Oscar season
Movies seen summer 2008-2009.
Originally written: February 2009
Quantum of Solace
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
Slumdog Millionaire
Frost/Nixon
In Bruges
The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford
The Oscar nominations are out and there are no real shocks. It was even predictable that there would be at least one surprise nomination: in this case, The Reader was nominated ahead of the more expected Revolutionary Road, despite what seems to be a general lack of enthusiasm for the former. Still, The Reader was produced by Harvey Weinstein, who knows how to get films nominated, and directed by Stephen Daldry (who has a good track record with the Oscars: his two previous features, Billy Elliott and The Hours, were both best picture nominees as well). The Academy has again gone for the safe and serious, ignoring more interesting independent fare, as well as both Dark Knight and Wall-E. Interestingly the voters have also ignored former favorite son Clint Eastwood, whose Gran Torino and The Changeling have been largely shut out. We've seen three of the nominated films recently and will see Milk when it opens. I tend to avoid Holocaust-themed movies and have little interest in seeing The Reader. In terms of adventurous film-making, and exciting cinema, only Slumdog Millionaire comes close to either the Batman sequel or Pixar's latest animation success. Benjamin Button and Frost/Nixon are safe, middle-of-the-road choices, exactly as you would expect from the Academy. Apart from Heath Ledger, the acting winners are anything but clear: Kate Winslet is favorite, but maybe for the wrong movie; it's a toss-up amongst Penn, Rourke and Langella; and, without Winslet, the supporting actress field has no clear favorite, although Volia Davis appears to be the leader. Danny Boyle should win best director, given that Christopher Nolan has not been nominated and you can bet the mortgage money on Wall-E for best-animated feature. By ignoring the box office successes in favor of the sercon, the Academy has made the broadcast less attractive yet again. Poor Hugh Jackman. First Nicole Kidman; now this.
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Entertainment at quantum level
Runner-up for worst title of 2008, Quantum of Solace, is also not a very good movie and is a very ordinary James Bond film. It follows immediately from Casino Royale, with Bond out for revenge on those responsible for the death of Vesper Lynd. In many ways it's a reprise of Licence to Kill, without the depth that Timothy Dalton gave Bond's revenge in the earlier movie. It's all the more disappointing because Daniel Craig is such a good Bond, and Marc Forster is among the more interesting directors chosen to helm a 007 movie. He comes from a diverse background, with Finding Neverland, Stranger than Fiction and The Kite Runner on his c.v. So there was an expectation that he would add some value to the straight Bond narrative, perhaps some character or something. Instead this is a by-the-numbers revenge story, with little or no drama. The Bond girl, Camille, is also seeking revenge - against a Bolivian dictator who is allied with the villain whom Bond is tracking. There is a fiendish plot to corner the world's water supply and far too many action scenes. Craig is good and Judi Dench excellent but the film goes nowhere and, compared to Casino Royale, is very thin indeed. It's run of the mill Bond trying to be quasi-Bourne. The producers and writers need to return to the Bond roots and come up with a better vehicle for their franchise.
A box of chocolates
There's a viral video doing the rounds comparing The Curious Case of Benjamin Button with Forrest Gump. The David Fincher film is not that bad, but there are certainly enough similar thematic elements to suggest that screenwriter Eric Roth (who wrote both movies) didn't try to do much differently. Given that, Button is the better movie, with superior acting and direction, and perhaps something more to say than the earlier, more satiric, film. Only it's not quite as good as it should be. Based on an interesting conceit, the title character is born old and ages backwards, while the rest of the world continues in the normal temporal mode, the film tries to cover his entire life and is thus episodic. It also features a number of fine performances, surprisingly not least from Brad Pitt at BB. I have normally had little time for his acting, which has generally been more engaging than theatrical, and best in supporting roles. Here he has a much harder job, convincing us as the aged young Button and as the maturing but youthening Benjamin. The role is not all that challenging, with Benjamin often reacting rather than initiating action. Nonetheless it is a breakthrough for the genial Pitt. Even better, though, is Taraji P Henson as Queenie, the nursing home nurse who adopts the abandoned baby Benjamin. The epitome of a good supporting performance, it is memorable and finely honed. Other good support comes from Tilda Swinton (as a British ice queen whom Benjamin melts in Murmansk - how and why his New Orleans tug got to the Russian northern port is never explained) and Julia Ormond (in the framing narrative set inexplicably during Hurricane Katrina). Cate Blanchett provides the love interest and gives her usual brilliant portrayal as the ballet dancer who falls in love with Benjamin when he's a very old man and she's a pre-teen. They meet again at intervals and finally live together when their ages jell as he heads down and she up. This leads to one of the main caveats I have with the film: there is a slightly ambivalent feel in the idea of the old man/young girl relationship (even though they are emotionally the same age) and the later get togethers echo some of the questionable nature of the relationship. My other main reservation arises from the premise of the piece: the script tries to link Benjamin's peculiar relationship with time to the construction of a backwards-running clock in the New Orleans railway station. An interesting conceit on the original conceit, the fantasy premise remains incredible and leaves the audience grasping to willingly suspend its disbelief. I wanted to like this movie a lot more than I did. It has some fine performances, but the script and the direction both leave something to be desired - perhaps it's the passivity of the main character that is most at fault in this regard and Fincher and Roth are each responsible. The result is that the movie is one of those that seems more important and interesting than it actually is - and is thus an ideal candidate for Oscar nomination. It is just not good enough as a movie to be an Oscar winner.
Asking the right questions
The Indian film industry is the world's largest, yet its products are rarely seen in the West, nor have western film-makers taken advantage of the established industry to make films there. Slumdog Millionaire is an attempt to redress that balance somewhat - and a brilliantly executed admixture of cultural influences and movie traditions. Using largely a local cast in a story based on a novel from an Indian author, the film tells the story of how the eponymous character, Jamal Malik (played as a late teenager by Dev Patel, an Anglo-Indian actor), an orphan Moslem child of the Mumbai slums, working as a chai-wallah for a call centre, manages to work through the questions on the Indian version of Who Wants to be a Millionaire? The film is the brainchild of English director Danny Boyle, who works with Bollywood's Loveleen Tandan as co-director, and is an audacious and ultimately successful attempt to combine the different narrative approaches of the Indian and western cinemas. The framing narrative sees the teenage Jamal being interrogated by the Mumbai police as to how he has managed to cheat his way into the latter stages of the Millionaire format. This leads to a series of scenes from Jamal's youth: the poverty of his family life in the slums with his mother and his brother Salim, and the tragic death of his mother, a victim of Hindi extremists. Latika is another orphan created by the same incident, a young girl who becomes the love of Jamal's life. The narrative follows Jamal's progress on the television show, where he is at first the victim of the barbs delivered by the host (played with smarmy charm by Anil Kapoor, the only established Indian star in the film), and his time as an orphan in Mumbai, where he and Salim barely escape the depredations of a gang of Indian Fagins who disfigure orphans to increase their value as revenue-raisers. The boys work a series of scams as they grow - on the trains and at the Taj Mahal. This section revolves on how the kid's experiences link to the ability to answer questions on the television show. How the brothers come across Latika again and their relationship with a gangster boss are other elements of the plot. Dev Patel and tyro Indian actress Freida Pinto are effective as the teenage lovers, and the various local kids who play the young and early teen parts are even better. Boyle and Tandan make excellent use of the inexperienced cast and of the local color. The music by A.R. Rahman adds another level. But the best thing about this is the sheer ingenuity of the script, the originality of the ideas and the bravura style with which it is carried out. It might not be the best film of the year (although it bears comparison with Dark Knight and Wall-E) but it is by far the best of the Oscar nominees and deserves the statue it will win. This is despite the fact that the film was produced by the same company that owns the international rights to Who Wants to be a Millionaire? Thoroughly recommended.
A dangerous mind confesses
I have a copy of the published White House Transcripts and books by, inter alia, John Ehrlichmann, John Dean and Woodstein (Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein). I was an avid Nixon-hater from very early in the piece and immersed in the schadenfreude of Watergate lore from the beginning. So I come to a film like Frost/Nixon with a certain amount of baggage. The previews of the film also gave me some pause: in particular I was concerned with the version of the Nixonian voice that Frank Langella was affecting. Despite those concerns, and the fact that the film is obviously derived from, and remains strongly linked to, the theatrical version of the script, the film is very good indeed. It is a fictionalised version of the events leading up to the 1977 interviews with former president Nixon conducted by David Frost. As you would expect from the title, the piece is largely a two-hander: a confrontation between the former president, trying to use the interviews to resurrect his reputation, and the talk show host, trying to revivify his somewhat moribund career (we know that it is in decline because we first see Frost as the host of an Australia-based Tonight show). The script has been written by Peter Morgan (The Queen and The Last King of Scotland, among others) from his own play and the film is directed by Ron Howard. They have made a smart move in using the same actors who played the lead parts on Broadway: Langella (who won a Tony for the performance) and Michael Sheen. They have supplemented them with a strong supporting cast, including Oliver Platt, Matthew McFadyen and Sam Rockwell as Frost advisers and Kevin Bacon as Nixon's aide. But the dramatic weight falls on the two leads. Here, again, Michael Sheen finds himself, as he did in The Queen, giving a great performance only to find himself overshadowed by an even more brilliant co-star. Helen Mirren won the Oscar for The Queen and Langella should win for this (if he can overcome the sentimentality that will attach to Mickey Rourke's 'comeback' in The Wrestler and Sean Penn's gay turn in Milk). My initial concerns with Langella's Nixonian voice proved to be unfounded. Certainly he has dropped his timbre into the lower registers but it is an effective use of accent that gets more interesting the further the movie goes along. He also captures many of the contradictions of Nixon: the intelligence combined with a certain charm but even more with a fear of failure; an over-weening arrogance matched by a profound self-doubt. Without really looking like Nixon, Langella manages to make you think of him: the shambling walk, the bent head looking down, not at the person to whom he is talking, the loneliness and the yet the intelligence. It's a masterful display all the more because Langella has played the same part on the stage and has to wind back the pyrotechnics to fit the demands of cinema. While Sheen's Frost is, in comparison, much more lightweight, he manages to convey the fragility that underlies the surface charm of the performer. The climactic confrontation, when the interviews finally turns to Watergate, and Nixon bares his somewhat tortured soul, works because Langella is able through his performance to suggest that, rather than Frost wearing him down and forcing a confession, it was something within Nixon that led him to need to confess. Also arresting is an immediately preceding scene in which an apparently drunk Nixon has a candid phone conversation with Frost, in which he draws parallels between the two men. There is just a bit too much superfluous talking on the way to the climax and there are some overly theatrical plot devices in the sub-plots. Otherwise this would be giving Slumdog Millionaire a run for the Oscar. As it is, it's a worthy nominee, one of the best films of the year, and a certain addition to the political wing of the Herman-McDonnell DVD collection. Recommended.
Murder with Belgian waffle
In Bruges is a comedy about death. The leads are two Irish gangsters sent by their boss to the Belgian city to hide out after the younger has accidentally killed a kid while deliberately killing a priest. Colin Farrell is Ray, the younger, and Brendan Gleeson is the elder, Ken. I have rarely seen the latter without a heavy covering of makeup (as Mad-Eye in the Harry Potter movies or Menelaus in Troy, for example). Here, in his own skin, he is particularly effective as the aging gangster in exile, happy to explore the hidden delights of Bruges, given that he is forced to be there. Ray, on the other hand, is less than gruntled, and in no mood for tourism. It is only the discovery of a film in production that revives his interest. There he makes contact with two people, Chloe (Clemence Poesy - Fleur in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire) and Jimmy, a dwarf. Through them he finds aspects of life In Bruges to entertain him. The interplay between these four, and the gangsters' landlady, is entertaining and revealing of character. This sojourn is disrupted by the actions of the boss, Harry (Ralph Fiennes - another Potter alumnus), and the fifth act of Hamlet is attached to the end of what has been a dark comedy. Debutant writer/director Malcolm McDonagh shows a talent in both areas and has provided his actors with a fine platform. Farrell is as good here as he has ever been but Gleeson's is the performance of note. He transforms Ken, a shambling mound of a man, into a tragic hero, armed with humor as much as with his weaponry. Recommneded.
Ford leaves the Pitt
The psychology of the assassin is an interesting contemporary study. The use of an historical analogy to explore some of these themes offers some interesting possibilities. Given that there is such fecund material, and that there is a startlingly good piece of acting in a central role, it's a shame that Andrew Dominik's The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford turns out to be an extended and fairly pointless exercise in ennui. In part that's because the movie is excessively long and episodic; in part because most of the parts are underwritten; in part because, rather than action, the director relies on character and dialog (not the best metier for a western); and because Brad Pitt is unable to hold up his end as Jesse James. On the other hand, Casey Affleck gives one of the best performances ever in a truly dull movie. He is mesmerising. His Robert Ford plays in part off more modern assassins, particularly Mark David Chapman, who wanted to be John Lennon, and eventually felt the need to destroy him in order to achieve his own growth. Ford starts as a callow member of the James' gang as they pull off their last train heist. He is not immediately accepted but worms his way into James' confidence and, through a series of episodes, we see how the gang falls apart and the events lead almost inevitably to the eponymous and climactic act. There are a number of good performances to supplement Affleck, including Sam Rockwell and Mary-Louise Parker, and a few bad choices, especially James Carville's cameo. This could have been much more interesting at 90 minutes rather than the 160 minutes of the released version. It's a shame, given the brilliance of Casey Affleck's performance.
[Note: Information about the movies mentioned, including cast and crew lists and all sorts of trivia, is available at the Internet Movie Database (IMDb).]