My Favorite Cinema in Austin - The Regal Arbor at Great Hills

My favorite cinema in Austin, the Regal Arbor at Great Hills, has closed permanently as of last Friday, after 19 years of showing a wide range of art-house titles you couldn’t catch anywhere else in town. I’ve kept a list of every theatrical movie I’ve seen since 2001, and the Arbor is by far the theater I’ve visited most in my life (I estimate I’ve seen several hundred films there over the course of the last two decades). This was a very important place for me – a theater that helped guide me as a young person to the varied offerings out there beyond the standard multiplex fare, and ultimately made a huge contribution to my love of cinema.

The theater was formerly the Great Hills 8 (which was a childhood staple – I had my seventh and ninth birthday parties there, for screenings of Air Bud and Inspector Gadget, respectively). After being closed for a few years, the cinema re-opened in 2003 and announced itself as Austin’s new art-house beacon. I will never forget the stunning line-up of new releases playing near the time of the Arbor’s opening – Mystic River, Lost in Translation, 21 Grams, House of Sand and Fog, Big Fish, In America, Monster. At any other theater in Austin at the time (aside from the Dobie), you’d be lucky if one of these films was playing. But the Arbor was a refuge for adults interested in serious cinema, and it often felt like you could walk into any one of their eight screens and a fantastic movie would await you.

As a teenager, I quite liked that I was often the youngest person at the Arbor. I remember seeing Alexander Payne’s Sideways (2004) with my mom at a packed opening weekend screening, and sitting behind us was my dentist and his wife, who seemed rather amused that I was there. In those days, I typically went to the movies with my friends two or three times per week – but we went to other theaters. The Arbor was a different place altogether. It’s where I went to feel like an adult, to watch a different kind of cinema, and it helped shape me into a person interested in real movies about real things.

I’ve had too many memorable cinema experiences at the Arbor to count, but I’ll try to list a few: going by myself to see Shattered Glass (2003) and being blown away by a performer I had never seen before – Peter Sarsgaard; waiting in a long line to see Brokeback Mountain (2005), genuinely impressed by the number of Texans eager to see the film; hearing the audible gasp of the audience as Martin Sheen’s body falls from the rooftop during The Departed (2006); being completely devastated by Into the Wild (2007), which marked one of the first times I can remember actually crying in the cinema; the lump in my throat as The Wrestler (2008) cuts to black and the Springsteen song begins; a double feature of The Hurt Locker and Moon (both 2009); the emotionally wrought experience of seeing Blue Valentine (2010) for the first time; opening night of The Tree of Life (2011), where an audience made up of folks who had worked on the film erupted in applause as the end credits rolled; a packed New Year’s Eve screening of Silver Linings Playbook (2012), during which the movie somehow hit me even harder than the previous three times I had seen it; numerous showings of Alexander Payne’s Nebraska (2013), which was the kind of intimate heartbreaker that fit perfectly at the Arbor; and a spur-of-the-moment late night screening of Jojo Rabbit (2019) with my mom over the Thanksgiving holiday.

I’ll never forget that Jojo Rabbit experience, in particular. As the film ended and the lights came up in the auditorium, my mom and I turned to look at each other. Our eyes were welled up with tears, but we also had grins on our faces – now that was a movie. That special moment between us is indicative of the power of the Arbor – sometimes, if you went at an odd time of day and were among the only people in a large auditorium, it felt like the film was speaking right to you. 

When I was home from college the summers of 2010 and 2011, I practically lived at the Arbor. My mom and I loved to go to double features, often picking one movie we were dying to see and one we knew little about. This led to us seeing films like Beginners, Meek’s Cutoff, Everything Must Go, Another Earth, Terri, Submarine, The Guard, Tabloid, Page One: Inside the New York Times, The Conspirator, The Future – and that was all just the summer of 2011.

In recent years, the Arbor was unique in that it never catered to what Paul Schrader has described as “club cinema.” Although I have great fondness for the Alamo Drafthouse and other dine-in cinemas of its ilk, the Arbor was just a regular old theater – no frills, no waiters wandering around during the movie, no open bar (though they did eventually serve alcohol at the concession stand).

Two weeks ago today, my mom and I went to an Arbor double-feature of See How They Run and Vengeance. We had no idea these would be the last films we saw at the beloved cinema, and I can imagine the employees were blindsided by the news – one person at the box office that day matter-of-factly said, “We aren’t going anywhere.” Exactly one week later, they were shut down.

Everything about the closure was unceremonious – just a short email from Regal saying the cinema was closed. No fanfare, no chance to say goodbye, no final screening for its loyal customers of nearly two decades. Everyone deserved better. My heart goes out to the people who worked there – particularly Brenda, who was the Arbor’s long-time ticket-taker. When you entered through the Arbor doors and received a friendly greeting from Brenda, you were immediately welcomed back into a home away from home.

The pandemic could not have been easy for the Arbor. When it reopened briefly in September of 2020, I saw two films there – The Personal History of David Copperfield and The Last Shift. Both screenings were nearly vacant. While other cinemas remained open (and were similarly sparsely attended), the Arbor closed its doors a few weeks later, not opening again until May of 2021. Since its second re-opening, I’ve tried to see as many movies there as possible, but the adult audiences that the Arbor caters to simply aren’t returning to the cinema in droves.

It’s not for a lack of new releases – last fall and winter featured a murderer’s row of incredible first-run titles at the Arbor, including Licorice Pizza, Nightmare Alley, West Side Story, C’mon C’mon, Parallel Mothers, House of Gucci, Mass, Belfast, The French Dispatch and Spencer, just to name a few. Nevertheless, you’d be hard-pressed to find more than 15 people in the cinema at a given time (though, to be fair, I often went at odd times to avoid big crowds).

Unlike other institutions that have closed during the pandemic, I don’t have any regrets regarding my recent attendance at the Arbor – by my count, I’ve been there at least twenty times since their re-opening. But I do wish I had a chance to say a formal goodbye – to spend a day entirely at the cinema, seeing as many films as possible.

What will become of the now-shuttered cinema? Considering the trend of Austin stripping away the local establishments that brought people here in the first place, I’m thinking a bunch of luxury condos. But the optimist in me wants to believe another cinema can take its place, just as the Arbor replaced Great Hills 8 (and, similarly, AFS Cinema replaced the old Lincoln 3 Theater). Given the way things are going in this town, though, it’s unlikely. But, as Bruce says, “Everything dies, baby, that’s a fact… but maybe everything that dies someday comes back.”

The Best Films of the Decade: #9

9. Brokeback Mountain (2005; Ang Lee)

“Jack, I swear…”

In 2005, I named Steven Spielberg’s Munich as the best film of the year, and Ang Lee’s Brokeback Mountain was a very close second. I don’t often change my mind in regards to my favorite picture of the year, but 2005 is a rare exception. Don’t get me wrong – Munich just barely missed my Best Films of the Decade list, and I personally believe that it’s one of the finest and most uncompromising films Spielberg has ever made. But Brokeback Mountain has resonated for me in a way that I didn’t fully expect upon first seeing it in December 2005.

For one, director Ang Lee achieved something few directors can nowadays – he created a breathtakingly beautiful art house film that also managed to enrapture (most) mainstream audiences with a powerfully moving love story at its center. Lee uses the empty blue skies and vast, open prairies of Wyoming to dwarf God’s lonely cowboy Ennis Del Mar (Heath Ledger) through years of pain and loneliness. Brokeback Mountain is one of the most assured directorial efforts of the decade – Lee is in total control as a filmmaker, contrasting the rich landscape of the 1960s American West with the sadness and sexual insecurities of the film’s protagonists.

In the process of his superlative direction, Lee somehow also made a movie that brought teenage girls back to the cinema over and over again – the love story between Ennis and Jack Twist (Jake Gyllenhaal) was this generation’s answer to the doomed romance between Jack (Leonardo DiCaprio) and Rose (Kate Winslet) in James Cameron’s Titanic (1997).

And yet it's not the love story that brings me back again and again to Brokeback Mountain, although the film is certainly remarkable for its cultural influence and its understanding of homosexuality in 1960s America. In fact, Brokeback Mountain wouldn’t resonate at all as a motion picture if it were merely a political statement on homosexual rights, or simply a film pushing a political agenda.

Yes, on its face, Brokeback Mountain is a tragic love story between two men in a time period where such a love was frowned upon by society (and, of course, is still frowned upon today, although in fewer numbers).

But at the film’s core is the tragic story of Ennis Del Mar, a character as existential, lonely and isolated as Travis Bickle (Robert De Niro) from Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver (1976) or Joe Buck (Jon Voight) from John Schlesinger’s Midnight Cowboy (1969). He comes from nowhere. He’s not educated. He’s already an outsider – he’s a cowboy in an age where cowboys aren’t really a cultural identity anymore, at least in the traditional sense (outlaw gunslingers were replaced by drunken good ol’ boys sometime during the twentieth century). He is alienated even further from society by his confusion with his sexual orientation.

Is he gay? He might be, although he might very well be bisexual. His relationship with Jack is formed, though, by circumstance – the fact that they’re two very lonely individuals who share one thing in common: a misplaced sense of identity, both sexually and culturally. Are Ennis and Jack meant to be together? I don’t think that’s the point – Brokeback Mountain is not a film about eternal love or soul mates.

The tragedy of Brokeback Mountain is that Ennis and Jack never really find out if they’re meant to be together. They never feel the joy and pain that most couples experience because, no matter how hard the two men attempt to feign some semblance of a lasting relationship, that summer they spent together on Brokeback Mountain is simply an elusive, nostalgic memory, incapable of being recaptured, especially after both men marry and have children.

The final scene of Brokeback Mountain, which takes place after Jack’s death, shows Ennis living alone in a trailer. His grown daughter visits him and announces that she is getting married. Watch Heath Ledger’s face during this final scene – without hardly saying a word, the actor gives us the life story of Ennis Del Mar in a few seconds. His eyes welling up with tears as his daughter drives away, he touches Jack’s blue-jean jacket, which hangs in his closet. Next to the jacket is a postcard from Brokeback Mountain. Ennis wants to share the news of his daughter’s marriage to his good friend, but there’s nobody there. It’s one of the quietest and most powerful scenes in cinematic history, anchored by Ledger in the finest performance of this decade. Jack, I swear, indeed.