Now that it's October, and this year's parade of "Oscar hopefuls" is in motion, the time has come to ask the question: what were this summer's movies—collectively—all about? What themes and trends did they have in common, and what can these themes and trends tell us about the zeitgeist of America more broadly? I only saw six movies, so I'm not really qualified to write a full "summer movie recap," but the six that I did see were enough for me to make out the overall flavor of the season, in movies and beyond. The six movies I saw were: Star Trek, The Hangover, (500) Days of Summer, Julie and Julia, District 9, and Up. They weren't necessarily all the most popular movies of the summer—I think that was Transformers—but still they all reflected and embodied America's collective consciousness in the sort of way that only the best summer movies do.
It goes pretty much without saying that this summer, in movies and in general, was about the recession. The main trend that most film critics agreed on was the remarkable absence of A-list stars in most of the summer's most successful movies, like Star Trek and The Hangover. The obvious explanation for this shift is that studios wanted to save money by not having to pay big-name actors millions of dollars. It had a possibly unintended side effect, though, which was to let the movie, rather than the lead actor, be the star. Actors have become such outsize figures that they sometimes drown out the movies that they star it. For instance, Land of the Lost, which flopped, could not manage to be anything more than a "Will Ferrel movie." Conversely, the actors in the summers more popular movies, because they were more or less unknown, could really convince us that they were their characters—unlike Will Ferrel, who is always Will Ferrel first and foremost, no matter what character he is playing. They could disappear into their movies instead of overpowering them, which was a big factor in what made this summer's movies so good.
The recession shaped this summer's movies far beyond the economic sphere, though. They also channeled the culture of the recession in a number of different ways, which I will mention in my individual discussions of the movies. The most important characteristic uniting all of them, though, is that they were all, in their own way, modest. The best way to explain what I mean by that would be to recall The Dark Knight, which was the movie that defined the previous summer. It was an excessive movie for outsize times—too big, too long, and totally overwhelming. That summer, with an election approaching that everyone said was the most important in generations, everything seemed overladen with world-historical significance; it was no coincidence that The Dark Knight climbed to such heights, with some kids (according to Boston Globe critic Wesley Morris) even wondering whether it was the greatest movie of all time. The Joker, a character who was somehow both ludicrously overacted and frighteningly lifelike, was an embodiment of this excess, and of the grave danger it represented. Like The Dark Knight, America in the summer of 2008 felt precariously overgrown, bound to topple at any moment.
As we now know, it did topple just a few months later. The recession happened—and, it's worth mentioning, the election of Barack Obama also happened—and, by the time the summer rolled around, they were both old news. Whereas last summer, terrible and earth-shattering events were looming just around the corner, this summer those earth-shattering events had already happened, and we were well into the process of learning to live in their aftermath. A creative writing teacher of mine once said "Avoid excess, unless excess is the point." In The Dark Knight, excess was indeed the point, which was why it was a great movie despite being so excessive—its dangerous instability was what made it such a thrill to watch. This summer, excess was not the point. The point, rather, was prudence and restraint; the phrase of the moment was "cutting back." Of the six movies I saw, none tried to do more than it could, and each succeeded fantastically by working fully within its modest means—succeeded, not in being controversial or in driving home some sort of message, but just in being satisfying, solid works of craftsmanship, which has always been what makes good movies good.
Star Trek set the tone for the summer. It was the closest thing 2009 has had so far to a Dark Knight—a big, eagerly anticipated addition to a well-established franchise. And, like The Dark Knight, it also made some risky moves, including the aforementioned cast of unknowns, and also the liberties it took with the official Trek timeline. But unlike The Dark Knight, for which excessiveness was a reason unto itself, Star Trek did everything it did for one reason and one reason only: to be entertaining. Through scene after scene, things keep happening exactly the way you were hoping they'd happen, even at the expense of believability—which, in summer movies, is not very important anyway. For instance, the scene in which Scotty just so happens to materialize right into tube of water may have been a bit silly, but makes for a great bit of screwball comedy nonetheless. And it is also certainly worth noting that Star Trek had none of The Dark Knight's darkness; it was a light, hopeful movie after a several-month spell of gloom. In every way, it was pretty much exactly what America needed.
The Hangover worked decently as a metaphor for the recession. It's not such a stretch to imagine all three decades leading up to the crash as one crazy night in Vegas, and the past year as the morning after when we all wake up hungover and try to figure out what the hell happened. Formally, though, The Hangover showed us that it had fully absorbed the most important lesson of the recession: don't write checks you can't cash. It had the same premise as Dude, Where's My Car?, the archetypal morning-after comedy in which friends wake up after a night of excess and have to solve the ever-deepening mystery of what they did last night. But in Dude, Where's My Car?, the mystery quickly gets so ridiculous that no amount of explanation could ever tie it all together; and it ends up as nothing more than a stupid shaggy-dog story. The Hangover, in contrast, ties all the loose ends together as deftly as a good mystery novel. Both movies demand a massive suspension of disbelief on the part of the viewer, but only The Hangover ultimately delivers on the investment.
(500) Days of Summer was an even better recession metaphor: the protagonist gets overly "invested" in a relationship with a woman that he knows is not looking for anything serious, and then plunges into despair when she inevitably breaks up with him. The way the movie was presented out of chronological order made the analogy even more evident: it let us see the whole arc of the relationship at once, as though it were plotted on a graph. On a deeper level, though, it was a fairly profound expression of the sort of idealistic naivete that ultimately led to the recession. Anyone who called it "this year's Juno" sold it short; it was not a cute indie movie, but rather a movie about a guy who expects reality to be like a cute indie movie, and then is devastated when it turns out not to be. It was a movie about what happens when people have unrealistic expectations, be they about love or about real estate loans.
Julie and Julia may be a modestly significant historical landmark: unless I'm forgetting something, it was the first movie about blogging. More to the point, though, it made itself into a recession movie by using its historical setting, 2002, as a foil for 2009. The aftermath of 9/11, like the recession, was a time when people had lost their sense of security, and were desperate to latch onto anything that felt solid and real. And, as Julie points out at the beginning of the movie, what could be more solid and real than cooking? It was a timely reminder that the most basic things in life, like food, are what really matter—that is something that more and more people have been saying over the course of the recession. The challenge that Julie sets for herself—to cook all of Julia Child's recipes in one year—is ambitious but not overly ambitious, and she does what it takes to see it through. All the while, Julia Child herself hovers over the action like a Laughing Buddha. She was one of the most indominable characters I've seen in any movie ever, and a perfect guardian angel figure for these difficult times.
District 9 may have looked like it was going to be some heavy-handed political statement about apartheid or prejudice or what have you, but what distinguished it was actually how apolitical it managed to be. Yes, the aliens were second class citizens living in a big shanty town in Johannesburg, but the movie did not go out of its way to invite further comparison. District 9 was really notable only as an astoundingly fine piece of filmmaking, a gripping action movie that gets started and never once lets up. Moreover, the style of the action was itself notable—it was brutal and gritty to match the dusty Johannesburg backdrop. Combined with the jerky handheld camera in the early scenes, it stood in stark contrast with the balletic choreography and editing that has dominated action movies ever since The Matrix made them fashionable. Its special effects were no less impressive than those in any other summer action movie, but they felt organic. It made the CGI characters seem real instead of, as is so often the case, making the real actors seem like CGI. Like the recent vinyl revival, District 9 represented, stylistically although not technically, a turn away from the digital and back to the unmediated physicality of the analog. In this way, it is part and parcel with America's newfound appreciation for concrete, organic reality over the bureaucratic spirit-world that played a large part in leading us into the recession.
Up actually came out between Star Trek and The Hangover, but I didn't see it until the end of the summer, and it made a fitting end-of-the-summer movie. It invites obvious comparison with WALL-E, its predecessor in the Pixar catalog and the other "event" movie (along with The Dark Knight) of the summer of 2008. Up and WALL-E were both brilliant movies, and both received more or less unanimous critical acclaim—but Up somehow did so much more quietly. WALL-E was a big movie that made a big, sort of controversial (not that controversial) statement about consumerism. Up, on the other hand, was just a simple, entertaining adventure, with the year's most touching love story jammed into the first ten minutes. It was completely apolitical, just doing all the things a good movie should do without trying to make any but the subtlest of statements. My favorite moment in the movie was when the old man throws all of his wife's old things out of his house so it will be light enough to fly. The meaning is clear: if you want to overcome the spirit of gravity, you need to let go of all the junk that you've been holding onto all these years and start traveling light. It was the perfect metaphor for the end of the age of excess, and the new era that is now underway.