The Year in Movies 2020: The Home Edition
Hollywood flailed and theaters shut their doors — but you could still find great films one click away
Hollywood flailed and theaters shut their doors thanks to the pandemic — but you could still find great films one click away.
Any honest accounting of 2020’s year in movies has to start with the resurgence of a 2011 artifact, after Covid-19’s spread to the U.S. had finally become undeniable among rational people, and Steven Soderbergh’s pandemic movie Contagion became one of the most rented films on iTunes. You know, the star-studded viral thriller in which a supervirus, borne of an infected bat, starts to spread out of China and eventually conquers much of the planet, including poor Kate Winslet?
It’s also a movie in which an international community of hypercapable scientists — the Good Guys — get the unfailing support of their respective governments, which are cooperating with one another in trying to defeat the virus. Which is to say, the appeal of Soderbergh’s suddenly fashionable pandemic procedural as a fantasy could not be clearer. Welcome to escapism in the age of cinema du coronavirus.
We turned to movies like this centuries ago, a.k.a. back in March, because we had no expectation that the era would produce movies about the pandemic — movies which would, necessarily, need to have been produced during the pandemic. Documentarians like Alex Gibney would prove us wrong about that with a masked, Covidproofed, edited-from-home dispatch from the coronavirus front lines ( Totally Under Control). But as for Hollywood, which had high hopes for the year via new James
Bond and Black Widow movies, Mulan and Dune remakes, and Top Gun reboots? The modern dream factory flailed. The story of 2020 at the movies would not be told at the movies, because film sets and multiplexes worldwide were largely shut down, and even a surefire box-office bet like Christopher Nolan’s Tenet would — as if in imitation of its own plot — see its release date bucked and rearranged a thousand times over.
The story of the year in movies does require sidebars on the fact that Nolan’s would-be-blockbuster was released in near-empty theaters likely nowhere near you. But that same narrative would have to recount the ways that the movies surprised us by reluctantly embracing online platforms. If you wanted new releases, you had to go VOD or straight to streamers: Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, Hulu. Or maybe the Disney+ streaming app, which had the good fortune to go live in late 2019 and would come to provide a perfectly viable alternative to theatrical releases (assuming you were willing to pay $30 to watch Mulan) once the company finally relented.
And there was also a fleet of virtual cinemas which, developed and hosted by innovative collaborations between local art houses and independent distributors, became a lifeline for smaller fare. Drive-ins, truly the “vinyl collection” of theatrical exhibition — So retro! So nostalgic! — had a resurgence in popularity. The 2021 Academy Awards were delayed, and major festivals like Cannes were tabled. But other impactful events went virtual — from big guns like the New York Film Festival to the inspiringly robust Indie Memphis festival. Despite what you may have heard, because a good many people have certainly been saying it, 2020 was not a year of “no movies,” in which there was nothing new and good to watch.
In fact, it was a great year for movies — as an art form. The business struggled mightily; the industry’s labor force struggled even more. Yet between the clearing out of loud, moneymaking distractions at the multiplex and the renewed urgency felt on the [
part of smaller distributors to get their films seen (something not really promised by theatrical distribution), 2020 quietly turned into one of the most idiosyncratic and surprising movie seasons in ages. The temptation to historicize this moment in terms of what didn’t get released, i.e., the movies that bigger studios and media advertisers care the most about, would be a grave error.
Because small, politically challenging fare proved especially urgent, pungent, and effective in 2020. This was not only the year of the pandemic, but also a year in which protests against racial injustice took center stage in the media, to say nothing of on the streets, and latent class inequities leaped to the forefront. Oh — and it was an election year. The onceunnervingly-popular speculation that the Trump Era would give rise to great art is as naive today as it was four years ago. And when anyone forgoing mere Trump impersonations to get adventurous got a little too close to the electric fence, the result seemed to be either: a) Everyone collectively losing their shit, b) filmmakers completely blowing it, or c) both. (See The Hunt, the gory satire about coastal elites hunting red-staters for sport that showed up culturally DOA.)
It’s thanks to Covid-19 that digital platforms — streamers and virtual cinemas alike — are almost the only movie experience any of us had this year. That isn’t to say there was no such thing as digital “hits” akin to theatrical ones, and I begrudge no one the time spent watching Hubie Halloween, a movie that makes me laugh a lot, or the hyper-relevant high-wire act of Borat Subsequent Moviefilm, a movie that made me laugh even more.
More important, this year made it easier to cheerlead for movies like Eliza Hittman’s extraordinary Never Rarely Sometimes Always, about a teenager’s effort to get a safe abortion, or Kitty Green’s low-key and exacting The Assistant, which tackles the sins of Harvey Weinstein by rendering the disgraced mogul solely in terms of invisible power. It became easier to point people to movies that are already streaming on Amazon Prime or Netflix — things like Garrett Bradley’s documentary Time, an innovating, lyrical study of a woman’s effort to get her husband released from prison. Or, on the other side of the divide, David Fincher’s peculiarly political, Citizen Kane- inspired Mank, which, even with Fincher’s name attached, is hard to imagine having been a hit.
Sure, it’s a silver lining to a dark cloud hovering over Tornado Alley. The pandemic rages on; art matters, but it certainly won’t survive if people don’t. There were also, it must be said, plenty of bad movies this year, too, and if anything, a striving for political relevance is exactly what exposes movies — like Jon Stewart’s small-town satire Irresistible or the specious wigfest that is Aaron Sorkin’s Trial of the Chicago 7 — for the simplistic liberal grist that they are. That can’t be helped; unlike the coronavirus, you could see them coming. But that’s not what we’ll remember when we look back on this annus miserabilis. What will spring to mind when we think of 2020 at the movies will be how the best and brightest of these works empowered us to look elsewhere for epiphanies. The movies didn’t die. They were just a literal click away.