In 1996,
The murder of nine-year-old Amber Hagerman inspired the creation of the AMBER Alert system;
Yasser Arafat was re-elected as president of the Palestinian Authority;
Hilary Clinton testified before a grand jury investigating the Whitewater scandal;
Copernicium was first created;
Deep Blue defeated Garry Kasparov;
Alanis Morisette won Album of the Year for Jagged Little Pill, becoming the youngest person to win the award;
Major League Soccer began its inaugural season;
Braveheart won the Academy Award for Best Picture of 1995;
The Unabomber was arrested;
In Romer v. Evans, the US Supreme Court ruled a Colorado law denying special protection to homosexuals was unconstitutional;
Seven monks from the Atlas Abbey of Tibhirine were kidnapped during the Algerian Civil War and executed;
Benjamin Netanyahu became Prime Minister of Israel for the first time;
The Nintendo 64 was released in Japan and the United States;
Journalist Veronica Guerin was murdered;
Dolly the sheep, the first cloned mammal, was born;
The Summer Olympics were held in Atlanta;
Eric Rudolph bombed Centennial Olympic Park;
The Ramones played their last show;
Bill Clinton defeated Bob Dole to win a second term as US President;
Prince Charles and Diana divorced;
The Big 12 Conference began its inaugural season;
Hurricane Fran made landfall near Cape Fear, North Carolina;
The last Magdalene asylum closed;
The Taliban captured Kabul, the capital city of Afghanistan;
The Fox News Channel debuted;
Mother Theresa became an honorary US Citizen;
The Sands Hotel and Hacienda in Las Vegas were demolished;
Kofi Annan was elected as the Secretary-General of the United Nations (his term would start January 1);
JonBenet Ramsey was murdered;
Seven-year-old Jessica Dubroff died in a plane crash attempting to become the youngest person to fly across the United States;
Sophie Turner, Abigail Breslin, Tom Holland, Kodi Smith-McPhee, Jena Irene, Liam James, and Dylan Minnette were born;
While Francois Mitterand, Barbara Jordan, A.G. Gaston, Jonathan Larson, Joseph Brodsky, Jerry Siegel, Gene Kelly, Audrey Meadows, Martin Balsam, McLean Stevenson, Pat Brown, Audrey Munson, Haing Ngor, Minnie Pearl, George Burns, Krzysztof Kieslowski, Edmund Muskie, David Packard, Greer Garson, Christopher Robin Milne, Erma Bombeck, Saul Bass, P.L. Travers, Jon Pertwee, Lash LaRue, Timothy Leary, Ray Combs, Jo Van Fleet, Ella Fitzgerald, Mel Allen, Margaux Hemingway, Herb Edelman, Claudette Colbert, Bill Monroe, Juanita Wright, Tupac Shakur, Spiro Agnew, Paul Erdös, Rene Lacoste, Morey Amsterdam, Alger Hiss, Tiny Tim, Pete Rozelle, Howard Rollins, Carl Sagan, Lew Ayres, and Jack Nance died.
The following is a list of my ten favorite films released in 1996:
10) Ransom
A group led by NYPD detective Jimmy Shakes (Gary Sinise) abducts Sean Mullen, the child of millionaires Tom (Mel Gibson) and Kate (Renee Russo) Mullen. After a failed attempt to pay the two million dollar ransom, a frustrated Tom goes on television to offer a substantial bounty / reward.
A panicked Shaker murders his accomplices and “finds” Sean, so he can collect the reward, but this plan falls apart when Sean recognizes his voice.
This film reminds us what a fascinating and intelligent actor Mel Gibson was before his drunken arrest and the controversy of The Passion of the Christ changed our perception of his work.
Ron Howard’s early films were light, comedic affairs, but this is a taut, suspenseful film grounded with great performances from Russo and Gibson. My only quibble is the casting of Sinise as the heavy in a clear attempt to avoid typecasting. With a more menacing bad guy, this would have been a better film.
9) Swingers
Leaving behind a long-term relationship in New York City, Mike (Jon Favreau) moves to LA to further his comedy career where he befriends aspiring actor and self-styled relationship expert Trent (Vince Vaughn).
Alongside their friend Rob (Ron Livingston) and Sue, they enthusiastically explore the LA night life.
Written by Favreau, the film is eminently quotable. For twenty years, everyone who lands at McCarran International Airport immediately thinks, “Vegas, baby!”
This sweet film about moving forward and letting go launched Favreau as a major Hollywood player and fixed Vaughn’s public persona. To large swaths of people, he is Trent Walker.
The discussions about life and love are surprisingly perceptive, plus it’s a nice reminder of the brief period in the mid 1990s when swing was king again.
8) Hamlet
Like his idol, Laurence Olivier, Kenneth Brannagh popularized Shakespeare to a new generation and couldn’t resist casting himself in the leading role.
This brilliant adaptation of the venerable play features a stellar cast including Derek Jacobi, Julie Christie, a pre-Titanic Kate Winslet, Robin Williams, Gerard Depardieu, Jack Lemmon, Billy Crystal, Charlton Heston, Judi Dench, Richard Attenborough, John Gielgud, and Rosemary Harris.
This is the first filmed adaptation of the full text and its four-hour run time limits the appeal, but all serious lovers of Shakespeare and the timeless transcendence of art will love it.
After simple-minded and deeply religious Bess McNeill (Emily Watson) naively marries atheist Jan Nyman (Stellan Skarsgard), she believes her selfish prayers caused Jan’s paralysis in an oil rig accident. When he asks her to find another lover, she reluctantly complies, dutifully reporting the details of her sexual exploits to him, believing it’s God’s punishment and thinking if she performs her penance, Jan will be healed.
The scandalized village excommunicates Bess, but before they can follow through on a plan to have her committed, she’s murdered by a group of sex-craved sailors. When the village refuses to bury her, a now healthy Jan buries her in the ocean.
A successor to fellow Dane Carl Th. Dreyer, Lars von Trier is one of the few filmmakers attempting to reconcile the post-modern age with a traditional view of God. If God exists, why is he silent? If God doesn’t exist, why do so many persist in their belief?
Religious people find inspiration in stories of the extreme faith of people like Moses, Abraham, Gideon, and Joshua, but when someone like Bess claims her faith compels her to behave unconventionally, the faithful are incapable of believing her sincerity. We put our faith in a box while venerating our forefathers for their refusal to conform.
During the tumultuous 1960s, the Ku Klux Klan was an active paramilitary, political organization using violence and intimidation to silence opposition. Many civil rights leaders and activists were physically assaulted or killed, including Medgar Evers.
Within a few weeks of his assassination, Byron de la Beckwith (James Woods) was arrested for the murder, but despite significant evidence linking him to the crime, two all white juries remained deadlocked and he remained a free man.
In 1994, Evers’s widow Myrlie (Whoopi Goldberg) convinced prosecutor Bobby DeLaughter (Alec Baldwin) to prosecute Beckwith a third time. Twenty-one years after the murder, Beckwith was convicted and sent to prison.
Rob Reiner’s film is a brilliant example of how powerful justice can be, even when delayed and a reminder all gains by evil are temporary.
Goldberg is phenomenal and Woods is great (in spite of the clumsy makeup designed to age him). My only complaint: Baldwin plays the idealistic prosecutor a little too squeaky clean (ironically, DeLaughter would later go to jail for bribery).
Hortense Cumberbatch, an adopted black optometrist in London, is surprised to discover her biological mother is a poor white woman, Cynthia Purley (Brenda Blethyn), with a dysfunctional home life.
The scope of the film is small, but speaks deeply about the evolving and fluid nature of family in the late twentieth century: equal parts blood and shared life. The film boldly inverts typical assumption of race and class, Hortnese is upwardly mobile, while her white mother spirals into a deeper hole of poverty.
Mike Leigh’s improvisational and collaborative environment keep this film about unconventional familial bonds fresh and organic.
4) Sling Blade
Twenty years after killing his mother and her lover, mentally disabled Karl Childers (Billy Bob Thornton) is released from a mental institution and returns to his hometown where he befriends Linda, her 12-year-old son Frank, and his gay boss Vaughan Cunningham (John Ritter).
In five minutes of screen time, Karl’s confession of his role in the murder of his younger brother after a botched abortion and confrontation with his father (Robert Duvall) dramatizes both sides of the abortion debate in a way our most skillful politicians and public servants cannot.
Meanwhile, Linda’s abusive relationship with Doyle Hargraves (Dwight Yoakam) reminds Karl of his own past and leads him to protect Frank in a way no one did for him.
Thornton’s masterful directorial debut made him an overnight star and his powerful performance is one of the most complex and nuanced portraits of a mentally handicapped individual in film history.
Yoakam is wonderful as the villainous Doyle (even if the character is little more than a stock plot device). Ritter (most famous for playing a man who pretended to be gay) is wonderful as a gay outsider who identifies with Karl’s plight.
This story continues the work of Flannery O’Connor’s Southern Gothic, juxtaposing dark violence with seemingly genteel people to illustrate a larger point, Southern hospitality is a facade, a way of repressing and suppressing potentially violent destructive behavior.
3) Sleepers
After a childhood prank nearly kills a man, four young boys from Hell’s Kitchen are sent to a juvenile detention facility where they’re systematically abused by guards and overseers.
Fourteen years later, two of the boys randomly encounter one of their abusers, Sean Nokes (Kevin Bacon), and murder him.
Another one of the quartet, Michael Sullivan (Brad Pitt) works in the DA’s office and arranges to try the case. He recruits the other victim, Lorenzo (Jason Patric), into a conspiracy to sabotage the case and convinces Father Bobby Carillo (Robert DeNiro) to provide an alibi.
It’s a little heavy-handed and bleak, but this intimate film accurately portrays the unforeseen ramifications of childhood abuse.
Baz Lurhmann’s film is Shakespeare filtered through MTV. He wisely leaves the original dialogue intact, while modernizing the presentation to look like a hip hop video, forcing us to pay even more attention to the language.
Released before Titanic (1997) catapulted Leonardo DiCapprio to superstardom, he brings a steady confidence to the star-crossed lover.
Juliet was originally offered to Natalie Portman, but producers were uncomfortable with how young she seemed in her scenes with DiCapprio’s Romeo. Fortunately, Claire Danes is exactly how I imagine the young Capulet.
The all-star supporting cast includes Paul Sorvino, M. Emmet Walsh, Paul Rudd, John Leguizamo, Miriam Margoyles, and Pete Postlethwaite.
Watch this to be reminded how timeless Shakespeare is.
1) The Crucible
In this film inspired by the infamous Salem Witch Trials, John Proctor (Daniel Day-Lewis) love his wife Elizabeth (Joan Allen), but an earlier infidelity with Abigail Williams (Winona Ryder) causes a rift in their relationship which ends in violence and engulfs the whole town.
Daniel Day-Lewis rarely disappoints. His John Proctor is torn between protecting his reputation or his family. Ultimately, he chooses his family, but like The Gift of the Magi, his wife refuses to confirm his unfaithfulness.
Beginning in the mid 1990s, Joan Allen began an impressive decade long run of quality films including Nixon (1995), The Ice Storm (1997), Pleasantville (1998), The Contender (2001), and The Notebook (2004). She brings a quiet dignity to Elizabeth Proctor, who continues to love her husband despite his infidelity.
Winona Ryder is a versatile performer who can be goofy, sarcastic and mean, or quietly manipulative. Sadly, her career was derailed after her arrest for shoplifting. Since then, she’s been relegated to supporting roles in films like Star Trek (2009) and Black Swan (2010).
She’s still relatively young, but I fear we’re going to look back on her career and see it as a squandered opportunity.
Paul Scofield focused on the theater, but the few films he participated in were memorable including A Man for All Seasons (1966), Henry V (1989), and Quiz Show (1994). He’s excellent as Judge Thomas Danforth, the architect of the trials.
Jeffrey Jones who played Thomas Putnam is fondly remembered as the dad in Beetlejuice (1988) and the principal in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (1986), but those fond memories were tainted when he was arrested for child pornography in 2003.
I’d read Arthur Miller’s play in high school, so I knew the film used the witch trials as an allegory for McCarthyism, but I didn’t anticipate the film’s message about love and commitment which makes it a perfect companion piece to The Age of Innocence (1993), also starring Day-Lewis and Ryder. The earlier film shows what sacrifices must be made to maintain fidelity in a relationship, while this film shows the consequences of breaking this vow.
