The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
Directed by David Fincher. Written by Eric Roth. Based on a story by F. Scott Fitzgerald. With Brad Pitt, Cate Blanchett, Julia Ormond, Elias Koteas, Tilda Swinton, and Elle Fanning. (PG-13)
On leaving a packed weekend screening of The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, I couldn't help but note its resemblance to another crowd favorite from over a decade ago: Forrest Gump. Both films chart the life of a misfit central character as he wanders through the big events of the 20th century, pining for an unrequited love. Both Gump and Button are raised in homes full of eccentric characters, both go off to war, both find work on boats helmed by loony captains, and both live by a motto. "Life is like a box of chocolates," Gump famously said. "You never know what you're gonna get." Button's take is the slightly less saccharine "You never know what's comin' for you."
It was only later that I realized the real-world connection: both films were penned by Eric Roth. Though Button is based on a short story by F. Scott Fitzgerald, the screenplay takes such liberties with its source material that it feels as if Roth seized the opportunity to revisit his biggest success in order to approach the story from a sadder, more world-weary place. Paired with the dark-hued direction of David Fincher (Se7en, Fight Club, Zodiac), the resulting film is as engaging as Gump but without the sugary aftertaste.
Brad Pitt stars as Benjamin Button, who is born into this world with the physical limitations of an elderly man. As an infant, he's creased and wrinkled, his organs are failing, and his hands and feet are ossified. Given up by his horrified father, he is taken in by the infertile Queenie (Taraji P. Henson), who runs a New Orleans retirement home. The residents, perhaps recognizing one of their own—"He looks just like my ex-husband," says one woman—accept him into their fold.
As he grows, Benjamin's strange nature begins to show itself. His legs get stronger, and as his friends find themselves confined to wheelchairs, he trades his chair for a cane. His white hair begins to color, his muscles become more defined, and by the time he's a teenager, he has enough vigor to take a day job on a tugboat—and visit a brothel at night with its captain, where his frail appearance proves deceptive.
Benjamin's true love, though, is Daisy (Cate Blanchett), whom he meets when she comes to visit her grandmother at the home. Though roughly the same age, their budding friendship is frowned upon; they'll have to wait until Benjamin grows into Brad Pitt to sidestep the gross-out factor. In the meantime, they go their separate ways—he to sea, she to dance ballet in New York—but promise to send postcards.
Though they're sure to reunite, a future together holds its own questions. Everything may be fine when they're both in their 40s, but what happens in another 25 years, when Daisy is an old woman while Benjamin approaches pre-pubescence, or in 40 years, when Benjamin nears his physical infancy? The answers are both sad and satisfying, and not quite the fairy-tale ending one might expect. It's an impossible quandary; to grow mentally older but physically younger—and a key difference from the original story, where the character is born with the mental capacity of an adult.
Much of the success of Benjamin Button can be chalked up to David Fincher's magical sense of storytelling. His direction expands the story dramatically by using different shooting techniques for each part of the story—early history is shot in an amber-hued light, without the smoothness of contemporary cameras; the recollections of retirees in a sped-up black and white; a travelogue is shown with a series of stills. Perhaps most impressive, he manages to make the computer magic needed to create the "old" Benjamin seamless.
There are times when Button threatens to devolve into little more than a series of interesting vignettes—see Benjamin fighting a Nazi U-boat; see Benjamin living in a Russian hotel—and the film uses a strange and unnecessary storytelling device: Daisy, on her deathbed with Hurricane Katrina about to hit, is telling Benjamin's story. It's an off note in a film that deals so much in a sort of magic, breaking the spell. But for most of the movie, the strength of its old-fashioned storytelling is enough to carry the day.
The Reader
Directed by Stephen Daldry. Written by David Hare. Based on the book by Bernhard Schlink. With Ralph Fiennes, Kate Winslet, David Kross, Lena Olin, Bruno Ganz, and Jeanette Hain. (R)
There is no shortage of films about the dark years of the Holocaust. A defining event of the 20th century, it is an endless source for reflections on morality and immorality, heroism and horror, and our frightening capacities—so often intermingled—for cruelty and apathy. Yet few of today's films deal with its immediate aftermath, and what it meant to be German in the decades just after the war.
In that way, The Reader is different. A sensitive and moving adaptation of Bernhard Schlink's acclaimed (and controversial) bestseller, it examines the pervasive sense of guilt felt by Michael Berg, a German who was still an infant when the war came to an end, and how the moral stain of genocide can reach into the lives of those who had no hand in its execution.
Michael (David Kross) is 15 when we meet him in the late 1950s. Sick with incipient scarlet fever, he's helped home by tram worker Hanna Schmitz (Kate Winslet) after he vomits in her entryway. After three months of bed rest—he works on his stamp collection, which includes some Third Reich pieces—he makes his way back to her building with a thank-you bouquet.
That first meeting doesn't go very well—she catches him peeping—but when he returns again, the older woman initiates an affair, bedding the young scholar after his classes let out. In exchange, she asks him to read to her, and they lie naked in the bed or bath as he recites from his schoolbooks—The Odyssey, Huckleberry Finn, Lady Chatterley's Lover. Of the last she notes, "This is disgusting. You should be ashamed." This from a woman in her 30s who is sleeping with a boy. "Go on," she urges.
Michael, an infatuated schoolboy, gives himself over to Hanna, selling his stamp collection to finance a cycling holiday to the countryside. It's a small but telling note, how Michael sees those swastika stamps as just stamps, something he can sell so he can take his girlfriend to dinner; at his age, he still has the luxury of innocence. It won't last. Soon after they return, Hanna disappears without a word.
Years go by before Michael, now a law student, stumbles across Hanna again. When his class attends a war crimes trial, he's dumbfounded to find her there—as a defendant. One of a half dozen SS guards on trial, Hanna is accused of a horrific crime. Michael, who may have exculpatory information, has to decide: does he help her, though she's certainly complicit on some level? Should he help her, when she makes it obvious she doesn't want the help he can offer? It turns out that Hanna has secrets even deeper than her SS past, secrets she will keep at any cost.
One of the stunning things about The Reader is how powerful it makes the relationship between Michael and Hanna once they're apart. For most of the film, they're separated, yet her effect on both boy and man (the older Michael is played by Ralph Fiennes) is acutely felt. The adult Berg is a lonely, distant man, estranged from his daughter and afraid of opening himself again to the warmth of human companionship. And here the film moves beyond its particular time and place to tell a story of how damaging our pride can be, and how the secrets we keep to protect it extract a deep emotional toll.
As the younger Michael, David Kross is a surprising find; the 18-year-old actor hasn't done many films, but holds his own in some intense and intimate scenes. Fiennes does his expected good work, coming alive when his middle-aged Berg decides to accept his personal history. But it is Winslet, white-hot and fearless in an unforgiving role, who runs the show, even when, late in the film, she's buried beneath old-age makeup. It's difficult to think of another actress with her ability to move across genre lines so effortlessly, yet perform so well in all of them. She simply disappears, and you forget that she's not who she says she is.
Valkyrie
Directed by Bryan Singer. Written by Christopher McQuarrie and Nathan Alexander. With Tom Cruise, Kenneth Branagh, Bill Nighy, Tom Wilkinson, Thomas Kretschmann, Terence Stamp, and Eddie Izzard. (PG-13)
Valkyrie, a slick new movie based on a real-life attempted assassination of Adolf Hitler, is a great example of what's wrong with World War II movies these days, movies that are more interested in the dangerously seductive polished leather of the Third Reich than in its terrible legacy.
Here is the story of Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg (played with an all-American gleam by Tom Cruise), an officer in the German army and one of the chief architects in a plot to kill the F?hrer and assume control of the country in order to stop the atrocities of the war. Already, it's a good story, even if von Stauffenberg the man was a more complicated hero than the film makes him out to be. Still, a man willing to risk his life and the lives of his family to commit high treason in the name of human justice? What drives such a man?
You'll not find out here. Valkyrie takes the story and turns it into another installment of Cruise's Mission: Impossible franchise. This is the sort of movie that constantly keeps you updated on its timeline with pop-up subtitles in the corner ("The Wolf's Lair, 12:38") instead of delving into the messy details of why. What's more, the "banality of evil" idea is taken to a ridiculous extreme, with Hitler portrayed as a foggy old man, the kind who always has a drop of cream soup on his stubbled chin.
The film re-teams the writer and director of The Usual Suspects, and the story moves along as crisply as that film did. But where the earlier film rightly embraced the tropes of the potboiler, Valkyrie demands something more and doesn't get it. Instead, it's a by-the-numbers action flick dressed up as something deeper.
Jack Brown can be reached at cinemadope@gmail.com.
