The Curious Case of Benjamin Button - Review

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button takes nearly three hours to unfold and every bit of it is depressing. As the story of a man aging backwards through time director David Fincher’s film is a failure; not much seems to happen and for a guy miraculously de-aging right before our eyes Benjamin is surprisingly uninteresting. As a panic provoking examination of death though, maybe he has something. Fincher’s movie seems to exist solely to remind us of our own mortality. It’s a series of constant, manipulative, downer bullet points which arrow towards the muddy grave we’re all headed for. Spending 3 hours in a darkened room meditating on your own eventual demise isn’t exactly my idea of a good time, but getting that kind of thoughtful reaction is at least an of accomplishment of a type. In that sense Benjamin Button is deeply affecting, but because of the way it reminds us of unavoidably miserable things in our own future, not because of anything interesting happening on screen. Afterward, I suggest going home for a stiff drink. Scotch. Neat.

The film’s fascination with the ticking clock that is our lives begins right at the outset, as we meet our narrator. She’s the daughter of an elderly woman (Cate Blanchett under heavy prosthetics), lying on a hospital bed in front of her and clearly close to death. The fading invalid, gasping for air, asks her daughter to read from a mysterious journal and the daughter complies. While she reads, we’re told that hurricane Katrina is bearing down on their hospital. Yes we’re in a New Orleans, right before the 2005 disaster which left so many drowned and extremely dead. Oddly the approach of Katrina, while frequently referenced, never amounts to anything in context of the movie except as a way of adding the specter of even more mortal misery and allowing it to loom listlessly in the back of our heads like an overlong obituary.

As she reads the daughter discovers amazing things about the life lead by her mother and of a singular man named Benjamin Button (Brad Pitt). As mentioned, Benjamin was born aging backwards. That’s not to say he popped out of his mother’s womb as a fully formed adult. Actually he looks sort of like one of the rubbery alien Muppets from the original Star Wars; a creature with all the size, proportion, and mental faculties of a newborn infant, but the wrinkled skin, arthritis, and pre-death health problems of an extremely elderly man. Everyone predicts that this freakish baby will soon be dead. He isn’t.

Abandoned by his father Benjamin ends up being raised by a kindly healthcare worker at a retirement home. Benjamin who, at the age of 6 looks like he’s 96, fits right in. Though he looks like he has one foot in the grave, every day Benjamin grows younger, stronger, and loses many of his troublesome wrinkles. Mentally he’s a kid, physically he’s an adult, and oh isn’t it depressing that he can’t live the normal life of other kids? I bet he’ll soon be dead.

Ben hobbles around as the narration shifts to his voice, Brad Pitt droning on in a slow, Louisiana drawl about the world as seen through his eyes. The world he sees is not one with a lot of excitement. Things seem to get moving in the latter half, when Benjamin is at least old/young enough to get up out of his wheel chair and hobble onto a tug boat, but there aren’t enough moments of wonder and enlightenment along Benjamin’s journey to justify it. He’s not exactly Forest Gump.

Worse, the most potentially interesting bits of Benjamin’s life are omitted entirely. We never see Benjamin as he nears his final years. What would it be like as an eighty-year-old man, with all the wisdom and world weariness of an aged soul trapped inside the body of a 20-year-old? A 16-year-old? What would it be like for Benjamin in those days, struggling to convince people he’s old enough to buy beer, rent an apartment, date a girl? You’d think with three hours of movie dedicated to Benjamin’s aging issues some film might be used in exploring these oddities, but it isn’t and we’ll never know. The film is limited to the story of a clueless child trapped in an old man’s body until at last Benjamin reaches middle age and then becomes pretty much like everyone else. From there on he’s simply Brad Pitt, in a mildly romantic love story with Cate Blanchett, one which we’ve already been told will not end happily.

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button isn’t exactly disappointing, it’s only that I’m not sure why it was made. David Fincher, the masterful director of such films as Fight Club and Se7en is incapable of shooting something without any redeeming qualities. This movie, like everything else he’s done is well shot and capably acted. His special effects, while not the eye-popping wizardry some seem to be expecting, are good enough to do the job. The de-aging process primarily involves slathering Brad Pitt in an intimidating number of rubber prosthetics. Pitt succeeds in an adequate performance underneath all that makeup, a disguise which serves its purpose, though perhaps without any particular flair. Cate Blanchett is beautiful and ethereal as love interest Daisy though even her character, like everything else in this movie, seems incapable of providing anything uplifting or heart-warming.

It’s just that Benjamin Button is a tremendous downer, and a downer without any clear purpose. There’s nothing better than a well-crafted, downbeat movie with something worth saying. I don’t mind being depressed, just give me a reason for feeling as if my hourglass is nearly out of time or alternatively, offer some light at the end of the tunnel. Benjamin Button does neither. We get it Fincher, some day we’re all going to be dead. Now what?

Valkyrie - Review

Tom Cruise is back! But did he ever really go away? He's spent the last few years as more of a tabloid figure than a box office draw, but the magnetism and and intensity that made him a gigantic movie star have never left him. In Valkyrie he takes a role that could have turned ludicrous-- an American in an eyepatch playing a German hero-- and makes it riveting. That goes double for the movie itself, which once again proves Bryan Singer's unassailable skill as a director, crafting a suspenseful and exciting story out of an ignored bit of history.

The whole thing is made with a no-nonsense, stripped-down attitude you imagine John Wayne would appreciate. It starts with the accents-- everyone keeps their natural inflections, including Cruise, which makes for an interesting mix of Brits, Americans and Germans who still fit in together nicely. And except for a brief prologue set in Tunisia, where protagonist Claus von Stauffenberg (Cruise) loses his eye and most of his fingers in a air raid, the story sticks within the close confines of Berlin's military headquarters, where Stauffenberg and a cohort of conspirators use their insider status to plot Hitler's demise. Tresckow (Kenneth Branagh) has already made a failed attempt on the Fuhrer's life with a bomb hidden inside a gift, and introduces Stauffenberg into his secret circle of conscientious objectors, including Olbricht (Bill Nighy) and retired general Beck (Terence Stamp). On the eve of D-Day in 1944, the group devises a scheme to defeat Hitler through use of the top-secret plan Operation Valkyrie.

The plan is a bit too complicated for proper explanation within the film, and involves a few too many characters to keep track of, but the basic details are pretty simple. If these guys can kill Hitler, Operation Valkyrie allows the military to take over the country due to a "national emergency." After getting Hitler to approve an edited version of Operation Valkyrie (in a particularly spine-tingling scene), Stauffenberg plans to set off a bomb at the Wolf's Lair, an enclosed bunker where Hitler held high-security briefings. Stauffenberg and the other conspirators enlist the help of telecommunications chief General Eric Fellgiebel (Eddie Izzard) and a more reluctant General Friedrich Fromm (Tom Wilkinson), who turns a blind eye more so than he provides any help.

There's one aborted assassination attempt before the real one takes place on July 20, and both are tightly scripted, expertly staged bits of action. Singer and screenwriter Christopher McQuarrie waste little time reminding us of the Serious Moral Implications of what Stauffenberg and company are about to do; the Hitler assassination angle is just a bonus element of what, in some sections, feels like a really good heist story. When the assassination appears to have succeeded, and Stauffenberg returns to Berlin to begin restructuring the government, the story expands without ever losing its sharp, pared-down efficiency.

Carice van Houten pops up in a fairly thankless role as Stauffenberg's wife, as the movie wisely moves most of the focus to the conspirators and the relationships among them. The performances are all strong if unexceptional, and Cruise fits right in, never letting an overacting tendency get the best of him. The script moves a little too swiftly sometimes when introducing these characters, and it's a good thing so many of them are famous, so that we can tell them apart. Except for a brief voiceover from Stauffenberg in the beginning, none of the men really express their precise oppositions to Hitler, and it's never clear how so many of them have served the German army for so long, and been so opposed to Hitler, without being found out.

But what keeps Valkyrie so light on its feet is an appreciation for history, not slavish devotion, so that timelines can be condensed and characters excised with the basic, thrilling story intact at its center. It doesn't have anything grand or new to say about World War II, other than revealing the existence of Germans who actively fought against Hitler during the war. But it's refreshing in its lack of pomp and circumstance, a movie that exists to be a movie and nothing bigger. Amid a flood of World War II movies this December, Valkyrie is by far the most entertaining and satisfying.

Revolutionary Road - Review

We tend to forget this about them, given the stellar careers they've built for themselves as adults, but most of us first met Kate Winslet and Leonardo DiCaprio aboard the most popular doomed ship of all time, Titanic. This is not an irrelevant bit of trivia in the background of their new movie, Revolutionary Road. Even if you've wiped away all memories of Titanic, sworn it off as trash, you and the rest of the world have seen this couple's courtship. And as Frank and April Wheeler, a couple as realistic and miserable as Jack and Rose were carefree fantasies, Winslet and DiCaprio, bearing crow's feet and fuller faces, have twice the capacity of any to break your heart.

It helps a lot that the movie, directed by American Beauty phenom Sam Mendes, is very, very good in its own right. But it was special casting brilliance to make Winslet and DiCaprio the Wheelers, the "golden couple" of their specific universe, whose dissolution is just that much harder to accept for themselves. The pair gives commanding, emotionally raw performances that make up the heart of a film that, not nearly as cynically as the novel it is based on, sears to the heart of where the American Dream probably ended.

With master cinematographer Roger Deakins, Mendes has recreated 1950s suburban Connecticut as still and verdant, a forbiddingly placid pond. Frank and April aren't the only unhappy ones, as we learn through quiet moments with supporting characters, but their disappointment is so immense they've no choice but to turn on each other. Seven years into their marriage they've memorized each others weaknesses, opening the film with a roadside argument that's unbearably vicious. Each of them once fancied themselves citified intellectuals, and treated their move to the suburbs-- seen in a single flashback-- as a kind of grand ironic adventure. But seven years later they've settled into lives neither of them wanted, but neither knows how to escape-- Frank in a low-level position at the same machine tooling company that rendered his father an anonymous gray flannel suit, and April a lonely and despairing housewife.

On his 30th birthday Frank impulsively starts an affair with office secretary Maureen (Zoe Kazan), a naive girl who falls for his false masculine bravado. He arrives home and is moved to tears by the birthday greeting from his wife and children, then blindsided by April's big idea to escape. They'll move to Paris, she'll get a job, and he'll finally figure out what he really wants to do with his life-- something we know, even at this early stage, he will probably never find. Their plans to move away disappoint their earnest friends Millie (Kathryn Hahn) and Shep (David Harbour), as well as neighborhood gossip Mrs. Givings (Kathy Bates), but the Paris dream gives them a summer of marital bliss they haven't known in years. But the dream, of course, is just that, and as the moving date moves closer both Frank and April confront their own terrors both of changing, and the knowledge that nothing really ever changes after all.

Blazing through all this like an aggressive Cassandra is John Givings (Michael Shannon), Mrs. Givings' mental patient son whom she hopes will benefit from Frank and April's genteel presence. He derides them and their classy lifestyle from the beginning, and when Frank jokes that Paris will help them escape the "hopelessness and emptiness" of the suburbs, John points out that it's not joke. His ability to see through Frank and April's bullshit further divides them, April recognizing John's brashness as truth, and Frank further retreating to the safe comfort of the life he thought he wanted to escape.

Adapted as it is from a novel that spends huge sections inside its characters' heads, it's remarkable how well Revolutionary Road is able to capture the same truths about its characters. Small gestures take on huge significance, entire series of emotions wash across a face within seconds-- all of the actors, from Winslet and DiCaprio down to Kazan, work together beautifully to externalize a story that's all about what's never said. Frank and April lay it all out in their screaming matches, but the real story is in the moment Frank's face breaks during their fight, or the suspiciously even tone in April's voice when she prepares him breakfast the night after a blowout. Hahn and Harbour are especially great at this, given their limited scenes, and perhaps it's because Shannon's performance is the most external that I was less impressed than others have been, though duly overwhelmed by his mesmerizing character.

While not quite reaching the masterpiece level of Yates' novel-- was that even possible?--Revolutionary Road is the rare classy literary adaptation with a beating heart, a cry of sorrow for Frank and April's despair as much as it is a sly deconstruction of all they hold dear. Vital and brilliant, without American Beauty's occasional pretension, it's a shot in the arm for the dull holiday season, a shattering experience well worth having.