Forget superhero flicks, mob movies, futuristic fantasies, and love stories: The best movie genre of the 2010s, by far, was the dramatization of true tales.
Hollywood has become very good at telling stories when the writers aren’t forced to invent the plots from scratch. In the past decade, the truth may not have been stranger, but certainly was better than fiction.
Indeed, I rate every movie I see, and those closely based on real events comprise a full dozen of my highest-rated 16 or 17 movies of the decennium. This is all the more remarkable considering that because the stories are (largely) true, the audience usually already knows the basic endings. It takes real talent for moviemakers to maintain narrative tension and keep an audience engaged without the benefit of mystery about the ending. Yet, Hollywood has become quite adept at meeting this challenge.
Consider Sully (2016), a story surrounding Captain Chesley Sullenberger’s successful landing of U.S. Airways Flight 1549 in the Hudson River. Just about every sentient American knew of the astonishing success of the landing and rescue efforts, with all 155 of the plane’s occupants surviving. Yet, by building the movie around the post-landing inquest into the incident, in which Sullenberger was forced to defend his split-second decisions against questioning, the filmmakers achieved their aim. In Sully, almost every second of the flight’s final four minutes became fraught with meaning.
In Zero Dark Thirty (2012), everyone in the audience already knew American intelligence and military efforts succeeded in finding and killing terrorist Osama bin Laden. Nonetheless, director Kathryn Bigelow maintained a sense of gripping drama throughout. As in Sully, the tension stemmed from the depiction not of what eventually happened, but how. It was great stuff.
The exception to this trend of overcoming well-known endings was the brilliant Bridge of Spies, the Stephen Spielberg project that told not just a story too old for most people to remember, but also a backstory not well-known even immediately after it happened. Tom Hanks played a U.S. lawyer sent by the U.S. government to negotiate the release of American pilot Francis Gary Powers, whose spy plane was downed over the Soviet Union in 1960. Critics almost universally loved the film, with Ignatiy Vishnevetsky of A.V.Club calling it “one of the most handsome movies of Spielberg’s latter-day phase, and possibly the most eloquent.”
Those three probably top my list of best “true story” movies of the decade, but others were close behind and easily among the top 20 of all of the decade’s movies, not just within the genre. The excellent The 33 told of the staggeringly innovative efforts to save workers trapped in a collapsed Chilean copper and gold mine. The Impossible portrayed one family’s survival of the horrendous tsunami that hit Thailand in 2004. Hacksaw Ridge related the inspirational story of Medal of Honor winner Desmond Doss, whose religious beliefs precluded him from killing people in World War II but who, as a medic, saved 75 men, under fire, in the battle of Okinawa.
Some actors seem particularly adept at this sort of “true story” cinema. Hanks starred not just in Bridge of Spies and Sully, but also in the wonderful Captain Phillips (and in 1995’s Apollo 13). Mark Wahlberg did great work both in Deepwater Horizon and Patriot’s Day. Bradley Cooper starred in both American Sniper and in the somewhat less accomplished American Hustle. (The latter took more liberties with the real story, and also didn’t make my list of top movies, but still was enjoyable.)
Rounding out my distinguished dozen were Unbroken and The King’s Speech, the latter of which had the distinction of achieving entertainment excellence despite telling a much less conventionally heroic or exciting story than the others.
In all of these, the producers, screenwriters, directors, and actors were able to mine real-life material to a tremendously engaging effect. As an inveterate moviegoer, I can remember no prior decade in which so much of Hollywood’s best work, and in significant volume, told true stories. My notes show at least ten other “real-life” movies that also were highly enjoyable, and only a small step in quality below those above. (That second list is here.)
So, everybody who wants can keep their Avengers and Star Wars and post-apocalyptic movies. The decade’s best film genre focused on real, and reel, true things.
