Cold harvest?

By Peter Keough

THE HOUSE OF MIRTH: maybe the problem with movies last year was that there were no Edith Wharton, Jane Austen, or Henry James adaptations? Think of it as a French Provincial Silence of the Lambs, in corsets and lace.

So, did last year’s movies suck or what? The bloom of the late boom of ’99, with the likes of Being John Malkovich, American Beauty, and Three Kings, has faded faster than the future of a dot-com portfolio. Could the coming year be worse? In fact, relief is on the way, as the frigid wastes of January belatedly yield up some of 2000’s Oscar wanna-bes and February and March offer some high-pro le features perhaps poised for early Oscar 2001 consideration.

The themes of many of these movies, however, re ect some of the anguish and despair of the year before. Murder, obsession, treachery, incest, arson, cheerleading, vengeance, misogyny, marital in delity, drug addiction, vampirism, hairdressing, and that old stand-by, cannibalism, are a few of the evils we can expect to enjoy on screen during the next few months. And that’s just the comedies.

January

Maybe the problem with movies last year was that there were no Edith Wharton, Jane Austen, or Henry James adaptations. If so, then iconoclastic British director Terence Davies gets us off to a good start with The House of Mirth (January 19), Wharton’s tale of a woman independent in spirit but not in means who contends against the entitled pooh-bahs of New York’s gilded age. The eclectic cast features former Agent Scully, Gillian Anderson, who seems quite at home in a corset, as well as Dan Aykroyd, Eric Stoltz, and Anthony LaPaglia.

Looking quite at home out of a corset is the former Elizabeth I, Cate Blanchett, who stars in Sam Raimi’s atmospheric thriller The Gift (January 19) as a poor Southern single mom whose gift of second sight involves her in the lives, and deaths, of her neighbors. Billy Bob Thornton based the screenplay on his psychic mom, and though it takes a turn for the generic, Blanchett’s down-to-earth ethereality grounds it. Fellow Oscar winner Hilary Swank (Boys Don’t Cry) adds to the cast, as do Keanu Reeves, Katie Holmes, Greg Kinnear, and Giovanni Ribisi.

Murder shakes another small town in The Pledge (January 19), Sean Penn’s noirish adaptation of the creepy novel by Swiss writer Friedrich Dürrenmatt. Jack Nicholson is the sheriff who makes a pledge to a bereaved widow (Sean’s spouse, Robin Wright Penn) that he will bring to justice the murderer of her daughter, only to learn that you shouldn’t make promises you might not be able to keep. It’s a lesson learned also by silent master F.W. Murnau during the making of his quintessential vampire movie Nosferatu, at least according to E. Elias Merhige in his version of the story, Shadow of the Vampire (January 26). John Malkovich plays the beleaguered director who lures real-life revenant Max Schreck (a hilariously mugging Willem Dafoe) to take the part in exchange for an unspeakable price.

February

Say It Isn’t So (February 2) might well be your response to the premise of this comedy: an animal-shelter employee (Chris Klein) falls in love with a klutzy hairdresser (Heather Graham), only to discover she might be his sister. It’s the debut for director J.B. Rogers, but with an MO like that, you know the Farrelly Brothers must be involved somehow — they produced and co-wrote the screenplay.

Not even the Farrellys could come up with some of the outrages presumably perpetrated in Hannibal (February 9), the sequel to The Silence of the Lambs (1991), both based on the bestselling novels by Thomas Harris. Urbane cannibal Hannibal Lecter is back, as is Anthony Hopkins in the role, but apparently the brain eating and so forth were too much for Jodie Foster, who couldn’t t Agent Clarice Starlin„ into her schedule. Instead, Julianne Moore will play Lecter’s nemesis/soul mate, and Ridley Scott, hot off last year’s juggernaut Gladiator, will direct in lieu of Jonathan Demme.

If after all that carnage you’re still In the Mood for Love (February 16), you could do worse than take in this brilliant lm by Wong Kar-Wai, the tale of a man and a woman who fall in love when they discover their spouses are having an affair. Spanning decades, it combines the poignance of Brief Encounter with the profundity of Hiroshima, mon amour.

March

What is it about March that turns one’s thoughts to controlled substances? First there’s See Spot Run (March 2), in which David Arquette plays a mailman who adopts a dog that turns out to be a former FBI drug sniffer wanted by the mob. Joe Whitesell makes his directorial debut. Then there’s Blow (March 30), Ted Demme’s true story of George Jung, the Massachusetts native who became drug lord Pablo Escobar’s right-hand man; Johnny Depp and Penélope Cruz star. Blow Dry (March 9) sounds like a drug movie, but it’s actually about that other societal menace, hairdressing; Rachel Grif ths and Alan Rickman star, and Paddy Breathnach directs from a script by The Full Monty’s Simon Beaufoy. And 15 Minutes (March 16) sounds as if it might be about the short-lived high of celebrity, and it is, sort of, but it’s more about a wave of arson battled by hotshot investigators Robert De Niro and Ed Burns; John Herzfeld directs. Virtual addiction, nally, proves to be the Center of the World (March 16), Wayne Wang’s digital video tale about a young nerd whose computer jones drives him to a three-day Vegas tryst with a stripper. Starring Peter Sarsgaard and Molly Parker, it’s Downloading Las Vegas.