Jeffrey:

This was not an easy task. In a given year, I would guess I see about 25 movies in the theater. I probably watch another 25 of that year’s releases on DVD, giving me about 500 movies to choose from for my favorite of the decade. Some movies could be eliminated right off the bat – I was fairly certain when I stepped out of the theater that Live Free or Die Hard wouldn’t be much of a contender. But aside from that minor transgression, I tend to only see movies that I am really interested in, and I tend to enjoy the majority of them.

That being said, I am totally lying to you. It did not take me very long at all to decide on my favorite film of the decade. In order to meet the criteria, the film had to be in my personal collection. And my personal collection only includes about 10 films that were released in the 2000s, so all I had to do was decide which I liked the best.

The film that initially leaped out at me was Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. That movie was clearly touched by God. For Charlie Kaufman and Michel Gondry, two extremely creative but extremely unreliable talents, to put together such a moving, tightly-scripted, and visually incredible film with Jim freaking Carrey in the lead role … there must have been some serious voodoo shit going on behind the scenes. Truth be told, it is on equal footing with the film I ended up choosing, but since it’s made it onto many other “best of” lists (The Onion AV Club, Slate, Time Out New York), I decided to let the others have it.

Children of Men was a serious contender. But even though I own it, I’ve probably only watched it all the way through twice, ‘cause let’s face it … that shit is harrowing. Wet Hot American Summer is probably the film I watched the most this decade, but it’s not a movie without its flaws.

Mulholland Drive, Mike’s pick, is in my top 5, but it’s difficult for me to ignore the fact that it was, as Mike says, somewhat “cobbled together.” For powerful stand-alone sequences, it can compete with any movie out there, but the storyteller in me believes my top pick should go to a film that, um, tells a coherent story.

So what did I pick? The anticipation is clearly killing you, because my phone is ringing off the hook. After much consideration, I decided that my favorite film of the 00s, the movie I most enjoyed over the course of the last ten years … is a relatively unheralded 2000 Swedish film called Together (a/k/a Tillsammans).

Well, not relatively unheralded, like I’m some kind of movie genius or something. It won an Independent Spirit Award for best foreign film in 2001 and the AV Club put it at 25 on their list. So it’s actually quite heralded. It just probably isn’t a movie a lot of people rushed to see in the theater. It is, however, a movie you should rush to see on DVD, if only because you love my opinions and are constantly trying to impress me with half-baked schemes that only make you look somewhat obsessive and sad.

Together tells the story of one fall and winter in the life of a group of young hippies living in a commune together in 1975 Stockholm. There is Göran the kindly pacifist, Göran’s bed-hopping wife Lena, Lasse the smartass, Lasse”s (ex-?) wife Anna the feminist lesbian, their son Tet (named after the noted Offensive), Klas the gay dude, Erik the raging Communist, and Signe and Sigvard the whiny conservatives. As if that weren’t enough, at the beginning of the film, Görgen’s sister Elizabeth and her children (14-year-old Eva and 12-year-old Stefan) move into the commune to escape Elizabeth’s abusive husband, Rolf. Throw in some peeping Tom neighbors, and you’ve got yourself a recipe for capital F-U-N.

The evolving relationship between Rolf, Elizabeth, and their children forms the backbone of the story, but Moodysson does an amazing job of making us care about each character in this film. He even makes us care about characters we don’t care about—Rolf enters the film as the villain but slowly becomes a character for whom we feel a great amount of empathy, in spite of his failings. The relationship between outcast Eva (the 14-year-old) and Fredrik, the nerdy son of the peeping Toms, is particularly moving—in a world in which the adults are absentee and they can do whatever they want, it’s incredibly touching to see them opt to just be kids.

Together hits all the right notes for a slice-of-life picture—Moodysson has a great insight into how people behave and is an expert at crafting these idiosyncrasies into a coherent and moving—if somewhat episodic–plot. In one scene, Rolf takes his kids—who he has not seen in weeks–out to dinner. He drinks a little too much to get his confidence up, and ends up forgetting his wallet in the restaurant when they leave. The scene that ensues is almost unbearably harrowing, yet riveting in its ability to show how one mistake can sometimes send life spiraling out of control. The film is also chock full of hilarious moments; one of my favorite jokes of all time occurs when 12-year-old Stefan asks Tet if he has any Legos they can play with. “No,” Tet says, “my dad was going to make some out of wood for me, but he only made two pieces.”

Like many slice-of-life films, the goal is not to tie everything up into a neat bow. There is, however, a definite sense of movement in all of the separate stories, and despite the fact that the characters rarely leave the house, we end up in a far different place than we began. And the end scene, in which the characters engage in a joyful, cathartic game of soccer while Abba’s “S.O.S.” plays on the soundtrack, never fails to make me bawl like a baby. It may not be the most intellectual or visually daring film of the decade, but in its exquisite rendering of the messiness of life, Together is the film that most touches my soul. And any film that can make me cry over an Abba song is a masterpiece of film making, indeed.

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