Posts Tagged Sean Penn

Jews on Christmas; The Curious Case of Benjamin Button review

January 8, 2009 at 4:52 am · Filed under Movie Reviews ·Tagged , , , , , , , , ,

I’ve already had one heated argument over this movie, which seems to do that to people as only really long movies and really short ones can.  I saw The Curious Case of Benjamin Button on Christmas, in a packed theater of Jews (or people who thought it would be fun to act like Jews), and I was stuck all the way to the side in the second row.  So my neck was craned awkwardly and most of my views of the characters were a bit skewed – and I STILL loved this movie.  I don’t think it’s good enough to crack my top three movies of the year, because those three (The Fall, The Dark Knight, WALL*E) are pretty impervious.  But still, it was an absolutely wrenching tale for me – a fully realized document of a life.  And that sounds kind of trite when I read it back, actually.  But dammit! It’s fucking true.

Benjamin Button, played subtly and stoically (too much so for any real shot at Mickey Rourke or Sean Penn’s Oscar) by Brad Pitt, ages backward, and grows up in an old folks home where he is left by his horrified father immediately after birth.  Though his body ages backwards, his mind is where his real age lies (a radical departure from the source material which at least one person I know thinks is awful).  His unique situation leads inexorably to an interesting life – people tend to be drawn to him at all stages of his life except for the radical edges, when they are repulsed.  When his body’s old but his mind is that of a preteen, people like my favorite character, Captain Mike, are charmed by his youthful enthusiasm despite his (apparent) advanced age.  Captain Mike helms a tugboat with a ragtag (of course) bunch of sailors that eventually sails to Russia, taking the mentally-teenaged Benjamin with them.

Okay, I just caught myself at really stupid plot summary.  Instead of continuing that, I’m going to give a list of people who affect Benjamin’s life in a meaningful way.

  • Queenie – Benjamin’s mother for all intensive purposes.  She raises him, gives him guidance rooted in a deep, deep faith and a seemingly endless well of kindness.  Although this kind of down-home, southern black TLC female character has gotten plenty clichéd by now, that doesn’t mean the role is just in the bank no matter what actress you pick.  Taraji P. Henson owns this role.
  • Ngunda Oti – Probably the most minor of these roles, but one of my favorites.  He’s the African pygmy who (based on a true story) lived in a zoo after being taken from his home in Africa.  He lived for a time in the old folks’ home with Benjamin, and taught him about self-confidence.  Rampai Mohadi was incredible here, he stole his scenes as a person who has that special light around him, the kind that makes any audience want to know him, and want him to have what he desires – to be home.
  • Thomas Button – Benjamin’s father who abandons him at birth, he’s the head of Button’s Buttons, a successful button company, and after running into (mentally) young Benjamin, decides to keep tabs on him and invite him out for the occasional drink.  The sheer emotional anguish of these encounters from Thomas’s side is fascinating, since he’s not really a monster – he just made a bad decision.  That doesn’t mean he’s a good person either (we never really can tell), but he has plenty of humanity.  Thomas does care about Benjamin, leaving his button factory to him at death, and (SPOILER) though Benjamin resents him after the reveal for abandonment and subsequent deceit, he can see what we see. (END SPOILER)
  • Captain Mike – Don’t we all wish we knew a Captain Mike? He’s radically free-spirited and independent, but with a killer sense of nobility.  When called upon at the outset of World War II, he knows what he (and members of his crew) must do. (SPOILER) Mike’s death slams home like a hammer, the hardest death of the movie, mostly because he was the only one that died before his time.  Up until this point, Benjamin’s only knowledge of death was the old folks who came through the home at which he grew up.  There, death was natural and expected.  But here, Benjamin learns that death can be surprising, and can be tragic.  Mike’s last words were my first almost-cry of the movie.  The hummingbird bit, though, seemed a bit much.(END SPOILER)
  • Elizabeth Abbott – I’m split about this one.  She’s the wife of a British spy in Russia, played with sort of a cold warmth that only British ladies like Tilda Swinton can master.  There are some lines in her sequence that are the most realist of the whole movie – natural, as opposed to literary, like the rest of the movie.  But there are some lines that are also stilted, shoehorned in to give context.  Really watchable, but not as profound as the rest.
  • Daisy – Where to begin.  As a child, she was okay – the well-known curious girl that a boy her age can’t help but like.  But once Cate Blanchette takes over, she is devastating.  Maybe my favorite narrative function of this movie was due to the framing of the piece as being told to Daisy from Benjamin’s journal on her deathbed while Hurricane Katrina was closing in on New Orleans by her daughter.  What this allows for is the completely realized perspective of both main characters.  Although some have criticized this part as director David Fincher and writer Eric Roth talking down to the audience, I really appreciate knowing character’s motivations instead of being forced to assume, sometimes without enough information and sometimes incorrectly.  Daisy’s narrative presence as the grounding force (that is, the perspective of someone aging forwards) is a crucial part of this story, and makes it feel as whole as it does.  And the fact that she gets so damaged, so affected by Benjamin’s condition might be my favorite part of the movie.

As you can tell, not a perfect movie, but an extremely good one, completely filled with huge, huge emotions.  Of course, there’s a lot more to this movie, like the painful, wrenching limits of time – but I can’t really say it in any more profound a way than AintitCool’s Moriarty did in his swan song review for the site.  This is really the best I can do.

And there’s also this old guy who talks about getting struck by lightning a bunch of times that provides some classic comic relief stuff.  This movie, until the real heart of the Daisy love sequence, isn’t tragic – it has some wry moments.  But these little lightning scenes took the audience by such surprise that a little soundless clip got huge, HUGE laughs.  And the last bit, even in the midst of some of the heaviest moments, made the audience laugh just as hard, but through their tears.

It seems we finally have our theme for comparing 2007 and 2008 as years in movies.  Although no one would begin to argue that 2008 rivals ’07 as far as the quality of their movies (I hope), what ’08 does provide that ’07 didn’t (except for in a couple of instances) were movies about big emotions, big feelings, as opposed to big concepts, big thoughts like in There Will Be Blood.  And as far as the magnum opus of each year, that movie really fits into my comparison when against, say, The Fall, which I’ll deal with in my year-end list, and against this movie.  I look forward to seeing this again when I don’t have to crane my neck.

Okay, I realize I did this character list twice in a row.  But they were far apart, the reviews both took a long, long time to finish each, so cut me a break.  Reviews of Milk and Let The Right One In will be my last before the year-end list.  After that, this blog will hit a crossroads that might need a full post in itself to discuss.

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What? Me write an entry? Absurd! Into the Wild Review

June 20, 2008 at 4:04 am · Filed under Movie Reviews ·Tagged , , , ,

I’m really elated that people are getting on board with this idea of a collective review blog.  It just makes me happy to see that people are expressing their opinions, and it makes me even happier that I was able to facilitate it.  Now the next step to legitimacy is a sustained blog – one that keeps going into the foreseeable future, instead of just a flash in the pan.  That’s been a challenge for me in the past; I often begin great undertakings and never get around to finishing them (read: IMDb Top 250 project).  But anyway, let’s get into the review, since I anticipate it being a long one.

Into the Wild was written and directed by Sean Penn, who has really had to work hard for my respect, since he just seems like such an ass.  However, he has proven himself as a great actor, and now a great filmmaker.  Into the Wild has vaulted itself into the second tier of my favorite movies – not all time best, but really really great.

Disgusted with the materialism of the world around him and scarred by a broken family life, Christopher McCandless left everything behind to pursue a life on the road, stopping to meet and get to know people on the way, and eventually deciding to live off the land in Alaska in an attempt to find purity and happiness in solitude, which is the way he saw that man was meant to be.

McCandless, who took the name Alexander Supertramp for his travels, leaves an indelible mark on all who cross his path, and the movie gives us the impression that all of his companions are better people when he left them from when he found them.  However, it’s hard to ignore the sadness and tragedy that each person felt when he moved on, and each time he does, I really wanted him to stay, because it seemed like he was happy where he was.

When he gets to Alaska, McCandless has an up-and-down existence, reading and making discoveries about himself that I won’t spoil for those who haven’t seen it.

There’s a real profound quality about the movie, in what Christopher McCandless, played by Emile Hirsch, says, in what the people he meets say, in the voice-over narration by McCandless and his sister, and in the actions of McCandless – whether reinspiring romance, showing an aging man a new outlook on life, or fighting for survival in the Alaskan wilderness.

It’s a credit to Penn as a writer and Hirsch as an actor that the character of McCandless was portrayed so believably, despite how outlandish he was.  At no point did I think, “No way could he have done that.”  He just seems like a once-in-a-lifetime person you meet, a person who makes you smile and frown at the same time when you remember him, because as Red put it in the Shawshank Redemption, “I have to remind myself that some birds aren’t meant to be caged. Their feathers are just too bright. And when they fly away, the part of you that knows it was a sin to lock them up DOES rejoice. Still, the place you live in is that much more drab and empty that they’re gone. I guess I just miss my friend.” That line makes me choke up every time, and it couldn’t apply more to this movie.

It’s very tough to have this strong a message in a movie (that of finding happiness your own way, either through people, nature, what-have-you, outside of materialism, so it’s a real happiness) without getting preachy, but Penn pulls it off, mainly because the film never speaks to the audience about these things – it either speaks to the characters or to itself, which seems to make it all the more powerful.

And if the first half (or two-thirds) of the movie is uplifting with the spirit of freedom and independence, the latter part is just as heartbreaking with the sadness McCandless leaves in his wake – the old man (played for an Oscar nomination by Hal Holbrook) who loved him so much in a short period that he asked to adopt Chris, the young girl in Slab City, and most of all, his family.

In the movie, McCandless only interacts with his family once, after his graduation.  His parents are horrifying materialists, played by William Hurt and Marcia Gay Harden (film buffs are beginning to realize now in this review how well-cast this movie is), but his sister is the deepest tragedy of them all, and it’s where I lost sympathy for Chris.  He left without so much as a letter or phone call to the one person he said understood him.  Her voice-overs are poignant, and progress from wistful to hurt and lonely over the course of the film.  However, all we get of the parents after he leaves are mute expressions of strangled guilt at the knowledge that they drove him away.

I really wish I could write more, because this review feels unfinished, but it took a lot out of me.  Looking back, I feel that the main strength of this movie was in its ability to get the audience really invested in the characters and the story.  I started to get bleary-eyed just while writing about McCandless’ sister.  I may come back tomorrow and flesh it out some more, but I’ll leave you with one thing for now:  this is a great, great movie, but it’s a real tough watch.  Its tragedy, unlike the darkest moments of romantic comedies or other cheap tear-jerker moments, is real and earned and doesn’t pull any punches or exaggerate.  The total palpability of the grief of everyone involved will weigh on you – don’t plan on doing anything fun right after seeing this movie.  But see it anyway.

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