IN A year in which the shadowy figure of recession spread its cape across the world, it is no surprise that the film for which 2008 will be remembered is one of its most bleak.
The Dark Knight, Christopher Nolan's audacious, morally complex and violent follow-up to 2005's Batman Begins was a masterpiece of dark art. Christian Bale's superhero was more macho Hamlet than caped crusader and Heath Ledger's posthumous Joker too
k comic book villainy to new, deranged heights. This was no cartoonish madman à la Jack Nicholson but a self-proclaimed "agent of chaos", a clown with a grin slashed into his paint-cracked face who represented evil not as wrongdoing, but as unfettered anarchy.
It was a year in which we seemed to want either extreme: escapism into the azure seas and Abba songs of Mamma Mia!, the most successful musical film in history and the fastest selling DVD in Britain, or immersion in deepest, darkest Gotham City. It was the year the superhero film grew up and got a gloved punch to the guts. And the new breed of superhero – darker, more troubled, and played by infinitely more interesting actors, well, barring Will Smith in Hancock – continued.
First up we got Robert Downey Jr in Iron Man. The action was updated to Afghanistan circa now and though it remained brainless action-thriller fare, the casting of Downey Jr with his jittery, mischievous scene-stealing, took it up a notch. Unfortunately, the same could not be said for Wanted, penned by comic book writer Mark Millar, which managed to drip with testosterone in spite of the gun-toting leads being a woman (though it was Angelina Jolie) and James McAvoy.
We got the most disappointing comic book superhero of them all in The Incredible Hulk. There was a thrill in imagining Ed Norton, an actor Oscar-nominated for playing a reformed neo-Nazi skinhead, become a big green giant but this was meat-headed pulp. One critic likened his Hulk to a smaller-headed Shrek. Thank God, then, for the return of Hellboy in The Golden Army, which, under the visionary direction of Guillermo del Toro, was funny, fantastical and genuinely moving.
Even the two greatest American films of the year that weren't about dark, troubled comic book superheroes still managed to look like them. The Coen brothers' tense, dust-blown thriller No Country For Old Men, for my money the best film of the year, featured a bowl-haired, cattle gun-carrying villain in Javier Bardem's serial killer who could well have been the Joker's henchman: psychotic, relentless and anarchic too. Daniel Day Lewis's ostentatious turn as Daniel Plainview in There Will Be Blood, another American epic but this time about the scramble for oil, had all the theatrics of the corrupted comic book superhero. These were big films with big directors, big actors and big ideas but still they had an arthouse, indie mentality. (No wonder, against a background of such dark, textured films, the last gasp of Indiana Jones felt like it was going through the motions.) Like The Dark Knight, these films were unashamedly cinematic, tough-going, bold and well-scripted – not what you expect from box office hits. This hints at another theme of 2008 – the indie film gone mainstream. Take Juno, a low-fi, quirky comedy featuring a newcomer lead and a script by an ex-stripper. It was like Donnie Darko or Rushmore being up for best film at the Academy Awards.
Similarly, the reign of the Judd Apatow and Seth Rogen stable of rude, crude comedy continued with films that as recently as last year were still considered fit for college boys only. In 2008, we got Pineapple Express and Forgetting Sarah Marshall, loathed by many but loved by more. And action comedies for men pushed out the more female-friendly romcoms, while the few exceptions women did get, 27 Dresses and The Women, were basically superbad. The most anticipated romcom of them all, Sex And The City, divided the critics though audiences loved it. With women getting short shrift at the flicks this year, the critic-defying successes of Mamma Mia! and Sex And The City start to make sense.
In Britain, it was a year of sitting comfortably back on our well-worn, twin-set stereotypes: the period drama and the gangster heist. The Edge Of Love, which opened the Edinburgh Film Festival, was written by Sharman Macdonald and starred Keira Knightley and Sienna Miller, with a less photogenic Matthew Rhys as the poet Dylan Thomas. A very British affair, in other words, minus convincing Welsh accents and Judi Dench.
Guy Ritchie's Rocknrolla, meanwhile, did exactly what it said on the tin – a bunch of mockney geezers ducking and diving around London with their shooters – but most people were more interested in what the director had to say about his missus. It would be up to more leftfield directors such as Shane Meadows (Somers Town) and Steve McQueen (Hunger) to make the most arresting, creative British cinema of 2008. And if we follow where the US goes, maybe next year these indie directors will bag the Oscars.
