Carrey’s performance is a perfect restrained mania, the first hint he was capable of more than pure energy, that he could play “normal” characters and still captivate audiences.
I saw this movie during my senior year of high school and left the theater utterly inspired. While my brief devotion to always tell the truth damaged a few relationships, it was worth it. Carrey was funny in In Living Color and Ace Ventura, but he proved he could act here.
During the Nazi occupation, Northern Italian Jew Guido (Roberto Benigni) and his son are sent to a concentration camp. Guido’s gentile wife, Dora (played by Benigni’s real life wife) insists on going with them, although she’s separated upon arrival because the camp is sex segregated.
Despite their circumstances, Guido, determined to keep his son, Giosuè, from losing hope, invents a comic game to distract him from the reality of their situation.
Benigni’s energetic performance is the reason the film works. He’s effortlessly charming and relentlessly optimistic in the face of a devastating reality.
Despite being a non-English Italian production, this is, in many ways, one of the defining American films about the Holocaust, with an American tinged deference to pluck, guile, humor and optimism.
The actual history of the Holocaust shows good humor and unfailing love did very little to thwart or slow down the atrocities, nonetheless this feels like the cinematic equivalent of Anne Frank’s famous quote “despite everything I still believe that people are really good at heart.” It may be foolishly optimistic, but at least it offers something besides nihilistic despair.
3) Affliction
Glen Whitehouse (James Coburn) was an abusive father to his children, Wade (Nick Nolte) and Rolfe (Willem Dafoe).
This abuse has taken a toll on Wade, who’s unstable and has few, if any, positive relationships.
Already divorced and estranged from his daughter, it appears he’s doomed to follow his dad’s footsteps.
During his work as a policeman, Wade becomes convinced an accidental shooting is part of a large conspiracy theory. As his obsession deepens, Wade loses his tenuous grip on reality leading to a long overdue confrontation with his dad.
Paul Schrader’s slow burning portrait of a man caught in a cycle of abuse losing what hope he has left, is heartbreaking.
Nick Nolte has never been better, James Coburn was harrowing and all too real as an asshole’s asshole and deservedly won an Oscar (which served as a sort of lifetime achievement award). Sissy Spacek was excellent per usual. When the fourth best performance in your movie is from Willem Dafoe, you’re doing something right.
This is the kind of small scale, intense character study we don’t see a lot of in cinemas anymore; it feels like this particularly hybrid indie / studio genre peaked in the mid 1990s, but this is a rewarding ride.
Kate (Helena Bonham Carter) is dependent on her Aunt Maude to support her and her drug addicted father (Michael Gambon). Maude wants her to marry for money, but Kate’s in love with a poor journalist, Merton Densher. She befriends a dying American heiress, Milly (Elizabeth McGovern), and schemes to have Merton woo Milly and inherit her fortune; heartbreak and anguish follow.
This film reminds us Helena Bonham Carter was a fine actress before Tim Burton turned her into a permanent weirdo.
Elizabeth McGovern is perfectly cast as the dying Milly. I’m happy to see her belatedly getting deserved recognition for her recent work in Downton Abbey,
Based on a Henry James novel, this is the sort of lush, morally complex, melodrama I imagine when I think of romance.
1) Wilde
Convicted of gross indecency (homosexuality), famed author Oscar Wilde was imprisoned for two years at the height of his fame.
His friends mostly abandoned him in the face of the controversy, although his wife remained married to him for her children’s sake.
While in prison he wrote De Profundis, a letter to his former lover, Bosie (Jude Law) whose father, the Marquess of Queensbury (Tom Wilkinson) was responsible for his imprisonment.
De Profundis is a moving rumination on the nature of art and existence, as Wilde desperately tries to make sense of his suffering and finds solace in Christ’s example.
Stephen Fry is perfectly cast as Wilde. Jude Law is great as Bosie. Tom Wilkinson is deliciously evil.
As we debate the status of LGBT rights and the limits to what we should accommodate, it’s amazing to consider Wilde, one of the most celebrated writers in the history of the English language was imprisoned for being gay. In 2017, over one hundred years after his unjust imprisonment, he was pardoned.