Pride Unprejudiced

	..MCN Reviews
	..Movie City Indie

Consternation at The Reader; confoundment at The Curious Case of Benjamin Button; admiration for the mania of Seven Pounds and girlish glee at Gran Torino: that's a stocking filled with mood swings, to be sure.

Lines that Never Converge
The Reader - ½

Less middlebrow than uni-middlebrow, director Stephen Daldry's three features are a mixed mishegoss, from the energetic sexual-confusion-coming-of-age of Billy Elliot to the tony video for Philip Glass' score, The Hours (some of which is, admittingly. fetchingly lovely to regard) and now, the tasteful, yet often tasteless, reportedly less-than-fully-finished The Reader. Inside baseball warning: during the post-production of this adaptation by David Hare of Bernard Schlink's beloved-to-Germans novel about guilt, legacy and forgiveness, Daldry asked for more time to edit. Rehearsing the Broadway transfer of the West End musical of Billy Elliot, pled exhaustion, wanting not to have to edit the film by night to meet a Christmas release.

Arguments between producers ensued, with Harvey Weinstein winning the day and co-producer Scott Rudin removing his name from the product. Isn't that interesting? In The Reader, David, 15, (David Kross) has his virginity taken by Hanna, a much older woman (Kate Winslet). (Reverse the sexual roles and if the movie could even find millions in finance for glossy production and greater-than-arthouse distribution, it would be called "The Raper.") Years pass, the boy grows into Ralph Fiennes and is shocked, shocked, to find the woman he'd done bouncy-bouncy with in the bathtub was in fact a Nazi criminal.

Considering the material, their first meeting is indelibly creepy, where Hanna is a streetcar conductor; the location cannot but suggest the trains that led millions to the camps and their mass murder. I'm a firm believer that any subject can and ought to be tackled, even if it's one of seven or twenty or forty films released during awards season that take on WW II or the Holocaust. The one hope? That the result is any good. Winslet's a wonder, and in an entirely different register than her fine turn in Revolutionary Road. Daldry means to swaddle her in weltschmerz but drowns her instead in schmaltz. Hare's storyline alternates present and past in a way that suggests less parallelism than the lines that never converge on horizons or in schematic, overly simple screenwriting.

The director who comes closest to mind for this meretricious material is the Lars Trier that sent poor Björk surely to hell in stern, elegant fashion in the closing shots of Dancer in the Dark. His saturnine, even malefic side would understand how to write what's wrong. Oscar Wilde put it this way: "It would take a heart of stone not to laugh at the death of Little Nell." Nico Muhly's score is often lovely on its own, but inappropriately mickey-mouses scenes that ought to make sense without his work. With Bruno Ganz, Alexandra Maria Lara.

	..Mike Wilmington Review
	..MCN Reviews
	..Movie City Indie

In the Love for Mood
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button - **

It get don't I.

A case of too much of a so-so thing, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button is a fatal mismatch of sensibilities, orchestrated by a master of complete control, David Fincher, with a poet of the passive, screenwriter Eric Roth, whose work includes The Good Shepherd (spy as watcher) and Forrest Gump (simpleton as empty vessel).

Drawing on a slim conceit from a wafer of a short story by F. Scott Fitzgerald -- man bites dog! I mean, man born old grows young -- The Curious Case of Benjamin Button is less picaresque or lifelong wanderjahr than a hybrid "Forrest Button." Things happen. A character gawps. The mind wanders. And it makes one muse over passivity in Fincher's films: in Fight Club, doesn't The Narrator lie back and let rampaging id Tyler do all the work? And Zodiac is a masterpiece about a gaze that misunderstands, about asking the wrong questions rather than not ever finding a sought answer.

(Roth himself confesses to the Los Angeles Times that he lost the entirety of his retirement fund from investments with mega-deca-billionaire dollar embezzler Bernard Madoff, whose funds reportedly largely took the form of interlocking types of passive investment. "I'm the biggest sucker who ever walked the face of the Earth," Roth told the paper last week. "But the tragedy is the people who lost their life savings and their dreams."

Ah, dreams. Benjamin Button (Brad Pitt) is born old and grows to be an ancient newborn. Ever-fresh Daisy, the girl he loves dances from a redhead of 10 to a dancer of whatever, embodied in some parts by Cate Blanchett, and in the distancing present-tense portions, set during the winds and lashing rains of Hurricane Katrina, by a bid for a Best Make-Up Oscar. In the middle, there's stuff about going to see and committing adultery with Tilda Swinton in a Russian hotel and getting sunk at sea and eventually Brad Pitt digitized to a younger, ever more angelic version of himself on the back of a fine shiny motorcycle. For me, the feeling was less one of coolness and distance and apartness from the material that some have identified than simply, what is going on here? It feels as impersonal as a yellowed telegram ordering clock parts. Pitt is a lovely mirror, but what's reflected back? Are you the hero of your own life if you your fate is to repeatedly open the closet in the hall and life avalanches on your head like a succession of empty boxes?

Born in New Orleans on the day World War I ends, Benjamin is a foundling, thought a monster for his newborn decrepitude, but once left on the doorstep of an infertile young woman (Taraji P. Henson), a miracle. Fireworks play across the French Quarter night, like the similar digital sky that opens Zodiac, with fireworks exploding above the bridges of the Bay. But the episodic tale that follows pales in comparison to Zelig or to Forrest Gump, less a chronicle of experiential amplitude than one of fussy gee-whillikers cod-drollery.

Images of intimate beauty twinkle through the tobacco'ed skies of this would-be epic, but the voluminous narration reminds again and again of only one indelible figure from the pantheon of cinema: Joey Nickels. Joey Nickels? Joey Nickels from Annie Hall! Joey Five Cents? (What! an asshole!) The stories being funneled through the walls of the theater invariably sound like oft-repeated balderdash from someone who's grown used to no one listening, not even himself. (Button's best recurring joke involves lightning strikes, and is self-criticism of high comic attainment.)

Still, in terms of inedible imagery Jean-Pierre Fincher still trumps Jeunet, to whose work Benjamin Button has been compared. In faux battlefield footage, doughboys stride backward as if emerging from the bullets that had in fact just pierced their chests. Florets of fireworks reflected incidentally in a Model T's tilted-just-so windscreen. Night-set scenes that work on the verge of pitch, the blackness and guttering sepia of de la Tour candlelight. A perspective of bridges overhead melting with fog. Daisy in a flat beret. An early 1960s rocket launch from Cape Canaveral reflecting over a sailboat at sea. Scars on a woman's legs, fingered deftly.

Very late (or early) in the film, there is an extended sequence about chance considers the incidents that, in sequence, end the dreams of one character, seems a clever misunderstanding of what Tom Tykwer did well in Run Lola Run. The increments of fate suggest a timepiece with variable cogs, wheels and gears, but come across also as late-game homage to Paul Thomas Anderson than undying literary strophe.

Any element beyond the simplest elements of timepieces, beyond basic movement, consists of constructions that are crested with a lovely term of art: complications. (Thus, great and treasured watches are built from complications of complications.) But in plotting as in childbirth, complications can be the death of a thing, the death of narrative grace and ease. There are heartening, hushed instances when you can feel Benjamin and Daisy meeting in the middle, the conceit of the moments of the two lovers are slowly hurtling in opposite directions, and you can furnish the particulars of your own life and loves to capture the sense of the fleeting correspondence of contact, or parallel human treks. But that's the function of canvas, not of a painting. And at these instances when the characters meet at nearly the same age that imply the sorrows of fleeting flesh and ever-limber love, yet the moment you're touched Roth reaches out and slaps you with a nice wet bromide. Something like "You're odd. You're diff'r'nt from anybody I ever met," or "You can change or stay the same. There are no rules to this thing. You can make the best or the worst of it." Box of chocolates for $160 million, Alex? I can't see the trees for the Forrest, but sweep Oscar smell I.

Seven Pounds - * ½

While the direction of The Pursuit of Happyness and Seven Pounds doesn't match the pitched tumult of Italian writer-director Gabriele Muccino's 2001 The Last Kiss (L'ultimo bacio), his work is inescapably Italian in temperament. Will Smith's choice to collaborate with Muccino again on screenwriter Grant Nieporte's first produced script is inspired by the most basic of fears and the most extravagant of contrivance. Yet this rollercoaster of sentiment and contrivance would not hold half the charm or a seventh of the emotion in cooler hands. Shameless melodrama ensues. A feel-good tragedy about survivor's guilt—the literary allusion in the film's title and the opening scene make the stakes clear within moments—Seven Pounds is near-dazzling when each and every strand finds satisfactory resolution. Befuddling, too.

A number of the important shifts in the story, however, shouldn't be implied through synopsis, although the script's tidiness is marked. (And since its release, the strange events are hardly a secret.) Simply put, Smith plays a troubled man who seeks to make amends for a tragic incident in his past by helping seven strangers he's taken pains to find. Taken as real-life psychology rather than taken as clever construction of the splinters of information we're offered, his deeply troubled (and troubling) behavior makes madness quickly evident. But the matters of privacy and intimacy and sacrifice are broached with fierce metaphor. Does this man seek the transformational powers of a God? Or the transubstantive character of Christ? Moments that seem repellent or skin-itching, particularly in light of Smith's other recent roles where he seems to have taken on the "suffering Christ" mantle of previous box-office powerhouses like Kevin Costner and Mel Gibson, are more forgivable as the layers of the parable are peeled away. Rosario Dawson, as one of his charges of whom he grows unwisely fond, an often-underrated performer, gives what is surely her most moving, mature performance yet. With Woody Harrelson, Michael Ealy, Barry Pepper, Judyann Elder.

	..Mike Wilmington Review
	..MCN Reviews
	..Movie City Indie

Giddy Girlish Over Grandpa
Gran Torino - *** ½

Holy Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award! Gran Torino is a dark comedy, an engaged anecdote about class and race, a stripped-down example of palooka art, and Clint Eastwood, at 78, has made a modest, yet almost radical entertainment. It's a gleeful astonishment.

Eastwood's always been a simple shooter, letting cameras roll on rehearsals and calling it a keeper. The results can be striking orstrange, as in the work of another veteran filmmaker, Woody Allen. Sometimes the effect of working quickly is a movie with graceful notes like Vicky Christina Barcelona, and sometimes it's hollow bunkum like Cassandra's Dream. And even in a well-regarded movie like Match Point, performances seem otherworldly strange, especially in how the actors seem almost never to engage with each other. A fascinating effect, but an intentional one? I'd like to think of Eastwood as one of the most conscious of filmmakers, even if he's known for picking up a script and shooting as-is.

In Gran Torino, Eastwood plays Walt Kowalski, a retiree from Detroit's factories, a veteran of the Korean War, now a widower. A large American flag graces the front of the house. He's a shambling embodiment of "politically incorrect." From Eastwood's first scowl and squint of eagle eye standing at the front of a church before his wife's casket, in which he audibly grrrowls like a cartoon back-alley cur, I was giddy as a girl child. Well, whatever… as Walt tends to say.

A widower who doesn't like his children, Walt's cast aside. They're inattentive, grasping drips. He doesn’t care for his wife's religion. He's a 78-year-old man in a no-longer Polish neighborhood with ghosts and with new faces, largely Hmong. Still, he has moments of autumnal rest: on his porch, popping a PBR, admiring the Gran Torino in the drive at sunset, murmuring to his faithful, elderly golden dog, "Ainnnt-she-sweet." Full stop.

Lives collide after teenage neighbor Thao (Bee Vang) is pressured by a gang to steal Walt's treasure. But an unlikely savior lives within. Eastwood adopts a growl for Walt that's not quite a Christian Bale maw of cracked glass, but to actually hear "What th' hell is this? Get. Off. My. Lawnnnn" from behind his bolt-action weapon. "I useta stack fucks like you five-feet-high in Korea and use ya for sandbags" is the coldest racially insensitive line I've heard from an older actor since Rip Torn turned to a female, Asian-American executive an episode of The Larry Sanders Show and inquired, "Didn't I kill you in Korea?" Eastwood's after more than the gag: not a half-an-hour in, the unvarnished man is revealed. Flawed. Casually racist. Unregenerate. Dirty Archie (Bunker). Who will he be ninety minutes from now? "Get off my lawn." (He's got the verbals about "dagos" and Jews, too.) "Hard-nosed Polack sonofabitch," his barber (John Carroll Lynch in a nice turn) happily calls after him. "See you in three weeks, prick." "Not if I see you first, dipshit."

Pared-down images abound. For instance, when Walt enters the garage where his car's threatened, rifle on his shoulder, Eastwood places the camera behind himself, the cowl of the overhead light dancing above his head and shivering a fall of decades of dust on his hair and shoulders. Simple. Epic. Dust to dust and all that.

What's on show is an old man's art. Old. Man. Clipped, stripped, frontal, not in the least sclerotic. Call it impatient precision. And there is tenderness, a streak of kindliness in his performance as a bigot who warms to humanity, like an American Vittorio De Sica film. (Critic David Ehrenstein is reminded of Umberto D.)

It's an "if-you-have-but-eyes-to-see" kind of movie: if you sense the genuine, glorious strengths of Gran Torino, you can appreciate its idiosyncratic carborundum grace. If not, you'll be asking your date, "And WTF was that ending?"

What does it mean to be an old man, alone, with a gun? Or several? The decline of masculinity? Masculinity in crisis? The slow dying of the light? Gran Torino? Well, whatever… It's a beaut.

God Savor the Scene
Frost/Nixon - ***

Peter Morgan, in movies like The Deal and The Queen, along with his collaboration on The Last King Of Scotland, has proven the most adept of magpies when it comes to backstairs dealings of the powerful: there are few movie passages in recent years as bold and lovely an invention as the encounter in The Queen between Elizabeth II and a proud stag at misty remove. (God savor the scene!)

Frost/Nixon, as play and film script, in the hands of the gleamingly facile yet restlessly clever Morgan, displays bursts of some of Howard's sharpest work in his fifty years in show business, but it functions best as a cartoon that chooses to think of itself as burnished bravura. I had the mixed blessing of seeing this farcical tragedy on a huge screen in Thessaloniki, embossed with the standard large scale of Greek subtitles. The opening montage, heavy on names and incidents for those too young or uniformed to know the scene, was embellished by the huge letters. Michael Sheen, as David Frost, and Frank Langella, as Nixon, are superb. Langella hardly resembles Nixon, but his physical performance is inspired, and captures the dour and brooding as well as the frustrated intelligence of the man.

Howard's visual choices are largely poppy and elliptical, with small objects or instants suggesting the larger scene that would be out of the range of the movie's reported $30 million budget. Cinematographer Salvatore Totino's images have a nice 1970s-remniscent flush of color, and are often shot with long lenses, exploiting the lovely potential of images partially out of focus. Shooting at Nixon's actual post-disgrace home is inspired decoration, especially in scenes where he stares out at the silent sea.

For dramatic purposes, much is shifted, to fine effect, for instance, portraying Frost as a womanizer, despite the fact that Caroline Cushing, the woman he picks up to take to meet Nixon was in fact his girlfriend of five years. Sheen's bounciness is infectious, as in a scene at London Weekend Television's canteen where he's all but bouncing on the balls of his feet as he asks for "Beans, peas and lamb, please!" You forgive the shortcuts almost immediately, as he does womanizing fop so well. And Rebecca Hall, whose intriguing performance held disparate elements together this year in Vicky Christina Barcelona, is all coltish vim and curiosity as Cushing, suggesting an avidly American Jane Birkin. Among the other performances, Toby Jones is especially droll and repulsive as Nixon's agent, legendary dealmaker Swifty Lazar, and in a fashion removed from his droll and repulsive portrayal of Karl Rove in W.

Each performance is fascinating in its own right, but as a weave, nothing comes fully together. Fake interviews with the historical figures deflate dramatic tension in a way the stage version surely did not allow, and at times the acting seems out of a cartoon. That is, after the style of contemporary animation, where inspired and spirited voice actors are recorded separately, one at a time, in an isolation booth. Sam Rockwell's rabbitty performance as James Reston, Jr., the Nixon-ologist who wants the interviews to be the cross-examination America never heard in a court of law from Nixon, is one of his best. But in the same room with the other actors, Sheen, for instance, remains in his giddily glib, eyes-wide mode. Oliver Platt's great fun as producer Bob Zelnick, but again, his performance never seems modulated within the greater drama of any given scene (one of the director's key tasks: marshaling overall tone).

Other elements ring false, including Kevin Bacon's Marine right-hand-man saying that hippies "spit on me when I got back from Vietnam" and Frost's penning a $500,000 personal check on a pounds sterling account. Was that possible? What matters is a small detail rings false. (As does Nixon assistant and amanuensis Diane Sawyer speaking only a couple of lines in the film, the actress serving as glimmers of blonde eye candy.)

Frost/Nixon would have been a different film in other hands, but despite its talk-as-much-as-show aspect carried over from its theatrical origins, it remains earnest entertainment.

December 26, 2008