Best of the year lists are inevitably incomplete and subjective. No one can see everything, and what’s to one person’s taste may leave another cold. Still, I keep a list every year, and here it is with two additional caveats. Not everything I liked in 2019 was new, only to me. And in the movie realm in particular, a dweller in Podunk may not get to see all the December releases until January, if then. If ever.
I read less than usual for pleasure in 2019 because of time spent reading newspapers, magazines and depressing tomes like the “Mueller Report” and the “House Impeachment Report.” No joy there.
I can recommend three histories unreservedly — “American Revolutions” by Alan Taylor, “These Truths” by Jill Lepore, and “Champlain’s Dream” by David Hackett Fischer. I have recently extolled the new-to-me British poet Wendy Cope whose “Anecdotal Evidence” is especially fine, and the novelist Penelope Fitzgerald whose “At Freddie’s,” “Human Voices,” and “The Bookshop” I enjoyed. I have six more novels of hers to look forward to.
I found “Falter,” a climate change warning, alarming and its prescriptions less than likely to occur. Two memoirs were touching, Michelle Obama’s journey in “Becoming” and Daniel Mendelsohn’s “An Odyssey” about a late reconciliation with his difficult father, enabled by retracing the steps of the Homeric hero. Finally, Bill Bryson, who is always an amusing guide to any place or thing that catches his fancy, has given us a delightful and creepy journey through our flesh and blood in “The Body: A Guide for Occupants.” It should prove especially useful to hypochondriacs. So many things to go wrong.
Television now produces so much content that one can never keep up. Since much of the best is on premium channels and streaming services one also can’t afford to keep up. At the top of the list for 2019, I would put two deeply disturbing dramas based on reality, “Chernobyl” and “Our Boys” about the random violence that poisonous Israeli-Palestinian hatreds produce.
Also at the top are “Gentleman Jack” with a knockout performance by Suranne Jones, the latest season of “Killing Eve” whose wickedly funny Jodie Comer has gotten a deserved acting nomination, the “Catch-22” miniseries, “Fleabag,” the charming anthology series “Modern Love,” and “Unbelievable” about bungled investigations into serial rapes put right by two women cops played expertly by Toni Collette and Merritt Wever.
I also enjoyed “Press,” “Years and Years,” “Catherine the Great,” especially for Jason Clarke in a large part opposite Helen Mirren worthy of his large talent, “Brexit: An Uncivil War” with Benedict Cumberbatch as the amoral, antisocial, Bannonesque political consultant and bomb thrower behind the Brexit vote, “Dead to Me” especially for the wonderful Linda Cardellini, a reinvigorated “Stranger Things,” and the latest, possibly last, season of “Goliath” since it ended with the case solved but our hero shot and bleeding in the rain.
It was also a year in which too many favorites reached their end — the long-delayed codas to “Tales of the City” and “Deadwood,” and the final curtain for “Counterpart,” “Veep,” “The Durrell’s in Corfu,” “Big Bang” and “Game of Thrones.” Fans hated the ending of “Thrones,” but the mother of dragons had it coming, Jon Snow was always a reluctant commander, and it was only fitting that wily survivors and misfits like Tyrian, Davos, and Sam should end up running the show for figurehead Bran. It was a series about power politics and so it ended.
It was also a fine year for documentaries on little screens and big, including the multipart Ken Burns “Country Music,” “100 Percent Julian Edelman,” “American Factory,” “Deadline Artists,” “Won’t You Be My Neighbor,” and amazing restored footage from World War I in “They Shall Never Grow Old.”
The best films for 2019 begin with two class-warfare dramas “Parasite” from Korea, and “Hustlers” with Jennifer Lopez in high gear. Next, a child’s eye view of Nazi Germany in “JoJo Rabbit” which stars amazing kid actor Ronan Griffin Davis, director Taika Waititi as his imaginary playmate, Adolf Hitler, and in the first of two fine performances Scarlett Johansson as his mother. Her second star turn is as the divorcing mother opposite Adam Driver — in “Marriage Story,” a beautifully calibrated dissection of wedded bliss blighted by incompatible aims.
The moving “A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood” has fine performances by Matthew Rhys, stealing the show from Tom Hanks, and Chris Cooper as his father. Cooper also has a nice turn in “Little Women.” It cleverly toggles between the familiar text and a framing story of the adult Alcott writing the book and getting it published. To no one’s surprise, Saoirse Ronan’s Jo gets to be doubly feisty as a result. Willem Dafoe is excellent as Van Gogh in “At Eternity’s Gate.”
It was a good year for comedy including “Booksmart,” “Late Night,” “Farewell,” “Where’d You Go, Bernadette,” enlivened by a Cate Blanchett coming unstrung, two homages to the power of song in “Blinded by the Light” and “Yesterday.” “Ford v Ferrari” is also fun, chiefly for the love-hate relationship between Matt Damon and the always surprising Christian Bale.
A few more serious dramas also earn a place on the list — “Everybody Knows,” with Bardem and Cruz, “Cold War,” and masterclasses in acting from Jonathan Pryce and Anthony Hopkins as “The Two Popes” and Judy Dench and Kenneth Branagh in “All is True,” an imagined view of Shakespeare in retirement. In both those cases, the cast is better than the script but worth seeing.
The same is true of “The Irishman,” Scorcese’s elegaic mob movie which is too long, too slow and adds up to little more than “No memory of having starred/ Atones for later disregard/ Or keeps the end from being hard.” Heck of a cast, however.
Finally, “Ready or Not” is an efficient comic-horror bloodbath, and the star-studded Agatha Christie homage,“Knives Out,” is notable for how the young Ana de Armas steals the show from the likes of Christopher Plummer, Daniel Craig, Jamie Lee Curtis, Toni Collette, Michael Shannon and Don Johnson. She obviously bears watching.
In troubled times like ours, we count on poets, painters, writers, actors and artists of all sorts to continue to hold up a mirror to nature. How doubly dreary the world would be without them. Not for the first time, I quote with heartfelt approbation this sentence from Randall Jarrell: “Art matters not merely because it is the most magnificent ornament and most nearly unfailing occupation of our lives, but because it is life itself.”
Happy reading, viewing, and listening in 2020.