In Bruges (2008)

 

In Bruges is, by turns, funny and dark, silly and despairing. It’s the tale of two Irish hit men who are sent by their demanding boss to hide out in the Belgian title city after a hit goes horribly wrong. The younger of the two men, Ray (Colin Farrell), while performing a hit on a priest in a confessional, accidentally killed a young boy. Apparently, hit men and their bosses have scruples: who knew? Ray and his mentor Ken (the subtle Brendan Gleeson) are meant to enjoy the city, but while Ken enjoys the medieval churches and the canal rides and other historical, tourist spots, Ray hates it. However, he soon finds a way to stay busy with a series of misadventures. Stumbling up a film shoot that includes an American dwarf as the star, Ray falls in love with a drug dealer named Chloe (Clemence Poesy). He picks a fight with a Canadian couple while dining out with Chloe, then later has to ward off an attack from her boyfriend when he goes back to her place for sex. Ken, meanwhile, has gotten the order from Henry (a very tightly wound Ralph Fiennes) that he has to kill Ray because the murder of an innocent child is unforgiveable. Ken doesn’t want to kill his friend; he feels that Ray can still be redeemed. It was his first hit after all. The strength of In Bruges lies primarily in its script. The banter (bickering?) between Farrell’s Ray and Gleeson’s Ken is delightful, dark at times, playful at others. They discuss what the death of a boy could mean; it’s some heavy existential stuff at times. However, they also have a raucous night with the dwarf film star (Jordan Prentice, stealing every scene he’s in), snorting coke and enjoying the company of hookers. Farrell has the flashier role, and he makes good use of it. This is one of his best performances in years. Thanks to the script by the talented Irish playwright Martin McDonagh, even relatively minor characters such as the pregnant woman who owns the hotel where Ken and Ray stay while in Bruges contribute to the depth of the story. All of the performers get moments to shine, and the city itself serves as a lovely backdrop to the action.

Oscar Nomination: Best Original Screenplay

Australia (2008)

Because it clocks in at almost three hours long—and it’s a very long three hours, trust me—the film Australia has a lot of opportunities to shift its tone, much to its detriment, to be honest. What seems like it might be a comedy, almost cartoon-like in its plot and performances, at first, eventually becomes a World War II movie and a tragic examination of the mistreatment of the aboriginal people of Australia. At times, given the icy prudishness of Nicole Kidman’s Lady Ashley, it even borders on a sex comedy. She’s obviously got the hots for Hugh Jackman’s Drover (and, given his prominent shirtless scene, who wouldn’t be?), but decorum or some such nonsense keeps her from acting on it for far too long. The plot is a bit of a muddle, frankly. Lady Ashley has arrived in Australia from England, determined to get her husband to give up his failing cattle ranch. After her husband’s murder, she has to work with Jackman’s Drover to get the cattle to market in order to have enough money to keep her home, and the cattle drive takes up a significant portion of the film, allowing the filmmakers to showcase the beauty of Australia’s geography. Kidman’s aristocrat becomes protective of a child of white and aboriginal heritage, a so-called “half caste,” after his mother dies trying to protect him from being taken from her, and when we learn later that Drover had an aboriginal wife who died from being refused medical treatment and that Lady Ashley is unable to have children, it’s only a matter of time before the three of them form a family structure. The film grapples with some large issues such as who actually owns what and who really belongs to whom, but the film tends to treat them rather simplistically. References to the film The Wizard of Oz and the song “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” appear throughout the film, and the pun on the use of “Oz” is cute but a bit of a distraction at times. Australia is a lovely film in terms of its production design and cinematography, but its attempts to create an epic examination of Australian themes lead to a bloated, rather dull movie overall.

Oscar Nomination: Best Achievement in Costume Design

Best Picture of 2008

The Winner: Slumdog Millionaire.

The Other Nominees: The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Frost/Nixon, Milk, and The Reader.

My Choice: I have to agree very strongly with the Academy on this one. As much as I loved and admired both Milk and The Reader, Slumdog Millionaire is just too great a movie. It has a story that allows viewers to maintain a sense of hope despite all of the dark paths that the narrative takes its lead character, Jamal, down. Despite its fairy tale romance, it manages to comment seriously on poverty and its varied effects on children. It was, from my perspective, the most technologically skillful film made last year, most notably in the areas of cinematography and editing. I loved the music, particularly the two songs that were nominated. And I thought all of the performances, especially given the tender ages of much of the main cast, were astonishingly good. When a film has all of that going for it, it deserves to be named Best Picture.

Best Live Action Short Film of 2008

Auf Der Strecke (On the Line), a German film, tells the story of a department store security employee who spends much of his free time (and quite a bit of work time) pining away for a pretty young woman who works in the book department of the store. He never speaks to her, of course, but watches her on the surveillance camera and even rides the same subway that she does so that he can continue to look at her. You begin to think that this is going to be a creepy film about a stalker, but then she boards the train with a handsome young man one night, and she and the young man begin to fight. After she abruptly leaves the train, the young man is attacked by three young thugs, who beat him to death. The security guard watches much of this, but he does nothing, perhaps jealous of the woman's affections for the young man. When the guard discovers that the young man is her brother, he tries—haltingly—to make amends. (Those German filmmakers and their sense of guilt...where would they be without it?) This film has an interesting story and some technical prowess, but I don't know that it would stand out to me in a field of hundreds of other short films of similar skill at storytelling and camera work and editing. This is the longest of the five films at 30 minutes, and it has the most fully developed plot.

New Boy, a film from Ireland, tells the story of a young boy from Africa who arrives at a grammar school in Ireland, only to be picked on by one of the Irish boys. Through a series of flashbacks, we discover that the young African boy has left his home country due to the military's arrest and probably murder of his father, a schoolteacher. The kids in his new class are an intriguing lot overall, most of them fitting pretty clear "types." The resolution of the story is charming, coming as it does on the heels of the most dramatic of the young boy's flashbacks to Africa. Again, this film is competently made, and it was fun to hear the Irish accents, but I'm not sure that it would stand out in a field of short films so distinctly either. It's the shortest of the five, clocking in at a brisk 11 minutes.

Toyland (Spielzeugland), is also from Germany, and it mines more familiar territory: the Holocaust. A young German boy is friends with the Jewish family downstairs; in fact, he and the son of the Jewish family play the piano together. When he learns that the Jewish family will be leaving soon, he wants to know why he can't go. When his mother tries to tell him that they are going to Toyland, that just makes him all the more excited to join them. What she can't tell him, of course, but what we all know is that they are on the way to the concentration camps; foolishly, she makes up a destination that only entices her son rather than discourages him. On the morning that the Nazis arrive to take the family downstairs into custody, the young German boy packs his suitcase and tries to join them. Much of the film is the story of his mother trying to locate him, even going to the train station and having the officers open the railcar that contains her neighbors. The payoff for this film is strong, but I won't spoil it for you on the chance that you might get to enjoy seeing it on your own some day. Like New Boy, Toyland uses a series of flashbacks to tell its story, but the German film is more emotionally engrossing, perhaps because of the more detailed knowledge we have of the cultural context.

Grisen (The Pig) is a Danish film about an older man who enters a hospital to have surgery; he has an abscess in his rectum, a fact which he shares with almost everyone he meets. At first, he is in a hospital room by himself. In his solitude, he notices a painting on the wall of a pig leaping into a body of water. He becomes intrigued by the picture and starts to feel like it is a good luck charm for him. He even likens the expression on the pig's face to the smile on the Mona Lisa. (Well, it is a rather enigmatic look. The pig's look, I mean.) He awakens after one of his procedures to see that the painting has been removed and that another patient has joined him in the room. It turns out that the other patient is Muslim, and his family has asked for the painting to be removed because it offends them. A series of misadventures follows, including the hanging of a picture of a moose as an alternative. Frustrated, the elderly man calls in his daughter, the lawyer, and asks her to become involved. It's all rather comic, yet each "side" still makes an intriguing case regarding the limits of tolerance. The way the plot is resolved is the most ironic of all five films, but it too should really be experienced firsthand.

Manon Sur Le Bitume (Manon on the Asphalt), a French film, is perhaps the most challenging in terms of its structure. It begins with a series of images of various people going about their day. Then the central character of Manon hops on her bike and rides to meet someone. She is struck by a car and, while she fades in and out of consciousness, begins to think about the various people in her life and what she last said to them and key memories of their times together and how they might react to her death. All of these people are, of course, the ones we saw in the opening sequence. The film ends with a series of images involving the same people, but I'm not certain that the narrative has been fully or satisfactorily resolved when that sequence begins. As intriguing as this film sounds, I'm not sure that it is executed as skillfully as it could have been.

Oscar Winner: Toyland. Perhaps it was the darker theme of the German short film that made it stand out more. It is the most resonant of the films in terms of its emotional impact.

My Choice: The Pig. It's sense of humor is charming, yet it manages to make some intriguing social commentary about tolerance and justice.

Best Animated Short Film of 2008

La Maison en Petits Cubes, despite the French title, was made in Japan. It's an intriguing story of a man whose home starts to flood, causing him to build another home on top of the existing one. Apparently, everyone does this, making the entire town a series of towers barely poking out of the water. When he drops his pipe into the water, he begins a journey back into his past as he stops at each level and reminisces about the time he spent there. It's a charming story, and (I suspect) it's also a parable about what we might be losing in the climate change the world is facing, what we leave behind when the world we knew starts to disappear. My only complaint is that this is the least visually appealing of the five nominees. The animation is a bit, well, ugly, frankly, but the story is a winner, the most fully realized of the five nominees. By the way, the title has been translated into Pieces of Love, Vol. 1, which I believe is a gross distortion of what the title actually means in French (something more like "the house of little boxes").

Lavatory—Lovestory is an unusual tale of a woman who oversees a public lavatory—she takes the "fee" you must pay to enter—and how she begins to realize that she has a secret admirer. A series of vibrant bouquets appear when she is not looking (which is often, especially when reading her magazine filled with fantasies for women), and she begins to wonder which of the men who come in and out of the lavatory might be attracted to her. This film is the simplest in terms of its animation, really little more than line drawings, and the only colors are the ones used for the different bouquets. Most of the production crew is Russian, apparently, but all of the words that appear on screen (such as the title of the magazine the woman reads) are rendered in English. This is a charming story, delightfully romantic, but a bit of a trifle perhaps.

Oktapodi is the shortest of these films at only two minutes, but it's a very rich two minutes. In this French film, two octopi (octopuses?) in love are separated when one is taken to be the special on the menu that night at a restaurant. The remaining octopus escapes from the tank at the pet store and begins a wild journey trying to retrieve his lover from the hands of the boy who has stashed her in a cooler to remain fresh until dinner time. The colors of this one are luminous and not a second of the short time is wasted. A real gem of a movie, and one that gives you the feeling that you'd like to watch even more of these two interesting characters.

Presto is the tale of a magician's rabbit who just wants a carrot. He keeps getting thwarted in his attempts to eat his lunch, a luxury that the magician has already enjoyed. If you saw WALL-E in the theatres, then you've seen this animated short. It's clever, as you would expect from the folks at Pixar, and very slickly produced. The film manages to find as many ways as possible to allow the rabbit to punish the magician for failing to feed him properly, and all with the use of a wizard's hat much like the one Mickey dons in Fantasia. (Yes, of course, I know there's an homage at work here.) While watching this one again, I was reminded of that old Bugs Bunny cartoon where he and the magician keep getting zapped by a magic wand. I suppose there are far worse comparisons that could be made, given the high standard that those Warner Bros. cartoons had.

This Way Up, an entry from the United Kingdom, tells the story of the most unlucky of undertakers on the most unlucky of days. After picking up the remains of an elderly woman, the two men (apparently, father and son) experience a series of mishaps, all triggered by a chain reaction the younger man starts in the woman's home. The Rube Goldbergian start to the film sets the tone for much of the slapstick that follows. The most intriguing of those mishaps involves the two men seemingly on a journey toward hell with the "ghost" of the old woman riding her coffin as if it were one of the boats at Disneyland's It's a Small World ride. Funny, if a bit macabre at times. I kept expecting even worse things than what did happen, but this one seemed to generate the most laughs from the audience of which I was a part.

Oscar Winner and My Choice: La Maison en Petits Cubes, It’s both the most ambitious and successful of the nominated films. As an aside, I also thought the speech by the director was entertaining, especially his shout-out to the band Styx.

The Reader (2008)

Nominated for Best Picture of 2008, The Reader is a Holocaust movie without the Holocaust. As a 15-year-old boy in the post-war Germany of 1958, Michael Berg begins an affair with an older woman who takes a moment to comfort him when he gets sick with scarlet fever. After this initial chance meeting, he begins visiting her apartment, and they begin having sex on a regular basis there. He even skips classes and leaves his friends to be with her, and he plans a biking holiday for them in the German countryside that the film showcases in beautiful cinematography. The catch to all of this is that the older woman, Hanna Schmitz, asks him to read to her each time they are together. Whether this is an act of foreplay or whether she is doing it for other reasons, the viewer does not know until later in the film. The summer they spend together, though, profoundly affects Michael for the rest of his life.

Hanna disappears one day, and Michael (who has fallen in love with her) has to wait until he is in law school in 1966 before he sees her again. She and five other women who were guards in a concentration camp during World War II are now on trial for their war crimes, particularly the act of letting hundreds of Jewish women die in a burning church rather than opening the doors to the building and allowing them to survive and perhaps escape. Hanna, in particular, answers all of the questions asked of her in court honestly, sometimes brutally so. She does not appear to be a woman who has thought much about the consequences of her actions, at least on the surface.

A third thread of the narrative deals with Michael's reconciliation in 1988 with Hanna after she has been imprisoned for many years. (No, I promise I'm not spoiling the ending here.) In this portion of the film, Michael is played by Ralph Fiennes, who had quite a year in 2008. He's good here, particularly because the role suits the kinds of tamped-down performance that Fiennes often gives. By the way, these different narratives are not told in strictly chronological order; most of them are intertwining remembrances that Michael has as he contemplates reuniting with Hanna, so you see Fiennes throughout the film. There's also a portion of the film that deals with events in 1995, as Fiennes' Michael prepares to meet his grown daughter for dinner.

Hanna is played beautifully by Kate Winslet. Winslet has become an even more expressive, powerful actress as she has matured. I loved and admired her performance a few years ago in Little Children, and this role manages to top that one. What makes her acting so remarkable here is the ability she has to contain her emotions. Hanna has reasons for not expressing herself, and Winslet allows us to see only slivers of feelings now and then, keeping us guessing until the revelation of Hanna's reasons are made clear. Another actress would not have been as subtle or effective. Winslet's acting here is among the best I've seen in several years from anyone, male or female, and no, I've not seen her work in Revolutionary Road yet, so save those comments until I am able to make the comparisons myself. Hanna could easily be one of the most evil of characters in less capable hands--she certainly seems emotionally rigid, even in the love scenes with young Michael--but thanks to Winslet's talent, just as we are about to dismiss Hanna for her actions or her behaviors or her attitude, we are given a small bit of insight into her character. It's never enough to make you "love" Hanna, certainly, but you do begin to comprehend her in ways that you wouldn't have thought possible. She manages to elicit a tiny bit of sympathy for a woman who might not fully deserve it.

I also want to talk about the young performer who plays Michael as a 15-year-old and then as a law school student. His name is David Kross, and he's an 18-year-old German boy. He's astonishing in his early scenes with Winslet. He has a depth and maturity to his acting far beyond what his age might suggest. I particularly admired how his face would light up each time he was with Winslet during the romantic scenes; there's a glow to him that suggests what being a young person in love for the first time is really like. Watch those scenes where they're on vacation together to see what I mean. He also is good at conveying just how painful it is when they are apart from each other. Admittedly, he's not as strong when he has to play a young man of about 23. I think that's the age he would be when he's a student if I've done my math correctly. He's perhaps just a bit too baby-faced to play that age convincingly. However, the scenes where he has to watch Hanna's testimony are still gut-wrenching. Both he and Winslet are at the top of their game in those courtroom scenes.

So why is this a Holocaust film without the Holocaust? There are no flashbacks to the camps, only stories about some of the events that took place there. We never to get to see directly what Hanna is accused of doing. The film never even shows us Hanna's life before she meets Michael on the train that day he is sick. It just jumps from the 1950s to the 1960s when Hanna is on trial, and it doesn't provide us with a great deal of exposition about any of those years in between either. Lena Olin, who's stunningly good here in two brief scenes as a mother and then her daughter, appears near the end of the film to give us a context for understanding all of those plays and books and other works (films?) about the Holocaust from the perspective of a survivor, and I think she's there primarily to remind us that this film should be examined for its take on the guilt that we carry or perhaps should carry for what we have done in the past. She tells Fiennes' grown-up Berg to go to the theater if he wants catharsis, a rather grown-up reaction to the subject matter.

The director of The Reader is Stephen Daldry. He's made three feature films: Billy Elliot, The Hours, and now The Reader, and he's been nominated for Best Director for each one. I don't know of anyone else who can claim such a track record. What stands out for me about his films, though, is how he seems to be very selective about the material he directs. Each of the three is, in its own ways, serious and literate and "adult." The Reader is a movie designed to make us ponder our own measure of culpability, our own decisions in life. It doesn't supply simple answers to what are truly complex and complicated questions, and that's why I think it's an admirable choice among the nominees for Best Picture of 2008.

Slumdog Millionaire (2008)

Part of the joy of watching Slumdog Millionaire, winner for Best Picture of 2008, is the cleverness of its premise. A young man from the slums of Mumbai has made it to the Indian version of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? He is so successful at answering questions, amassing winnings of 10 million rupees, that he is taken into custody after the first day of his appearance on the show and questioned--well, tortured, really--about how he managed to know all of the answers. What follows is a series of flashbacks based upon his correct answers, allowing viewers to see the remarkable set of circumstances that has provided him with the knowledge to succeed on the game show.

Structurally, the film's narrative is told through that series of chronological flashbacks, which means that each of the three major characters is portrayed by actors at different ages. Jamal Malik, the contestant on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?, is the sensitive younger brother who witnesses a series of rather horrific events in his young life, including the murder of his mother, his brother's shooting of the man who once made them into beggars, even the abuse of the girl whom he has always loved. As the grown Jamal, Dev Patel is very solid, particularly in the scenes with Freida Pinto, who plays the grown Latika, the girl who was orphaned at the same time as Jamal and his brother and who has experienced her own series of misadventures.

I find it interesting that the last half hour or so of the film--no, I'm not going to spoil the ending for you--offers a rather dramatic shift in tone from the rest of the film. Some of the twists are movie cliches, to be sure, such as the part where the beautiful girl winds up in the clutches of the mobster, but the filmmakers have taken these kinds of moments with which we are familiar and given them new life by providing a different locale and a different set of characters for us to follow. I do believe that most of the praise for Slumdog Millionaire comes from the fact that, despite all of the serious events that occur throughout this film, there are also moments that allow us to feel a sense of hope. Don't be mistaken, though. There are some very gruesome moments depicted here, and more than a few of the patrons in the theater when I've seen this film have made their discomfort loudly known.

Director Danny Boyle, still probably best known for Trainspotting, has managed to coax some remarkable performances from his very young cast. Patel, who anchors the film, is only 18 years old, but he already seems destined for a long career. Pinto is quite effective as well, but as the victim throughout the film of many older men, she must convey more with her expressions than with her dialogue. As Jamal's older brother Salim, Madhur Mittal builds nicely upon the performances of the two boys who play Salim at younger ages. Boyle's casting director, Loveleen Tandan, has managed to find mostly nonprofessionals to fill these roles, and she deserves a great deal of credit for the success of the film, thanks to the energy that each of the nine young performers bring to Slumdog Millionaire.

I've seen this film twice now, once before Christmas and now again in the new year, and each time I have been swept up in the drama that unfolds on the screen. This is a particularly engrossing film. Anyone who tends to dislike films in foreign locations or non-American or unknown actors or a few subtitles here and there should be taken to see Slumdog Millionaire because I suspect it will change attitudes about all of those traits that tend to be seen as deficits. The editing is fast-paced, and the look of the film itself is rather spectacular. I must also mention the music by A.R. Rahman. The cast appears in a musical number entitled "Jai Ho" (a song you should download if you already haven't) that is straight out of any number of Bollywood films, and it's a highlight of the movie. The second time I saw the film, I paid more attention to the soundtrack and realized just how much it assists in maintaining the pace of the film.

Wall-E is still my favorite film of 2008, and Milk is still the film that I most admired, but Slumdog Millionaire ranks high on either of those lists ("favorite" or "most admired"). It manages to give us a view of a different world, one with which we are not familiar but one which quickly becomes intriguing to us, and it presents that most hackneyed of plot devices, the boy who will do anything to win the love of a girl, yet does so in a way that makes us care about the fate of the couple. It manages to provide us with a vision of the depths to which people sink when they are faced with poverty, but it also gives a sense that we are able to overcome that poverty, to make ourselves into better people than our financial situations would suggest. How intriguing that a film set in India and directed by an Englishman should represent those rather quintessentially American values.

Frost/Nixon (2008)

Frost/Nixon, nominated for Best Picture of 2008, takes us behind the scenes of the historic interviews with Richard Nixon conducted by David Frost three years after the former president resigned in the wake of the Watergate scandal. A substantial portion of the film recreates moments from those interviews, particularly the moments when Nixon managed to outsmart Frost and answer the questions to suit his own purposes, and those recreations actually make for some of the most intriguing parts of the movie. Certainly, we have the originals available to use to watch, so we can make direct comparisons, but the selection of particular moments to include in this film has been well made to achieve the most impact.

Frank Langella gives a strong performance as Nixon. Although he does not physically resemble Nixon all that much, he captures the disgraced president's vocal patterns and his mannerisms well. It's especially astonishing to see just how fully Langella is able to hone in on the feelings of inadequacy that plagued Nixon throughout much of his lifetime, that sense that others always felt they were better than he. You don't ever quite forget that you're watching someone else play Nixon, but Langella is quite effective at capturing some of the man's personality. Michael Sheen, who was so good as Tony Blair in The Queen (written by the same screenwriter as Frost/Nixon, Peter Morgan), is Langella's equal here. Langella has received all of the attention for his performance, but Sheen brought back to my memory many of Frost's tics and style of speaking. He, too, fails to look much like the person he's playing, but he nevertheless inhabits the part well.

The movie is told as a series of flashbacks by various men who were involved in the development of the interviews. Sam Rockwell and Oliver Platt portray two newsmen who help Frost conduct the background research for the project and supply questions to ask of Nixon. Both want to force Nixon to apologize, to admit his guilt for Watergate and the continuing U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War, and both find themselves disappointed when Nixon proves to be a more commanding presence under the camera lights. (As an aside, Platt does a pretty accurate verbal impression of Nixon early in the film. Too bad he isn't close to the physical presence as well; it would have been interesting to see him in the part.) Both men are well cast, as is Matthew Mcfadyen as Frost's producer. Mcfadyen is perhaps best known for playing Mr. Darcy in the most recent adaptation of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice, but even in this small part, he makes quite an impression.

The other person who serves to introduce the flashbacks is Nixon's loyal former chief of staff, Jack Brennan, played here by Kevin Bacon. Is this always going to be Bacon's lot in life, to shine so brilliantly in these small parts yet never receive much recognition? He brings to the character such a sense of loyalty, that kind of blind loyalty that allows you to overlook someone's flaws, the kind of flaws everyone else can see. He has to play a rather tightly wound man in this film, but Bacon is definitely up to the challenge. It's a pleasure to watch him each time he appears on screen.

There are a few moments of humor scattered throughout this film, but it's mostly played for earnest drama. And perhaps that's why it's not that interesting of a movie overall for me. Certainly, there are moments of great intrigue: whether or not Frost will raise enough money to produce the interviews without studio support, whether or not Nixon will truly be forthcoming in his answers, those kinds of issues. However, despite its attempts to raise important issues, such as those involving journalistic integrity, Frost/Nixon suffers at least in part because we already know how everything turns out. There have been films in recent years that have managed to create a sense of tension despite having an ending with which everyone is familiar--I'm thinking of United 93, just as an example--but Frost/Nixon never seems to catch fire that way. In fact, portions of it are rather dull. To be honest, I've seen the film twice, and I've had trouble staying awake during the first half hour as the various deals and agreements are being made to set up the interviews.

There is, of course, (or, more properly, was) an opportunity with Frost/Nixon to make comparisons to the most recent presidential administration. A few times during the movie, there's a mention how the president damaged the credibility of the United States and brought shame to the office. There's also the scene where Frost challenges the legality of some of Nixon's actions (and those of his administration), only to have Nixon reply that the mere fact that the president is carrying out those actions means that they aren't illegal. How many parallels could have been made to the Bush years if the filmmakers had tried to draw the similarities out more? How many people will want to have some sort of retribution for the past eight years, much as the country wanted Nixon to "pay" for what he had done, a fact that is addressed early in the movie but inconsistently after that? Frost/Nixon, unlike Milk (another of the nominees for 2008's Best Picture), seems less timely than it should. I suspect the stage version might have been more effective in conveying that sense of connectedness, of "timelessness," but all we have in this film version is the historical context of the late 1970s.

I suppose there might be people (rather young people?) who don't know about this portion of American history. They might "learn" something from this film (although it's adherence to historical accuracy at times is quite suspect), but the rest of us will just have to nod and reminisce about what we can recall from this time in our nation's collective experience. Frost/Nixon doesn't really challenge our beliefs about Nixon (or about Frost either, for that matter), despite making him perhaps more sympathetic at times than many would want to accept. I'm sure there are still stories to tell about the aftermath of the Nixon presidency and what his life in solitude was like, but Frost/Nixon, unfortunately, plays it too safe to be considered a truly great film.

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (2008)

All of the elements are in place to make The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, one of the nominees for Best Picture of 2008, an outstanding movie. It has an intriguing story as its basis: a child is born as an old man and ages backwards. It has good actors as its leads, Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett, and a fine supporting cast. It has an impressive scope, pretty much the entire 20th century and some of the loveliest places in the U.S. and Europe. It has so many teams of special effects wizards to make what seems impossible--the grafting of Pitt's face onto various of Benjamin Button's bodies at different ages--into something believable. And, yet, watching this film left me feeling unsatisfied.

I think part of the problem is the framing device of the movie. Blanchett's Daisy is dying in a New Orleans hospital while Hurricane Katrina is gathering force outside. Her daughter Caroline (Julia Ormand) is reading to her from Benjamin's journal. What follows is a series of flashbacks to various moments in Benjamin's past. Just as a vignette begins to gather some emotional resonance, though, we are drawn back to the hospital room to hear Daisy and Caroline talking about the events that have just been depicted. I'm not really quibbling with the choices that the filmmakers have made in presenting the story, but the effect is one that doesn't allow for the building of tension on the part of the viewer. The reconciliation between Daisy and Caroline just isn't as intriguing as the one between Daisy and Benjamin that occurs in the flashbacks.

Benjamin was born on the day that World War I ended. His father, grieving over the death of his wife from childbirth, abandons his son at a stranger's house; he cannot face his child, who looks wrinkled and perhaps deformed. The house where he leaves the baby happens to be filled with elderly people who are looked after by Queenie (Taraji P. Henson) and Tizzy (Mahershalalhashbaz Ali). Queenie, being a goodhearted person, takes in Benjamin and raises him as her own child. Benjamin is not give much hope for living, but he defies the odds and starts to grow up...well, grow young...well, you know what I mean.

While he is still only about seven years old or so, Benjamin meets Daisy, the granddaughter of one of the other residents. The two begin a friendship that they sustain over a period of years as Daisy grows older and Benjamin grows physically younger. His life takes him sailing around the world, including an extended stay in Russia, where he meets and has an affair with Tilda Swinton's Elizabeth Abbott--a pretty emotionally satisfying vignette, by the way. Daisy's life as a dancer takes her primarily to New York and to the tutelage of George Balanchine. Daisy and Benjamin manage to meet several times over the years, but until both are in their 40s, they do not develop a relationship. When they do, though, the best part of the movie begins.

It's almost two-thirds of the way through the film before "Movie Star Brad Pitt" shows up looking like himself. When he does, the movie finally kicks into high gear. The love story between Pitt's Benjamin and Blanchett's Daisy is charming and emotional and sexy. It's the heart of the film, really, and it's all too brief. I do understand that given the nature of the story, it can't help but be brief, but for a film that clocks in at almost three hours long, I'd like to see a bit more of the Brad Pitt with which I'm familiar. Blanchett gets to look pretty much like herself for a substantial chunk of time, but not Pitt. And, really, it's the two of them we should be waiting for, not the next special effects gimmick to see how well they've managed to "age" or "youthen" Pitt.

The script is filled with homilies, most of which are rather pat and inconsequential. What does it mean to keep saying to people that you can't really know what to expect? How "deep" is it to suggest that nothing really beautiful can last? Who are the people who don't know these lessons already? I suppose we could "learn" from this film that we should just accept things as they happen and try to accept people as they are, but those seem like such insignificant statements to make in a film that has pretensions of being Great Art.

It's really not the fault of the director, David Fincher. I've liked much of his other work like Zodiac and Fight Club and even parts of Se7en, and he does solid work here too. It isn't the actors who are to blame, either. I don't think they are given a great deal to do. Much has been made of Pitt's underplaying of his role, but I don't know that he has a choice but to remain on the surface; his character isn't given a great deal of depth. Benjamin doesn't really change all that much, except in a physical sense. Blanchett is always reliable in her performances, and she manages to do her usual good work here with what little she really has to work with (but I had to keep looking at her face in the scenes set during Katrina just to reassure myself that it was Blanchett). I'm not as impressed with Henson's turn as Queenie as others seem to be. I thought she was spectacular a few years ago in Hustle & Flow, but here she is given so little to do except be the perfect surrogate mother that it wastes her considerable talents as an actress.

I think the fault has to lie with the screenplay in this case. It's written by Eric Roth, who based it on a story by F. Scott Fitzgerald. I've not yet read the story, but I'm familiar enough with Fitzgerald's work to know that there would be more substance than this film offers. Roth also wrote the screenplay for Forrest Gump, and I will readily admit that I was not looking forward to watching that movie again for this project. I hated it the first time I saw it in the theater, and my distaste for it has changed little over the years. I didn't particularly dislike The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, but its emotional impact is just too stunted for it to truly be considered one of the best pictures of the year.

Oscar Wins: Art Direction, Makeup, and Visual Effects

Other Oscar Nominations: Picture, Director, Actor (Pitt), Supporting Actress (Henson), Adapted Screenplay, Cinematography, Costume Design, Film Editing, Original Score, and Sound Mixing

Milk (2008)

I've seen the movie Milk, nominated for Best Picture of 2008, twice now, and each time has been an emotional experience for me. Coming so soon after the defeat that gay people in California suffered at the ballot box in November, this movie reminds us of a time when it was even more difficult to be gay, and yet there were people like Harvey Milk who just kept pushing for more recognition of our dignity as human beings. It's a biopic on the surface, but it's also bracing political commentary that couldn't be more timely.

The film begins with archival footage of men being arrested in gay bars, a reminder of the context out of which Harvey Milk emerged as a political figure. The present-day narrative begins with Sean Penn as Harvey dictating a message to be played in the event of his death by assassination. Of course, Milk was assassinated along with San Francisco Mayor George Moscone, and the film wastes no time in letting viewers (some of whom are apparently unaware) of this outcome. Knowing the ending of the story in no way diminishes its impact, though, because what really matters is how Milk came to live his life openly and proudly once he moved from New York to San Francisco in the early 1970s.

I love the fact that the filmmakers begin Harvey's historical odyssey with his meeting of a younger man on the New York subway on the eve of his 40th birthday. The two men go back to Harvey's place and have sex, which is depicted in shadow but nonetheless depicted, before talking about what the future holds for them. In fact, what is really admirable about this approach is that it does not desexualize Milk. Harvey was a believer in sexual freedom, and the references to bathhouses and open relationships and such only serve to reinforce that. Thankfully, no one tried to "tone down" the story of this man who was emblematic of his time and place.

I admired all of the performances in this movie. James Franco as Milk's great love Scott Smith gives us a sense of the frustration that his real-life counterpart must have felt to see how powerfully politics engulfed Harvey; he's such a sweet person, but ultimately, he just can't help feeling abandoned due to Harvey's political ambitions. Emile Hirsch is fantastic as a young Cleve Jones, happy to be in a place like San Francisco where he can be openly gay. Josh Brolin adds to an already impressive body of work here with his portrayal of Dan White, the man who assassinated Harvey Milk and Mayor George Moscone. (Again, I'm not giving away any secret by stating that. If you're unfamiliar with the story, the film also catches you up to speed at the beginning by showing archival footage of Dianne Feinstein, then the president of the Board of Supervisors, making the announcement.) I think this is perhaps the best ensemble cast of any movie this past year. Everyone seems to have taken to heart the spirit of the project and the legacy that Harvey Milk represents.

If I have any criticisms of the casting at all, it would be with Diego Luna as Jack Lira, who became Harvey's lover after Scott's departure. Well, it isn't really with Luna's performance, I guess, since he is apparently portraying Jack the way that people remembered him. He's just an annoying presence, one of those people who never seems to be happy and is always taking up so much of other people's energy. I know there are people like that, and the filmmakers have been careful not to make everyone gay into a saintly figure in this film, thankfully.

Of course, the greatest performance--and one of the best of the year--is by Sean Penn as Harvey himself. I've never been as fond of Penn's performances as everyone else. I thought he was actually overrated in Mystic River, which brought him an Oscar for Best Actor. I can acknowledge that he has range, but there's always been some sense of a person who's "Acting" (yes, capital letter and all) that's too present in most of his roles. Here, though, he manages to make me forget that it's Sean Penn. Physically, he's a bit too buff to look just like Harvey, but otherwise, the resemblance is pretty close. He even manages to get the mannerisms associated with Harvey down right. I was able to become caught up in Milk's story rather than Penn's performance, and for me, that's a sign of a good acting job.

The most intriguing part of the film's narrative has to do with the campaign against Proposition 6, which would have banned gay people from teaching in the schools in California. Harvey became that proposition's leading opponent, and the film does a respectful job of demonstrating just how much effort and time he and his colleagues put into that fight. Of course, you can't watch Milk now without thinking of the campaign against Proposition 8, which outlawed gay marriage in California via constitutional amendment. This film challenges you to ask if we did enough, if we were as willing to take chances and to go as far as we could to change the minds of the voters of this state. How remarkable was the timing of this film's release? I only wish it could have opened a month or two earlier so that we could have used its generosity of spirit to inspire us.

Much of what I know about Harvey Milk is from the award-winning documentary The Times of Harvey Milk. Milk itself even uses some of the same footage from the earlier film. There's a twenty-year gap between the films, but both of them are valuable reminders to us of the difference that one person can make. Harvey always claimed that the movement was more important than he was, but without him, there might not have been a gay civil rights movement, certainly not in California. Milk is a potent film that deals with issues that we still face, and I hope more people have a chance to see it and learn from the example that Harvey Milk gave us.

Oscar Wins: Actor (Penn) and Original Screenplay

Other Oscar Nominations: Picture, Director, Supporting Actor (Brolin), Costume Design, Film Editing, and Original Score