"Chicago" is about murder, betrayal and manipulation. And it's the closest thing to a feel-good movie among this year's Oscar nominees for best picture.
Some have described 2002 as a bit of a bummer because the five best-film contenders -- also including "Gangs of New York," "The Hours," "The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers" and "The Pianist" -- deal with downbeat subjects. (Well, that may be true, but only if you consider suicide, homicide and genocide to be depressing.)
Add in the two other biggest vote-getters, "Frida" and "Road to Perdition," and the landscape also includes death, physical injury and bullet-riddled gang war. The multi-nominated "Far From Heaven," "About Schmidt" and"Adaptation" cover homophobia, family dysfunction and writer's block.
Now that's showbiz!
Seriously, it is actually refreshing to consider that 2002 will go down as a year when Oscar for the most part got it right. Few nominations have induced head scratching, and many of the honored films will go on to be considered classics. Much of the post-nom analysis, revealingly, has focused on who was left out rather than who took the back way in.
The "bum" rap is amusing. Nobody accuses Shakespeare of being a bummer, but "Hamlet" and "Macbeth" aren't a lot of laughs. But they're pretty good.
In all five films, the dazzling filmmaking is enough to offset the darkness of the material.
If there's a connecting theme in the Final Five, it's the fact that the leads are trying to rediscover or to reinvent themselves. Szpilman in "The Pianist" wants to get back to his role as a musician; Roxie in "Chicago" wants to have the showbiz life she feels capable of. Characters in "The Hours" try to find the thread of their lives, which they've lost (or never had). The young men in "Gangs" and "Two Towers" are on a quest, but in each case, it's a story about their growing pains.
Assigning too much importance to the kinds of films that come out in a particular year can be foolish. (Was "Gladiator" somehow emblematic of the year 2000?) But posterity does have a way of asserting itself as people go back to certain years to get a feel for the pop-culture Zeitgeist.
Great Oscar years -- 1974 or 1939, for example -- have an odd way of coinciding with global unrest. Times of prosperity and complacency give us "Titanic" or "Gigi." That's not to say that the worst of times don't sometimes also yield some lightweight best picture choices. Some crowd-pleasers, in other words, could have been made in any era.
Still, the brooding themes of 2002 raise the question: What's been eating these filmmakers?
Life, in a word. The uneasy times in today's world, marked by a stubborn recession, rumblings of war and a political climate that is stridently partisan when it is not apathetic, cannot help but influence what winds up on screen. Of course, these films were not born yesterday, to say the least. "The Hours" probably took the least amount of time to reach the screen; the other best-pic nominees gestated for years, if not decades.
It is interesting, though, to reflect on the past 18 months in Hollywood.
The Twin Towers had barely toppled when pundits and culture mavens were declaring that "everything has changed." Goodbye, Schwarzenegger. Hello, warm 'n' fuzzy. Irony, Graydon Carter insisted, was so 1990s.
Things didn't turn out that way, of course. A diversity of tastes and styles persisted; one could even argue that pop culture had a driving need to explore the world at large, thematically if not specifically. Within weeks of Sept. 11, "Training Day" reigned at the box office and rap and metal acts were topping the pop charts.
What does the current Oscar crop have to do with all of this? Perhaps very little. Perhaps much more than that. No matter what source of inspiration is claimed, however, the 2002 movie year will be one for the books. And that's something we can all salute.
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