My blog
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"Slumdog Millionaire"
Friday, Jan 30, 2009 2:10PM / Standard Entry
What’s in a Name?
“Slumdog Millionaire”
By Jimmy So
I met a friend for a drink just after I came out of “Slumdog Millionaire,” and I outlined the plot to him without giving away the ending. “Wait a sec, you mean to tell me that in the beginning you don’t know that he’s won the million bucks? The title’s not exactly keeping that a secret.” I suppose in a literal interpretation, the inclusion of the word “millionaire” would mandate that the "slumdog" Jamal Malik (Dev Patel) ought to win the Indian version of “Who Wants to be a Millionaire?” But titles also come in the form of the vague, the ironic, the satiric, and even the outright absurd. We need not know to which category “Slumdog Millionaire” belongs to except to recognize that it is a good title: the film is as peppy as a puppy and fantastical as a millionaire-dream.
“Slumdog Millionaire” opens with the misstep of Jamal being tortured by a police inspector (Irrfan Khan)—frankly, Patel looks more stoned than mutilated, but apparently America is not the only country fond of “enhanced interrogation techniques.” The police accuse Jamal, an uneducated 18-year-old orphan who grew up in the slums, of cheating in “Who Wants to be a Millionaire?” He is one question away from 20 million rupees, but before that final multiple choice the show propitiously runs out of time and takes a one night recess, while a billion and a half hardly affluent Indians ironically and fervently wonder if the rich-poor gap can widen just enough for Jamal to squeeze through.
Jamal, of course, is busy getting tickled by electric shocks, but he doesn’t have a confession—he has flashbacks. He explains how he has come to know the answer to each of the question, and in the process serves up the ultimate rebuke to pedantry—a rich and eventful life has provided him with esoterica that might just happen to appear on a bad but very lucrative quiz show. His first explanation is a giggle. Asked to pick out the name of a Bollywood star, Jamal recounts how, as a kid, he crawled through feces three feet deep just to get the autograph of the superstar.
Next he tells of how his mother is killed in the 1992-93 Hindu-Muslim riots (a rather incongruous explanation of another answer lies in this episode), and Jamal befriends a waif named Latika—on the other hand, Jamal’s brother, Salim, seems to have something against her. The three of them are trained by a sinister gang to beg for money, but they escape, only that Salim leaves Latika behind. Why does Jamal know that Benjamin Franklin is on the U.S. 100-dollar note? Because, looking for Latika, Jamal reunited with a fellow slumdog who was not so lucky as the Maliks and had by then become a blind beggar, and he asked Jamal to look at who’s on the currency to confirm that it was a Benjamin. He knows the inventor of the revolver because Salim used a Colt pistol to help Jamal rescue Latika. You get the idea.
Surely you know the trajectory of this tried and true story, but the fact is that you don’t know if Jamal gets the last question right until the end of the film, regardless of what the title suggests. There is ample suspense to captivate an audience—twenty million rupees are clinging onto one of four possible answers to a multiple-choice question. The title sequence, itself tied to four answer choices, might give something away, but does it even matter?
The opening title card reads: “Jamal is within one right answer of winning the game show, so how did he get here?” The letter they want you to pick is “D: It is written.” Simon Beaufoy wrote the script, based on the novel Q and A by the Indian diplomat Vikas Swarup. I wager that the two men are familiar with “Lawrence of Arabia”—the writing’s in the sand, surely, in the life of T. E. Lawrence, a man so driven to defy everything before him he only makes sense of his actions later. In the famous desert scene so engulfing you can taste the granules in your mouth, Gasim, an Arab fighter, fell off his camel unnoticed during the night, and O’Toole’s Lawrence seizes the opportunity like a serpent spotting Eve, and against the advice of the Bedouins, turns back to look for him in the endless Nefud Desert. “Nothing is written!” Lawrence snaps at them; he manages to rise above not only the Bedouins but the desert and destiny as well, saving Gasim—but the sand has the last word, and later Lawrence personally shoots Gasim to prevent a blood feud among his fighters. The plot twist suggests the decisive victory of fate—after all, where would mythmaking be without it? Nevertheless let us be reminded that Lawrence was not above little contrivances himself, and if anything is written he is likely to have written it, and made it all up if he can help it.
“It is so contrived!” is the complaint I hear most often about “Slumdog Millionaire.” But what do you expect—a film executively produced by fate? Or will you settle for a movie contrived by standard human beings? Once upon a time, movies were manufactured products of entertainment filled with set pieces to be devoured and enjoyed. Flights of fancy weren’t always results of dream sequences or signs of magical realism. You took the cosmic amusement of yesteryear Hollywood in stride. They used to manufacture flights of fancy not with expensive CGI but the old fashioned way, by taking a cute but implausible turn in the plot. Not all films are miracles of realism in the natural rhythm of life. And if you rightly anticipate that I take the view that they don’t make them like they used to, I am unabashed about my romanticism for the spirit of the Golden Age.
Who else shares my fondness for supple storytelling, of bending reality to one’s liking? After a late-night layover in a Calcutta motel watching a Dharmendra (the Burt Lancaster of Bollywood) doubleheader with two Indian mates I consider brothers, and a subsequent in-flight entertainment featuring 2006’s “Om Shanti Om,” (only one of the biggest grossing Hindi films in history, an Indian redux of “Singin’ in the Rain” and “Phantom of the Opera”) I can say that the subcontinent of South Asia still has a good appetite for unblushing cinematic thrills worthy of the exclamation “That’s Entertainment!” The Tinseltown of the1920s to 1950s has immigrated to Mumbai, studio system and formula and all. In making “Slumdog Millionaire,” the British director Danny Boyle not only pays homage to the sari and mehndi, but he takes on the very spirit of what a movie out of India might feel like.
“Slumdog Millionaire” has the look of neon worship, a love for the vibrant urban life found in the best Taiwan and Hong Kong films but absent in American cinema since the gentrification of the Big Apple. Megalopolises are both beautiful and dangerous. Heroes survive by running past colorful lights, getting lost in the downtown maze, and they are rewarded with the temporary relief of having been rescued by a city. The best part of "Slumdog Millionaire" is the last—a full Bollywood dance number on the platforms of a train station, involving almost the entire cast. American cinema has long averted its eyes from such frivolities. It is written that the direction of film is to go another way, but in our return to Depression-era economics can we not find the time for a short reunion with Depression comedies in all their confounding, twisted paradoxes, and hope, once again, that a slumdog can indeed become a millionaire? ♦
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"Let the Right One In" and "Twilight"
Sunday, Dec 21, 2008 9:07PM / Standard Entry
Vampires
"Let the Right One In" and "Twilight."
By Jimmy So
A child falls in love with a vampire in a bloodless, faded town—and you thought I was talking about “Twilight.” Children are getting mixed up in all things superhumanly strong, bloodthirsty, and garlic-adverse. If you have kids, you might not want them interested in sharp fangs, but the silver screen does, and it’s offering not one, but two vampire flicks centered around young adults. So this is what it’s come to: They’re now taking our young, and with such vengeance that the animated television funny “South Park” devoted an entire episode to the epidemic. “Twilight,” based on a vampire romance teen novel better selling than it has any business to be, will attract all-too-willing schoolgirls, and the bloodshed will be inescapable all across the country. But “Twilight” is, by comparison, a warm and fuzzy affair, the earnestly chilling outing being the Swedish film “Let the Right One In.”
Spooky is the promise here: Oskar (Kåre Hedebrant), an innocent, flaxen-haired twelve-year-old boy—his criminal instincts strong, he enjoys rehearsing the stabbing death of his tormentors, but let’s assume he’s an angel—befriends Eli (Lina Leandersson), a girl vampire who along with an older man moves in next door. Eli, superpowered and hence considerably less inhibited, encourages Oskar to fight back against his bullies. Eli doesn’t deny herself a few gallons of blood now and then either, and citizens of this suburb of Stockholm gradually get the taste of shechita.
John Lindqvist, who adapted his own novel to the screen, has crystallized his 2004 book to feature little else outside of the friendship between Oskar and Eli, leaving the director, Tomas Alfredson, the task of figuring out what to film during vast silences. “Let the Right One In” waits a long time for something to happen in the nocturnal, refrigerated town. The ground is always snowbound—all the better for the spilling of blood, and when the splattering occur let’s assume the audience includes no viewers in Oskar’s age group. It’s as if the complacent, clueless adults living in the sterile town need defibrillating.
It isn’t always bloodshed that disturbs the peace—two of the best moments in the film involve a woman who’s bitten by Eli but doesn’t die. In both scenes the violence is dangerously close to a bad joke, and there were more than a few chuckles in the theater. In another case, Eli’s gruesome attack is administered with a deafening honk in the soundtrack—the excess works because the fear is real and tragic in those instances: Eli, never ambivalent about her appetite, dines on innocent people. But it all boils over in the climax involving the bullies, because a morally crippled tale has no business settling the score. The grownups might be negligently unaware of Oskar’s plight, but should the boy rely on an uncontrollable, paranormal creature to solve his problems? That unscrutinized premise is more chilling than all of the film’s well-staged terrors. As a film exercise in the techniques of shock that doesn’t ask to be taken seriously, this little Swedish shop of horrors is beautifully shot. Just don’t pretend to know who are the right ones to let in.
As for “Twilight,” it’ll surely send much of the country into a blood-curdling frenzy, so you are entitled to a pardonable curiosity of what all the fuss is about. Seventeen-year-old Isabella Swan (Kristen Stewart), who has disowned the first two syllables of her name, doesn’t much like Forks, Washington, where she moved to from Phoenix, Arizona. That’s understandable—Forks is a small town that’s “under a near-constant cover of clouds and rain.” Rain sucks, and Bella—voicing over an opening shot of a deer preyed upon in the forest of the Pacific Northwest—explains: “I’d never given much thought to how I would die, but dying in the place of someone I love seems like a good way to go.” Excuse me? What was that? We suspect there’s a more impending doom than ninety-percent humidity, and sure enough, her moving speech is all explained if you patiently wait for the better part of the film to be over.
In between, Bella goes to a new school and encounters little opposition on her way to becoming the most popular girl among the kids who are hardest to stereotype. Just one problem: her lab partner in Biology class can’t seem to stand her. The hunk is Edward Cullen (Robert Pattinson), so lethally good-looking he’s clearly a model and the winner of the “most Marlon-Brando-like brow” award. Turns out he’s as real as the Easter Bunny—a vegetarian vampire. The thought conjures up images of Dracula sucking at celery stalks. But what Edward means is that he doesn’t drink human blood—a sacrifice that’s such an undeniable turn-on that Bella falls head over heels for him. After far too many close-ups of the two looking miffed, Bella has narrowed things down: “About three things I was absolutely positive—first, Edward was a vampire; second, there was a part of him—and I didn’t know how dominant that part might be—that thirsted for my blood; and third, I was unconditionally and irrevocably in love with him.” I was absolutely puzzled about something: how is she so sure that Edward thirsted for her blood when she looks, well, anemic? Soon the lovers go steady, complete with Bella meeting Edward’s vampire family at the Cullen home (it’s no Castle Dracula). But the poor couple feels the brunt of the revenant-human romance problems: There’s some silly business about it being hard for them to make out or have sex, and on top of that, a bad vampire wants to snack on Bella. Edward saves Bella in time and they go to prom, cementing the fourth thing she can be absolutely positive about: a sequel.
All told, a typical junior year at Forks High School. Unfortunately, I cannot muster up much enthusiasm for what may come in senior year. For one, if the sequel anticipates more monkey fights between vampires—and, on top of that, proper foreshadowing has promised the pitting of werewolves against the Cullens—the action sequences have got to be done with aplomb. Werewolves would indeed bring more diversity—not every pale and brooding model has to be a vampire, and I fear the casting director might have to ring up Tab Hunter next. Pattinson, who, as I mentioned, has an oppressive brow like the young Brando’s, also does his best fashioning his style after James Dean, but he has none of the venom of the two legends. He can’t very well pull that out of his hat—his part has no personality to speak of, and that also applies to Stewart. The tagline says: “When you can live forever, what do you live for?” The answer, turns out, is not much. Edward, who has presumably lived since 1901, has been in high school for—how long as it been now?—oh yeah, 90 years. Bella has no goals except to be with this mope. When Edward suggests that she move away so his undead associations won’t threaten her life again, she freaks out and twitches: “We can’t be apart! You can’t leave me!” All she wants by the end of the movie is to become a vampire. “Twilight” has the fatal flaw that also declawed “Let the Right One In”: The two films subscribe to an airheaded morality, ripe for lampooning. Thank goodness for “South Park.” ♦
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"Man On Wire"
Wednesday, Dec 10, 2008 8:11PM / Standard Entry
Song of Innocence
“Man On Wire.”
by Jimmy So
“The Sorrow and the Pity” is the domineering parent of its documentary children—the weight of the name can break the backs of all those college dropouts with their cameras. It did justice to a subject as “The Times of Harvey Milk” did justice to a person. It was oral history and a story that no one else would tell, like “Hoop Dreams.” Its search for truth made it possible for an innocent man to be freed from prison because of “The Thin Blue Line.” Only some concert films and sports documentaries were able to break away, scoffing at solemn gravity and enjoying a joint or a beer. Then, there is the new work “Man On Wire,” concerned with something very much like a musical performance that drains the documentary form of its discovery apparatus and floods it with a celebratory spirit. This last-chance child is not interested in examining an issue or investigating the facts of a story. It is not a biography or a story that will shock the world. “Man On Wire” deals with a simple matter—one image, really, a now-timeless moment, when the tightrope walker Philippe Petit lay down a wire bridging the two towers of the World Trade Center on August 7, 1974, and danced on it.
Petit, who was born in France in 1948, is now the high poet of tightrope walking. New Yorkers know him—in the early nineteen seventies, he performed slack-rope walking, juggling, and magic tricks in Washington Square Park, where he was practically artist-in-residence; that’s what he is, in fact, at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine. This all makes him sound professional—he is the most famous high wire artist in the world—but the director of “Man On Wire,” James Marsh, never gives Petit’s contrivances the spirit of profession. He begins the film with oomph, retelling Petit and his crew’s break-in inside the twin towers, only to break off and give us the true star in this star vehicle—not the “man” in “Man On Wire,” but the structure from which the wire was anchored—the twin towers. He shows us a lollipop dream, the World Trade Center the Oz for a dewy-eyed Parisian boy, and Marsh never lets Petit’s boyishness go.
The heist-like sequences of the World Trade Center adventure will return throughout the film, and in between Marsh shows us the exploits that prepared Petit for his magnum opusr: his first “coup,” three years of preparation culminating in the walk between the towers of the Cathedral of Notre-Dame on June 26, 1971, which surprised the world and was beautiful enough if he never did another walk; and bringing his art to the other half of the globe, he walked between the pylons of the Sydney Harbour Bridge. But as an expose on tightrope walking and as a biography of the man on the wire, it is a failure. The viewer never gets a sense of what the ancient Roman art of high-wire walking is and how Petit changed it with his World Trade Center caper. Petit’s background is not outlined in the film: he was a rebellious middle child in a bourgeois family; his father was an aloof and strict author and war hero, a pilot in the Air Force; he was kicked out of five schools; he’s mostly self-taught; he insists that tightrope walking is not difficult and he himself posseses no special athletic abilities; he claims over five hundred arrests while he performed on the streets of Paris.
There is a strong sense that, were we to follow Petit, he would provide a lyrical account of why he turned to a life of magic, juggling and circus acts. As it is, Petit is a superb interviewee, speaking excitedly in fast French-sounding English, eloquent beyond the illusion of the accent. His bust reminds one of Cicero. But all of Petit’s words and all of his friend’s testimonies, accompanied by archival footage of their young idyllic days and their escapades, are only buildup, and all this time the terrible beauty of a small black figure between the twin towers was at the back of my mind. I cared only about that, and when the moment came in the narrative for Petit to step into the skyscraping sky, there was plenty there to convince us that a simple walk can center an ordinary picture, if indeed that here is an image of unutterable wonder.
Certainly you say to yourself: “It is only a tightrope walk. It isn’t much, and it can’t move me.” But then, you see Petit’s friend cry simply at the revisiting of the memory, and you can’t believe it has that grip on you. It is the memory of a moment, yet it reaches across 34 years. You realize that you are finding yourself in the same room with the memory of the twin towers without fury or pain. It does wonders to the process of grieving, like saying goodbye at the funeral. You don’t care about the bad, you don’t want the truth, you don’t want the whole picture, and you don’t even wish to hear the words of consolation. All you want to hear is that simple anecdote, the one story that might or might not have captured or symbolized the person you knew. You only want the memory of that dance you shared, and Petit had a most enchanting dance with the erstwhile soul of New York. “Man On Wire” is an elegy to the twin towers.
What is it with the feather-thin mythology of walking on air, penetrated by a wire and a man with the will to step onto it? When I was preparing for this article, I was reading old articles about Petit and his many feats and plans to walk over this or that (including across the Grand Canyon, which he has yet to attempt). I realized that I was asking myself: “Did he make it? Did he fall?” But of course he didn’t, or he wouldn’t be here in “Man On Wire.” It is beyond my imagination that a person can survive a nearly hour-long walk a quarter of a mile in the air—I can’t even walk to my kitchen without stumbling. It takes something so banal and basic as walking to stun you into uncanny awe.
There isn’t any mention of the old aggravating sounds of what happened to the towers. Petit and his allies do not break down and talk about it—if they did, “Man On Wire” would be colored by our disaffection. The dance cannot be done again. There have been already films on 9/11 (“World Trade Center”) and there will be more movies about 9/11. There might even be an expansive documentary on the terrorist act, the survivors, Al Qaeda, Osama Bin Laden, or even the towers that were the World Trade Center. But a simple elegy like this? It can only be delivered once. This is all we need to remember the towers. And it has helped us say goodbye. ♦
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"Quantum of Solace"
Friday, Dec 5, 2008 10:19PM / Standard Entry
The Great Depression
“Quantum of Solace”
By Jimmy So
Are we being overloaded with bad news about the financial “tsunami?” (As it is called in, of all places, Asia.) What we damn well need is a reminder that somewhere in the world, someone still has the prerogative to budget in an Aston Martin for James Bond to smash up. Of course 007 would deliver a swift uppercut to the global recession, but did the world ready itself for a Bond in depression?
In “Quantum of Solace,” Bond (Daniel Craig) is in mourning, his lover Vesper Lynd having died in the previous film, 2006’s “Casin Royale.” Maybe depression is too harsh—he’s still crashing cars, tackling traitors, making amends with former allies, going to the opera and sleeping with redheads—all in all, dealing with grief quite well.
The story picks up only hours after the end of “Casino Royale,” and Bond is still hurting and doggedly after revenge. In his hunt for last episode’s villain, Mr. White (Jesper Christensen), who gets away after being captured, Bond finds another color-coded member of Quantum, the secret organization that supposedly “has people everywhere.” Dominic Greene (Mathieu Almaric) is an unimposing environmentalist whose innocent hobby is overthrowing governments and taking over their water supply. Environmentalism is Mr. Greene’s front, as he is supposedly creating protected reserves but actually corrupting the agenda. Our favorite special agent, on the other hand, leaves a Sasquatch-sized carbon footprint in Siena, London, Haiti, Austria and Bolivia; teams up with a new Bond girl, Camille (Olga Kurylenko), saves impoverished Andeans from a drought, and wraps up the movie by driving not his own car, but recycling the villain’s hydrogen-powered Ford Edge.
A few friends have remarked to me: “I didn’t know this was going to be a sequel!” Most of mankind are so used to Bond as a series of stand-alone entertainment filled with epigrams, gadgets, and frivolous seduction that they didn’t expect anything different. Also shocking is that Bond is a loser; everybody he gets close to or cares for ends up losing their life—or are at least shot. He goes fearlessly headlong into every dangerous situation, including balconies in Italy and the backstage of “Tosca.” He smashes things and kills people before he can get intelligence from them (which is supposed to be a big part of his job descrīption, no?), and more often than not he survives thanks to luck. It doesn’t hurt that Mr. Greene shrieks like Maria Sharapova when he swings an axe at Bond, but with a foe as unworthy as Greene—whose most menacing move is turning his awkward eyes at Bond and opening them wide while his minions hurry in chase—Bond needn’t even worry much about survival. Greene’s other favorite move, which he does twice, is the frightening act of leading Camille to a ledge—once to strike fear into her by showing her a body lying in the shallow harbor bed, and once to push her off at a height of no more than three stories. For what? So that she will twist her ankle in the fall? Why they chose the cerebral Almaric to play a Bond villain I will never know.
Greene does have a slightly scary partner in crime, an exiled and lascivious Bolivian general named Medrano (Joaquin Cosio), who’s paying Greene to overthrow his native country’s government. It’s unconvincing that military might can be handed over to the general by the clerical Greene and his book-club-like organization—the members of Quantum do not meet in a war room, or a base in a hollow volcano, or in a nuclear submarine, but at a lakeside concert hall listening to Puccini. Who are the formidable henchmen protecting these terrifyingly powerful dark lords? Greene has a skinny sidekick named Elvis (Anatole Taubman) who looks like Professor Frink from “The Simpsons”—he comes with a bowl cut and all he needs are thick glasses.
Although Medrano claims to have filled his resume with randy violence (which we don’t see until near the end of the film), he and the boys and girls of Quantum could benefit from some show of their rightist terrorism; give a nod to Pierre Dux’s role as The General in “Z” (1969), for instance, who oozes notoriety. It is nearly perverse for a film to show so much of a hero’s violent triumphs—it becomes celebratory—but none of the villain’s atrocities. It is unfortunately very rare that filmmakers of today would use violence only to make you hate violence. I understand that the director of “Quantum of Solace,” Marc Forster, is hinting at the way corrupt power is exercised at the top ranks of global politics—Greene makes a pact with the CIA (much to the chagrin of Bond’s ally, Felix Leiter, played again by Jeffrey Wright) so that the U.S. government would do nothing about the impending Bolivian coup, and Quantum’s members include an advisor to the British Foreign Secretary. Quantum could, I suppose, stage a coup without firing a shot, but even conspiratorial power must be wielded with physical, concrete injuries and threats. What’s more, movie viewers cannot be forced to simply marvel at an action star’s many brutal acts in the name of thrills; we need none of Bond’s fights if we cannot cringe at what the villains are capable of—if we do not know what Bond is fighting for.
Le Chiffre, the antagonist of “Casino Royale,” was also a bit of a joke—he was only a pawn in Quantum and was simply put out of his misery by his bosses. But the movie had its heart in the right place. Director Martin Campbell at least bothered to show Le Chiffre’s attempt to blow up a giant airliner, and the villain positively tickled Bond’s private parts with a carpet beater. It was, therefore, too bad that Bond didn’t get to kick the living daylights out of him. You’d think that “Quantum of Solace,” the shortest-ever Bond film at a mere one hundred and six minutes long, could show us a little of why we should fear Greene and Quantum. Two of Bond’s allies are killed in this outing, assumed brutally beaten, or tortured, or both, but we don’t know which it is—because we don’t even see it. I am all for a minimum of violence in movies, but when Bond is allowed to cause drivers of Alfa Romeos to end up as crunched up crash test dummies in gratuitously realistic head-on collisions and eighty-foot cliff dives, violence that reminds us of what he’s saving the world from should not be spared.
We get, therefore, no thrills from 007 besting his new villains, and we can freely laugh at Greene’s assertion that his organization could make you quiver in your sleep, fearing for the wellbeing of your testicles—he makes the boo-hoo threat and he might be ordering a latte. And since the studio executives will probably not allow their franchise hero take on real threats like Al Qaeda and powers of its ilk, it is pretty much up to Craig to lend the twenty-first century Bond some emotional depth.
Craig’s Bond, we understand, is not the slick super spy of yesteryear. He is more raw, and why? Bond might not have aged, but he has changed as a reflection of the world since 1962. Intelligence warfare has matured, and with maturity things get a little graver. Can you trust a man like the Bond in “Thunderball” (1965)—who is not above blackmailing a nurse for sex—to protect your country?
And since it is clear that “Casino Royale” showed 007 in his beginnings (including earning his double-0, license-to-kill prefix), Craig’s portrayal thus far could be showing the novice’s transformation into Sean Connery’s more composed, slick Bond. Before I saw “Quantum of Solace,” I had known that it would be a sequel, and since I did not expect Mr. White and Mr. Greene’s vast organization to be stamped out just yet, I half hoped that the movie would be “The Empire Strikes Back” (1980) of a trilogy, a suffering, cascading, disturbing bridge that plunges into the netherworld. With the depression subtext, Bond clearly still has feelings that can be hurt, a newfound possibility for the special agent. He would be tested and battered, a Connery-Bond in training, and in the next installment, emerge triumphant, changed, and a little more like the spy we know in “Dr. No” (1962).
We get hints of that—as I mentioned earlier, Bond has to heave the body of a trusted friend into a Dumpster, and another ally dies (maybe only as an homage to a scene in 1964’s “Goldfinger”). As Craig’s rugby-player body tumbles its way through glass ceilings without a scratch and bangs his broad shoulders against guards when he’s handcuffed in an elevator—he doesn’t even need arms—it is that big head of Craig’s that we should focus on, that makes him look like a big baby, and he’s even acting in accordance. The rebooted Bond doesn’t deal well with authority, can’t get over his dead girlfriend, and drinks six of the martini she invented in a sitting. He could morph into Connery’s more calculated and relaxed ways in the next movie—Craig’s round, statuesque bust actually looks a little like Connery’s, and with a bit of brown hair dye the transformation could be complete. The suave Scot appeared in “Dr. No” fully formed, but the blond is still scabrous. It is conceivable that Craig could soon enjoy himself a little more, once he gets over the dead girlfriend.
But then, the chauvinism will return. Right now, with this Bond, I can sit back and enjoy a spy who seems as interested in meaningless sex with Camille as Jaws is with dental care. And anyway, “Quantum of Solace” isn’t dark enough. As the title promised, it does provide some consolation. Craig’s Bond did not plummet into the depths of depression. And, in a blessing, nor will he emerge out of it in “Return of the Jedi” (1983) fashion.
Craig’s Bond will always be a bit morbid. It has always been the actors who dictate how we view Bond, and grimness will be Craig’s contribution—it’s unlikely he’ll let such frivolities as plot get in the way of him and his character. What’s more, filmmaking has evolved—we demand a certain level of realism in our thrillers and melodramas—and we now have a man playing Bond who’s too intelligent an actor to revisit old follies. Craig understands that fans will readily accept a sleazy, cool spy, but a good film will not, and the undertakers of the new franchise are trying damn hard to make a decent movie. “Casino Royale” was too gaudy a title—it never fit the raw currents of that picture. “Quantum of Solace” is also a bizarre one, for it makes a Bond film sound scientific—or worse, like a car commercial. But its meaning is dead on—a quantum of solace is all we’ll get out of Bond from now on. ♦
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The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
Thursday, Dec 4, 2008 6:30PM / Standard Entry
Forever Young
“The Curious Case of Benjamin Button”
By Jimmy So
“The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” is about a man who takes 86 years to kick the bucket. The man, Benjamin Button (Brad Pitt), is born old and grows younger, but the curiosity is in seeing how the man is born and how he dies; the misfortune is that his demise takes two hours and forty-seven minutes. To my knowledge, nothing quite like this has been attempted on screen, unless you include the turn-back-the-clock efforts of Joan Rivers.
So how did they pull off giving birth to an old man with “a long smoke-colored beard” who can speak as soon as he was born, as F. Scott Fitzgerald intended in the short story the film is based on? The meaning of “based on” is taken as loosely as possible; screenwriters Eric Roth and Robin Swicord merely borrowed the idea of the story and none of the material, and certainly none of the light-heartedness of the social satire. Admittedly, Fitzgerald’s inchoate story doesn’t give the director, David Fincher, much to work with, but in some cases such a deficiency would free up the film maker to not be bothered with how best to convey the author’s style. Sure enough, Fincher isn’t cramped by Fitzgerald’s lack of curiosity, and the picture doesn’t deal with whether Button can go to Yale or Harvard (a big concern in the short story). But neither does Fincher offer his character anything but lumpy indulgence—Button is a bore with no personality and no moral core, and the man who plays him would win an Oscar if acting consists solely of gazing mutely out of the frame. The picture might as well be called “The Sluggish Stare of Brad Pitt."
The film cares nothing for immediacy, despite a frantic search for it that has the screenwriters creating a clock that runs backwards, “So that the boys who died”—in the First World War—“will come home.” Button is then born on Armistice Day. But this metaphor is not connected in any way with his life; Button has no vision, no drive and does not live as if he was given a second chance. Button comes into the world with his mother dying in childbirth, is nearly thrown into the Mississippi River by his wealthy father Thomas (Jason Flemyng), and gets adopted by Queenie (Taraji P. Henson), a black woman who runs an elderly home. With a background like that, you’d think Button would do something about civil rights—or become President (there are some scenes where Pitt looks a little like Franklin Roosevelt with a great white mane)—but the film doesn’t once touch on race relations. And not only does Fincher adopt temporal illogicality, the incongruence extends to social relations—a black woman picking up a white baby in the South without anybody saying anything?
Before anybody could say anything, Button has already messed with their idea of the irrevocable arrow of time, healthily ungrowing into a slightly less old, diminutive man. The reverse-aging basis offers Fincher an unrivalled opportunity to reproduce those computer-generated mouths they put on cats to make them talk. Button’s childhood (or is it his senility?) is forged on computer and detachedly mechanical. Dare we request Brad Pitt to competently portray an ancient creature with juvenile charm. (Pitt is not Robin Williams in “Jack” (1996), but then again, is anything and anyone like Williams in “Jack?”) Even if Pitt did any acting behind that wrinkled avatar, we wouldn’t be able to tell, and reviewing his track record we can safely assume he did none.
This is a movie of strung-together anecdotes—an evangelical preacher dies for no reason, a man gets struck by lightning seven times (every one of those hits are shown), and the picture must present the most pointless recitation of “The First Part of Henry the Sixth” ever put to film. The dull tale of Benjamin Button is actually told by Julia Ormond’s character Caroline as she tends to her dying mother Daisy (Cate Blanchett), reading out loud the diary of Button, who was Daisy’s lover. There is one scene—really, just one look—that Blanchett was able to salvage from this distant film: a lioness stare, as Button abandons Daisy and their daughter. Button is a coward and a chauvinist for underestimating the strength of Daisy, assuming that she’ll be unable to raise a daughter and a retrograding husband, but the film makes no effort to engage the audience on the possibility or consequences of that drama. One look—that is all, and forget the other scenes. Blanchett can do nothing for them. Every time Button and Daisy meet, a bit of chemistry builds up, but Fincher—who hasn’t had a strong sense of visual imagination since “Se7en” (1995) and “Fight Club” (1999)—fails to provide any amplitude, and things fizzle out. What about the sex scenes between the two supposedly hottest stars on the planet? When Button and Daisy finally sleep together, they do so in the elderly home, and they couldn’t proceed more matter-of-factly.
There is a klunky “Blind Chance” (1982)-like sequence that comes out of nowhere and goes away without doing its job, which is to disguise a deus ex machina. Thomas Button even runs into his son in a whorehouse—a nightmarish scenario for every father-and-son pair, and not a bad scene for a movie to find itself in. And what does Fincher do with this? Nothing. He doesn’t even bother, not in a Richard Lester way, but in a what-else-do-you-want-from-me way. “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” dies well before Benjamin Button is dead, which is remarkable because that effect is indigenous to a good number of Brad Pitt films—it must be written in his contract to drain a picture even before it begins. Consider “Meet Joe Black” (1998), “The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford” (2007) and “Legends of the Fall” (1994).
But “Benjamin Button” most readily recalls “Forrest Gump” (1994). Fincher’s picture is little more than a series of vignettes that represents its characters through the news of Pearl Harbor, a Lusitania-like assault, Balanchine, “Carousel,” Bolshoi and a storm that’s supposed to bring to mind Hurricane Katrina. There’s even a Captain Mike (Jared Harris), the “Benjamin Button” version of Lieutenant Dan, and Queenie—though no Sally Fields—also has a drab line that is nearly identical to Momma Gump’s “you never know what you’re gonna get.” Both films are childishly naïve, but whereas “Forrest Gump” infuriated some viewers, “Benjamin Button” will leave them little more than blasé. But perhaps “Benjamin Button” is an imperviously effective, self-referential exercise—for anybody who’s ever doubted that they grow older and not younger, after a hundred and sixty-seven minutes, you’ll know you’re never getting that precious time back. ♦
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