Just seen: Oscar Picks

This year’s Oscar picks.
by David Denby, New Yorker Magazine
Is it the seamlessly blended amber and caramel colors, the slowly gliding camera work? Or is it the sentiments that fall like flakes of wet snow into the dialogue? Many elements join to make the beautifully crafted “Curious Case of Benjamin Button,” with a running time of two hours and forty-seven minutes, the best picture in years for a postprandial rest (popcorn division). As you may have noticed, 2008 was not a great year for movies. There was nothing comparable to the hair-raising “There Will Be Blood,” or the ravishing “Diving Bell and the Butterfly,” or the sinister “No Country for Old Men,” from 2007. Even so, a nod for best picture could have gone to more deserving movies, such as Jonathan Demme’s “Rachel Getting Married,” which settles down into a revelatory examination of a family’s anguish and joy; or “Happy-Go-Lucky,” Mike Leigh’s startling look at the power and the limits of goodness; or even the animated masterpiece “WALL-E,” with its vision of the end of industrial civilization and its ironic salvation in an anodyne space station decorated in cruise-liner moderne. The total of thirteen nominations for “Benjamin Button” has to be some sort of scandal. “Citizen Kane” received nine nominations, “The Godfather: Part II” eleven, and this movie, so smooth and mellow that it seems to have been dipped in bourbon aging since the Civil War, is nowhere close to those two. In fact, of the five nominees for best picture—“Milk,” “Frost/Nixon,” “The Reader,” “Slumdog Millionaire,” and “Benjamin Button”—only “Milk,” a bio-pic with a thrilling sense of history and lots of jokes and sex, has the aesthetic life and human vitality that warrant its nomination.

“The Reader,” based on Bernhard Schlink’s novel, and “Frost / Nixon,” based on Peter Morgan’s play, have both, in their passage to movies, picked up an aura of preening importance that is not justified by what’s onscreen. Schlink’s intelligent book has been frozen in marmoreal stillness and hoisted onto a pedestal. His resonant reflections on postwar German guilt have been dropped, and what’s left is a few good scenes set in nineteen-fifties Germany in which a tall, fifteen-year-old boy (David Kross) has the luck to fall into a terrific sexual relationship with a woman (Kate Winslet) twenty years older—a stern, secretive, yet hungry partner whom the boy doesn’t realize is a former concentration-camp guard. The sex scenes border on kitsch, but I can’t say that I didn’t enjoy them, and the cocky grin that breaks out on the face of young David Kross is irresistible. Unfortunately, as he grows up he metamorphoses into Ralph Fiennes, and Fiennes, who seems to have made a career out of anguished sensitivity, suffers so passively and silently when his old girlfriend is put on trial that you want to hard-elbow him back into life. Winslet, acting with her strong shoulders, suggests alternating currents of shame and pride, but the movie goes dead, and the notion that a woman who has committed atrocities is redeemed by the serious books that her former lover sends her in prison is, as the Times’ A. O. Scott has pointed out, shaky and sentimental at best.

In the well-acted “Frost / Nixon,” a nice journalistic coup—David Frost’s pushing Richard Nixon into semi-confessional mode, in 1977—has been elevated to a great transformative moment in history, which, alas, it was not. These two films may have been controlled more by their directors and their writers than by their studios, but they’re still the kind of middlebrow pictures that the Academy used to nominate in the bad old studio-dominated days—the contemporary equivalents of “Judgment at Nuremburg” and “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner?” They are “important” pictures that “say” something about public issues. They’re good for the industry’s image.
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The two movies likely to slug it out for the best-picture award, “Benjamin Button” and “Slumdog Millionaire,” are something different: they are fairy tales for adults. “Benjamin Button” is based on an early story by F. Scott Fitzgerald, set in Baltimore, in which a child is born as a seventy-year-old man. In the story, Benjamin is about five feet eight inches tall at birth, as big as a baby giraffe, and he grows younger and smaller throughout his life until he dies a tiny infant. It’s a deadpan science-fiction conceit that Fitzgerald transformed into social comedy: the upper-middle-class people Benjamin encounters are irritated by his oddity; he’s not, they feel, playing his proper social role—he’s willful, a nuisance. As adapted by the screenwriter, Eric Roth, and the director, David Fincher, the story is now about a baby born with the features and the internal organs of an old man but the mind of an infant. In a New Orleans old-age home that takes him in, he’s simply accepted by the fading elderly as one of their own. When he’s around seven, he has a sagging frame the size of a boy’s and the face of an aged Brad Pitt (which turns out to bear a startling resemblance to the current Dick Cheney). He eventually leaves the home, enters a stunningly gentle world, and has assorted and generally meaningless adventures. Fitzgerald’s curt little story has been literalized and solemnized and stretched into a quest for the essence of time—it’s now a metaphysical conceit. As Benjamin makes his way, many people puzzle over the discrepancy between his age and his temperament. But who cares? The movie is given over to an infinitely patient and scrupulous working out of its own bizarre premise, and you come away from its sombre thoroughness with the impression that something profound has been said without having any idea what it could be. The central drama in the picture turns out to be Brad Pitt’s makeup. By degrees, lines and wrinkles fade; soft flesh tightens into muscle; a stiff, wobbly walk eases into a saunter. What is this strange movie really about? A guess: many people in Hollywood endlessly have “work” done to put off aging, and here’s a movie that begins with a wizened baby and ends with physical perfection, a progression that may encapsulate both the nightmares and the dreams of half the Academy.

Pitt’s modesty when he comes into his own handsome flesh is becoming, yet his eyes are unforgivably blank. Where is Benjamin’s exhilaration at shedding his infirmities? He tells us very little of what we want to know, which is how he feels about what has happened to him. Perhaps if you’re born old with an infant’s brain and get younger, you never know much of anything (including the ardencies and the anxieties of youth), but that kind of mental void doesn’t yield much of a protagonist. Benjamin leaves his loving girlfriend (Cate Blanchett) and travels all over the world and announces, “It’s never too late, or in my case too early, to be whoever you want to be.” Someone at Paramount Pictures must imagine that this sentiment is a gift to the world, because a full-page ad that the studio took out in the Times, on Inauguration Day, proclaims it as such. (The quote continues, “I hope you live a life you’re proud of, and if not, I hope you have the courage to start all over again.”) Courage is definitely a good thing to have; lots of money (which Benjamin inherits) helps, too. It seems that Roth has gone back to the fatuous simplicities of his screenplay for “Forrest Gump,” with its dopey hero who conquers the world. Whatever else it might be, “Benjamin Button” is a celebration of ignorance; it could be a wan kiss goodbye to the Bush era.
The central plot mechanism of “Slumdog Millionaire”—Jamal (Dev Patel), a poor kid from Mumbai, overcomes his ragamuffin past and achieves fame, wealth, and selfhood by answering questions on a high-stakes game show—feels both cheesy and rigid. The movie is a Dickensian fable, but didn’t David Copperfield have to work his way up the ladder? As Jamal thinks over the questions put to him on the show, moments from his early life float through his mind, and some wrenching event delivers the right answer to him. Apart from a nagging implausibility—how could every question link up with an old memory?—I object to the way that the director, Danny Boyle, orchestrates Jamal’s life. Everything is seen in a flash—the boy’s mother is beaten to death, a man is set on fire, tiny goddesses appear out of nowhere—and nothing is prepared, explained, or understood. As slum children, Jamal and his friends are enchantingly beautiful, but the supersaturated color makes not just the kids but every surface and texture shine glamorously, including the piles of garbage that Jamal and his brother live among. Boyle has created what looks like a jumpy, hyper-edited commercial for poverty—he uses the squalor and violence touristically, as an aspect of the fabulous.
Almost every movie, of course, is a fantasy, or a fable, or a fairy tale of one kind or another. In a great movie, though, narrative and technological magic combine to produce heightened intimations of the real, and that ecstatic merging of magic and reality is what imprints the movie on our emotional memory. Besides the children, what I will remember of “Slumdog Millionaire” is a disorderly exploitation of disorder, a kind of visual salad of glowing rotten fruit, constantly tossed. The envelope, please—I guess. ♦