Gran Torino (2008)

Kamis, 26 Februari 2009

Gran Torino (2008)

Gran Torino (Clint Eastwood, 2008)

In Sergio Leone's invaluable masterpiece The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly (1966), a very young Clint Eastwood plays an unnamed cowboy (popularly known as the Man with No Name), who in his pursuit for hidden treasure, involuntarily gets involved in the ongoing Civil War. In one scene, he witnesses firsthand the effects of war as he rides by fallen soldiers struggling to stay alive amidst mortal wounds and severe despair. Through death and suffering, Eastwood's unnamed cowboy sheds his familiar indifference to partially reveal his affiliation with humanity. A firsthand experience with the human condition pushes him out of the comfort of his chosen neutrality; and all at once, witnesses the repercussions of humanity in its most depraved. Whether or not the encounter causes a dent on a soul that has already been rendered callous by violence is out of the film's range. The Man with No Name rides into the sunset wealthier from the spoils of his adventure, and we can only guess whether he took with him the weight of his wary world.

More than four decades later, Eastwood plays Walt Kowalski, a Korean war veteran whose wartime experiences has turned him into a cynical fossil of a man. The inescapable internal and external hell that Walt struggles with seems to be the apt representative of the grim twilight of all of his famous onscreen personas' lives: The Man With No Name of Leone's popular spaghetti westerns, Inspector Harry Callahan of Don Siegel's Dirty Harry (1971) and its many sequels and offshoots, Bill Munny of Unforgiven (Eastwood, 1992), and to a certain degree, Franky Dunn of Million Dollar Baby (Eastwood, 2004), who share with Walt the edgy perspective in life would normally lead to a lifetime of repressed remorse, lest callousness has crept into the core of their souls to the point that redemption is no longer an option. Walt is observably, an embattled soul who in his old age, is still painfully struggling with the baggage created from a lifetime of accumulated and accumulating sins. It seems that there can be no redemption for Walt; yet the miracle of Eastwood's filmmaking in Gran Torino (which to my mind is one of Eastwood's better films in his career as a director and undoubtedly his best film in the past decade) is to seamlessly convince his audience of Walt's slow yet deliberate turnaround.

The film opens during the wake of Walt's recently deceased wife. His children, their wives, their sons and daughters, attend the ceremony in deference to mere blood relationship. The strain that defines the relationship between Walt and his family is more than apparent: Walt is constantly irritated by the antics of his grandchildren (he silently growls when he catches his grandsons play with his medal of honor; a more prominent though silent growl is expressed when his granddaughter is leading him to give his beloved memorabilia); and the latter repay his irritation with discomfort when in his presence; Walt is disappointed at his son for driving a Japanese-made car, and dismisses him and his wife from his house when they suggested on his birthday that he relocate to a retirement home. Walt is obviously living in a pit. He has no real relationship with anyone, especially after the death of his wife. His health is deteriorating. He is slowly being cornered in a neighborhood where he is obsolete and immaterial.

Walt is a caricature of classic American arrogance: mouthing racist mantras as he sees his formerly White neighborhood fill up with immigrants; embarrassing the novice parish priest as the latter convinces him to go into confession, lecturing the young priest on life and death based on his experiences; exchanging insults with the local barber, supposedly in good and friendly humor. The face of the America he has lived in, loved, and killed for is rapidly changing. His insistence on the America he knew has stunted his life, which primarily consists of him sulking in his front porch while drowning himself in beer or admiring his one treasure, his vintage Gran Torino. In a twist of fate, the Gran Torino, the one thing that represents his ideal America, becomes the spark that pushes him to befriend Thao (Bee Vang), his Hmong neighbor who he catches one night attempting to steal his car as part of the initiation rites for a gang he was coerced to join, and his family.

Absent from Gran Torino is the typical heavy-handedness and seriousness that often plagues Eastwood's directorial efforts. Eastwood treats the material with an irreverence that is refreshing and most surprisingly, quite fun. The story evolves from light and often comedic sketches that depict Walt's persistent intolerance (with Eastwood's over-the-top yet undeniably apt portrayal limited to growls, grimaces, and guttural utterances of profanities and indecent remarks) to a highly emotional morality play, where Walt, with all his ethical inadequacies, is forced to referee a delicate situation that he finds himself in the center of. The sudden gravity that develops midway through the film is unforced; instead, it lures the audience into an emotional involvement with the affairs of Walt, not totally different from the one achieved through the machinations of daytime soap, that escalates in a climactic scene that is resolved by Walt's mental prestidigitation that completes his redemption, something often wished for but hardly achieved by most of cinema's morally weathered figures.

Milk (2008)

Minggu, 15 Februari 2009

Milk (2008)

Milk (Gus Van Sant, 2008)

Milk, to put it simply, is a terrific film. Gus Van Sant's take on the life of Harvey Milk (immaculately played by Sean Penn), America's first openly gay elected public official, is depicted within a perspective of acceptance rather than mere tolerance. As a result, the film, despite its largely political content, does away with the polemics of the gay rights movement and instead looks into the logic of the movement: that it is not sexual preference that divides us but our common humanity that binds us. Van Sant adeptly recreates the era through Harris Savides' stunning cinematography that is only amplified by Van Sant's use of several archived footage. Dustin Lance Black's screenplay is understandably sentimental, since Harvey Milk, with his accomplishments in giving the gay community a voice in American politics and his tragic demise, has turned into an icon. Van Sant acknowledges the screenplay's need to beatify its subject, but instead of simply subscribing to what's written, he maneuvers the film to demystify Milk, and bring him back to Earth from the pantheon of icons whose accomplished histories have dehumanized them completely. Thus, Milk is most delicious during the moments it showcases Milk in his most human, where we sense, without Van Sant announcing it, the troubles and conflicts that burden the man.

Milk opens with Harvey hooking up with a young man in one of New York City's subway stations. Scott Smith (James Franco, who makes most his timeless good looks to portray Harvey's handsome target), dodges Harvey's propositions with playful candor. Van Sant shoots the sequence with an unwavering interest to the game; his camera switching from Harvey's persistent face (his facial gestures and vocal intonation protests the lie that he is living as he is reeling in a potential catch to cap the forty years of living inside the closet) to Scott's sly smiling mug. Harvey succeeds and the two leave the subway as a couple. They make love in a hotel room; the screen purposely covered by the couple's copulating bodies, bronzed by the room's yellow lights. After their lovemaking session, the two playfully celebrate Harvey's birthday. It is this endearingly intimate portrait that jumpstarts the film, purposely reminding us that Milk, despite his contributions to the gay rights movement, is as human as any of us, that he is persistently needful of human connection yet fumbling in front of the object of his desires.

This is the balancing act Van Sant maintains throughout the film: to show the story of Harvey Milk both as an important portion of American history and as a struggle by a man forced into the limelight while battling his own personal demons. It is this balancing act that turns Milk into something more than a biopic. Milk is a fascinating portrait that transports the viewer in a situation where the gay psyche is no longer marginalized but is the mainstream. Absent the heavy-handed pedagogy that usually infests films that are burdened with big issues, Van Sant is able to tell his story with as much levity for the viewer to partially forget the issues and just get swept by the immense range of emotions (of anger, love, hate, lust, etc.) that are fluently evoked by Milk's struggle.

Dan White (Josh Brolin), who shot Harvey Milk and San Francisco mayor George Moscone (Victor Garber) one morning out of mixed emotions of anger and insecurity, is shown not as the representative of America's intolerant majority, but as an ostracized soul, trembling in the midst of an overwhelming change because he is fearful of being outnumbered; probably because he himself has been closeted by his culture and family. He stands in the middle of two warring factions (Anita Bryant and Senator Briggs' conservative Christian front and Milk and Mayor Moscone's gay rights defense), where he and what he represents are rendered insignificant as a result of the social and cultural movement brought about by Milk's agenda.

Van Sant, who has depicted the outcasts and the outcasted in Gerry (2002), Elephant (2003) and Last Days (2005) with an intriguing mixture of sophistication and simplicity, paints Dan White's character with the same inexplicable psychology that consumes the outwardly normal characters he explored in his previous films. In fact, most of the characters in Milk are similarly explored as damaged souls, inadvertently alienated by the rapidly moving times and the rest of humanity's violent stampede to keep up. Cleve Jones (Emile Hirsch) has evolved from being an apathetic good-timer to Milk's campaign manager through sheer circumstance; a salvaged soul who has managed to keep up and be in the mainstream. Jack Lira (Diego Luna), Milk's beloved lover, passionately raw and perpetually jealous, is unable to keep track, in one beautifully shot sequence (Harris Savides' tracking shot of Milk's confused steps up his apartment's bathroom to find Lira dead is one of the film's strongest moments), just gives up.

Milk seems to be a departure for Van Sant, especially from the sequence of films he directed previously (from Gerry to Paranoid Park (2007), all of which can hardly be defined as commercial ventures). In fact, for a time, it seems like Van Sant has sold out again, the same way he did when he made Good Will Hunting (1997) and Finding Forrester (2000), which, in my opinion, are merely finely directed Hallmark features, not films that should be taken seriously. However, in Milk, Van Sant is able to reach a wider audience without sacrificing artistic integrity. True, the film indeed flirts with melodrama (a gay kid calls Harvey to tell him that he would commit suicide instead of being sent to a correction facility by his parents; the side story finds fruition when the same kid calls Harvey to tell him he won in Los Angeles, and that he has escaped from the clutches of his parents and into independence), yet beyond these rare missteps, Milk is an absolute triumph.

Doubt (2008)

Sabtu, 07 Februari 2009

Doubt (2008)

Doubt (John Patrick Shanley, 2008)

While film and theater bear similarities to the point that theater directors often cross-over to film and vice versa, there is a distinction that separates the two art forms apart. Film is a recorded medium, where a single performance is eternalized. Theater, on the other hand, is organic, where each individual performance has certain nuances that differentiate itself from previous or future ones. That said, adapting a stage play into a film involves something more than recording a performance. For the film to truly stand on its own, the director must infuse the material a personality that will make it distinct and memorable, enough for it to be immortalized not only in form but in spirit. Take for example Tim Burton's Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (2007), the prolific director's take on Stephen Sondheim's musical of the same title, about the legendary vengeful barber who murders his clients and stuffs them in into his meat pies. Burton remains faithful to the material but infuses it with a visual style, a sense of comedic darkness that is distinctly his own. In turn, he creates one of the most memorable stage-to-film adaptations in recent years.

John Patrick Shanley's Pulitzer Prize-winning play Doubt: A Parable is an electrifying examination on how we live in a gray world that morality and the institutions that espouse it insist on classifying as either black or white. The play centers on Sister Aloysius, the strict and stern principal of a Bronx school, who headstrongly launches an investigation against Father Flynn, the amiable parish priest, when Sister James, an impressionable young nun, finds Donald Miller, the school's first Black student, distraught after a private session with the priest. The play does away with revelations, keeping the narrative within a certain level of very uncomfortable uncertainty. It is this uncertainty that fuels the play's questions, and these questions are just left unanswered, ultimately giving birth to further queries on the repercussions of the fallibility of supposedly ironclad principles such as religion and justice.

Shanley's film adaptation of his own play, I suspect, barely differs from the stage version. Doubt is embellished by Roger Deakins' reliable cinematography and Howard Shore's cleverly spare musical score. However, underneath the cinematic trappings that Shanley has diligently put together, Doubt runs like a theater piece, stubbornly mechanical as to how the story unfolds, with conversations that have a tendency to overflow with literary self-importance. Symbolisms, some obvious and some archaic, abound. However, Doubt feels to be as potent in its insistence on denting humanity's reliance on the questionable certainty of morality with a tool that seems as natural as the world itself: doubt. The only problem with Doubt is that it is overly reliant on its source material, down to the overly theatrical elements (which is undoubtedly the result of having the same person adapt and direct his own play; we never really get to see a valid re-imagining of the material), to the point that it feels absolutely inert: an overbearing and at times, rambling piece whose only real value as a film is that it made the source material widely available, and nothing more.

Thus, the burden of making Doubt an effective theater-to-film adaptation belongs largely to the ensemble. Amy Adams, who plays Sister James, personifies naiveté very well (as we've also seen in her roles in Phil Morrison's Junebug (2005) and Kevin Lima's Enchanted (2007)). It is the way that she commands this facile innocence into the realm of distrust and suspicion that is quietly riveting. Philip Seymour Hoffman, who plays Father Flynn, adeptly crafts a character that is the center of the film's persisting ambiguity, most of the time, convincingly sociable and intelligent, delivering rousing sermons in the pulpit that navigates the Catholic Church's eventual liberation from its dogmatism, and sometimes, palpably predatory. Viola Davis, who powerfully plays Donald's working-class mother in an extended scene with Sister Aloysius, has the duty of further deepening the dilemma, infusing Shanley's discussions on the blurry spectrum between good and evil with the expansive reach of real world poverty. Her surprising reaction to Sister Aloysius' affronts introduces the malady of social inequity to the picture: if Father Flynn is indeed guilty as Sister Aloysius claims, is his actions, considering that it is Donald's only hope in a world that has decidedly existed against his race and gender, evil?

Of course, the picture really belongs to Meryl Streep, who graduates Sister Aloysius as a caricature of authoritarian pompousness into a more understandable monster of a woman: a wasted figure that retreats to religion in the midst of tragedy (which also explains why it is so easy for her to give it up). Her motivations for destroying Father Flynn are unclear: is it really in the interest of justice? to protect Donald Miller from the abusive priest? to quietly assert the strength that the Catholic Church, through its dogmatic insistence that only males can be priests and nuns are answerable to priests, has deprived her? Despite this ambiguity in her character, Streep plays Sister Aloysius with methodical coldness, but with an allowance to show cracks so that little bits of her shrouded humanity can be observed. Doubt, as what I think is only a recorded version of the play, a mere product of modern convenience, belongs largely to the ensemble, which, through the individual cast members' inspired performances, has elevated the film from a mere a typical adaptation to something more.

Australia (2008)

Sabtu, 31 Januari 2009

Australia (2008)

Australia (Baz Luhrmann, 2008)

In Baz Luhrmann's Romeo + Juliet (1996), the oft-repeated and replicated Shakespearean romance, including the famous playwright's hefty Victorian grammar and vocabulary, is lifted from the streets of medieval Verona into the contemporary Verona, an anonymous suburb in the middle of the United States. The gimmick effectively creates an illusion of heightened romanticism within the confines of present-day America, where undying pledges of love and prolonged vendettas are uncommon, thus, making movie-going romantics swoon despite the improbability of Luhrmann's experimentation. In Moulin Rouge! (2001), Luhrmann infuses another love-against-all-odds tale set in 1899 Paris between an impoverished poet and an in-demand courtesan with contemporary pop and rock songs. It feels like a hyperactive and sometimes incoherent mess: an overproduced MTV where women dance in tight corsets and men sing in bright trenchcoats. For me, it's a guilty pleasure.

Baz Luhrmann's directing style involves a lot of pomp, a lot of spectacle, a lot of unabashed lavishness. His films are enjoyable precisely because it skirts realism for grandiosity, converting what typically would be commonplace tales in commonplace settings into invites to an alternate universe where humanity is driven by passion (more often than not, in insanely large doses), enough for dancers to equate ballroom dancing with love and life (in Strictly Ballroom (1992)); or for young lovers to utter declarations of love in old English; or for turn-of-the-century Parisians to belt out hits by Madonna, Bono, the Beatles, among others.

Australia, Luhrmann's latest, is tame compared to his previous excesses. There are no musical interludes, no outdated verbose dialogues, no fierce dance-offs to salvage what essentially are two-dimensional characters interacting in borrowed storylines. Instead, Luhrmann mines from what seems to be an immense national pride, casting two of the continent's most internationally familiar faces in another love story that defies all odds set during a pertinent portion of Australia's history. As a result, Australia suffers from an unwieldy heft: a need to be epic in scope because of its desire to be relevant.

Hence, the film's central romance is fitted right in the middle of the impending Pacific War and the plight of the stolen generations, sons and daughters of aboriginal mothers and White fathers who are forced out of their families by the church in order to cleanse them of their so-called savage lineage (Philip Noyce's Rabbit-Proof Fence (2002) offers a sincerer and more accurate depiction of these stolen generations). To convince her husband to sell their cattle ranch, Lady Sarah Ashley (Nicole Kidman) travels from her leisurely estate in England to Faraway Downs in the middle of the Australian wildernesses, only to find out that her husband has been murdered, and their ranch is nearly bankrupt under the management of Neil Fletcher (David Wenham), who double agents for King Carney, owner of the largest cattle ranch in the continent. In order to reverse the misfortunes of Faraway Downs, Sarah Ashley is forced to drive her ranch's best cattle into the port town of Darwin to win the contract with the government to supply beef to the war-ready army. Along the way, she becomes surrogate mother to Nullah (Brandon Walters), half-breed son of Fletcher and an aboriginal woman, and falls deeply in love with Drover (Hugh Jackman), who agrees to help her drive her cattle to Darwin.

The problem is Luhrmann does not have the requisite discipline or integrity to mount such an exercise. The immensely overt emotionality is in fact, shallow. Its historical deft feels highly artificial, more like a backdrop rather than a genuine interest. The sensuality is almost non-existent, with Luhrmann floundering on attempts to pump the romance with amorous verve. With Australia, Luhrmann's excesses feel more like padding than style and quirk. It's still sometimes entertaining, but to be sure, Australia is just hardly the film it was imagined to be.

The Thank You Girls (2008)

Sabtu, 24 Januari 2009

The Thank You Girls (2008)

The Thank You Girls (Charliebebs Gohetia, 2008)

The Thank You Girls is obviously an editor's film. The story is absolutely simple. A group of professional gay pageant contestants who never actually win anything (referred to sarcastically as "thank you girls," in reference to the obligatory script a pageant host would throw to losing candidates as they flock out of stage), travel by jeepney, rickety from the years of use but beautified by its passengers' sheer creativity, from a losing stint in Davao City to Cagayan de Oro City, where they would try their luck in another pageant. Charliebebs Gohetia, the oftentimes incredible editor of some of Brillante Mendoza's films like Manoro (The Teacher, 2006), Pantasya (Fantasy, 2007), Foster Child (2007) and Tirador (Slingshot, 2007), fractures the straightforward narrative, successfully turning the thank you girls' colorful roadtrip into something more profound: an observation on the repetitiousness of these characters' lives.

The traveling group consists of the following colorful personalities: Bernadette (July Jimenez), the boisterous kleptomaniac, Vanette (Kit Poliquit), the cantankerous prima dona, Macario (Kim Vergara), the hopelessly terrible singer, Allyson (Gie Salonga), the loveless queen who is hoping to meet his former love, a sexy starlet who is hosting the gay beauty pageant in Cagayan de Oro, and Paola (Pidot Villocino), the group's mother hen whose maternal skills are consistently challenged by his frisky son Chris (EJ Pantujan) and his wayward lover Carlos (Ari Bancale). Erupting from the unpredictable chemistry (a delightful product of putting together six drag queens in the cramped confines of a jeepney) are several nuggets of comedic genius (atop the jeepney, the pageant contestants practice their Q&A's, often ending with spectacularly spoken declarations that sound good but make no sense at all) and melodramatic twists and turns. As it is, The Thank You Girls is a whole lot of fun.

Digging through the often humorous and sometimes touching spectacle, you arrive at a well-covered core that might escape the viewer who becomes too enthralled with the shallow delights of the girls' misadventures. Gohetia cuts the narrative, often repeating instances, dialogues, and events, to a certain degree, to guide the story to track a character's sideplot; but more importantly, and I presume, to drive a point.

Gohetia seems to be commenting on the predictability of his characters' lives: as they parrot the same motherhood statement in response to all pageant questions; as Bernadette attempts to pilfer a cellphone, only to be chased away; as Chris participates in anonymous sexual trysts in rest-stops and restaurants; as as they travel from one pageant to another, always to lose. As it turns out, the underlying melancholy that The Thank You Girls subtly assumes is something predictable as well: stories of parents violently treating their homosexual children; stories of hopelessly romantic gay lovers abused and exploited by their objects of affection; stories these drag queens share with the rest of the country, that persistent attempt to rise above poverty, by all means possible, whether it requires a roadtrip worth a thousand miles, meals composed of hundreds of hormone-changing pills, and finales resulting in endless insults, jeers, and sometimes, adulation.

It's a lovely picture: one that utilizes cinema's infatuation with the effeminate homosexual, without exploiting them. It is slightly reminiscent of Lino Brocka's Ang Tatay Kong Nanay (My Father, My Mother, 1978), where the incomparable Dolphy plays a cross-dressing surrogate father (he also dabbles in joining beauty pageants at night) to his former lover's child. Brocka masterfully utilizes Dolphy (who is famous for playing drag queens, most often, to comedic effect) to create a well-made melodrama that forcefully explores, by pitting a gay man with the duties of fatherhood, the painful divide that daunts the homosexual man. While The Thank You Girls is much more cheerful and seemingly impertinent, it nonetheless evokes the same pressing concern: that underneath the cheap make-up, the fake boobs, and the loud costumes, are men surviving through the inescapable redundancy of living.

Bontoc Eulogy (1995)

Jumat, 16 Januari 2009

Bontoc Eulogy (1995)

Bontoc Eulogy (Marlon Fuentes, 1995)

Cinema thrives in illusions. Its existence is predicated on the ability to manipulate the limited capacities of the human eye to view still images sprinting in quickfire succession. French filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard proclaimed cinema as "the most beautiful fraud in the world." While cinema largely owes its endurance as an artform to its ability to sustain that primordial lie, its purpose is magnified, ranging from unabashed escapism to poetic verity. Thus, Godard also claimed that "the Cinema is truth 24 frames per second."Austrian filmmaker Michael Haneke's rebuttal is much more accurate. Reconciling Godard's two inconsistent quotes, he said that "film is 24 lies per second at the service of truth, or at the service of the attempt to find the truth."

Bontoc Eulogy, directed by Filipino-American filmmaker Marlon Fuentes, is a faux documentary about an Igorot warrior who was one of the 1102 tribal Filipinos sent to the 1904 St. Louis World Fair to be exhibited to America's curious masses. Bontoc Eulogy draws its inspiration and interest on historical events, but is cleverly crafted from facts, subtle half-truths, and downright obvious falsehoods. Archival videos and images, re-staged footage, soundbites, and other elements are stitched together to create a coherent whole, seamlessly operating like a real documentary. Yet, Fuentes' goal here is clearly not to deceive (unlike Peter Jackson in Forgotten Silver (1995), his most beautiful fraud ever). Instead, he uses that portion of history he refurbished as a springboard for his discussion on his own fractured identity as a Filipino (who, according to film critic Alexis Tioseco, left the Philippines for the United States and hasn't returned since for reasons only known to him).

Bontoc Eulogy is the unnamed narrator's investigation on the fate of Markod, the narrator's grandfather who was separated from his pregnant wife to join a torturous expedition to the St. Louis World Fair. The investigation leads to several points of interest, primarily to anthropologists and historians, as the gritty details of survival against the backdrop of very drastic changes in climate and culture is deliberately told in the fashion of a personal memoir, recorded by Markod and replayed by the narrator for the benefit of quenching his haunting curiosity of his roots. While fact and imagination mix to the point of the audience not knowing where fiction starts and where it ends, the film dutifully fulfills the most apparent of its goals: to provide ample light to a footnote in Philippine history, where Filipino men and women were exported around the world for the sole purpose of exposing their supposed primitivity, thus earning America the greenlight to colonize the Philippines, in the guise of gifting the archipelago with civilizationl; exploitation in the guise of benevolence.

To be satisfied and stop there would defeat the subtle artistry behind Bontoc Eulogy. While the film concentrates mostly with Markod's experiences during the St. Louis World Fair, it is also about the narrator's own dilemma as a Filipino uprooted from the motherland and in the brink of losing his identity, which in turn, is reflective of Fuentes' own situation. The narrator rationalizes, "to survive in this new land, we had to forget." Assimilation, the ability to combine cultural traits in the process of survival, not civilization, is America's gift to the Philippines, and the Philippines has maximized this gift, ultimately forgetting itself along the way. This is the narrator and Fuentes' dilemma, acknowledging that "we must remember in order to survive," not exactly as humans, but as Filipinos with an identity and culture to hold onto.

History repeats itself. The Philippines no longer exports its citizens to be displayed in world fairs and museums. The Philippines no longer needs salvation from what its colonizers refer to as savagery. The Philippines needs salvation from anything as broad as poverty and political turmoil or any pressing matter that would force a man to cut the cord that connects himself to his nation. We never become aware what drove the narrator (or Fuentes) away from the Philippines, but their emotional thirst for a reconnection to the motherland (or at the very least, a definite explanation as to his present scenario) fuels the picture, allowing for parallelisms between the narrator's predicament and Markod's eventual descent to cultural limbo. In Bontoc Eulogy, Fuentes adamantly searches for questions to answers he himself might not be aware of, and in turn, creates a film that seems to be the literal translation of Haneke's definition of cinema.

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (2008)

Jumat, 09 Januari 2009

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (2008)

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (David Fincher, 2008)

It's easy to get swept away by one's curiosity of the unique condition of Benjamin Button (played by Brad Pitt who is apt for what essentially is an iconic role, giving the character the same visual presence he contributed to Andrew Dominik's The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (2007) as the infamous criminal) and that condition's repercussion to his life, particularly to his romance with Daisy (Cate Blanchett, who infuses the picture with incandescent humanity), his childhood friend. At first, David Fincher's The Curious Case of Benjamin Button seems to be traversing the road most travelled, concerning itself primarily with the afflicted protagonist and his fated lover to the point of melodramatic tedium (like similarly themed films like Ron Howard's treacly A Beautiful Mind (2001) and Robert Zemeckis overpraised Forrest Gump (1994)). Fortunately, Fincher uses the intriguing premise just enough to reel us into his fascinatingly detailed world, which in my opinion, is far more curiouser and far more intriguing than Benjamin Button's fantastic aging process.

As soon as we're hypnotized by the painful complexities of Benjamin Button's bizarre life and romance, Fincher posits his weighty observations on the inevitability of time's passing and the quiet majesty of singular moments in the larger expanse of time. A moment can change a lifetime. This is something Fincher belabors when he narrates the little actions, mostly insignificant moments in a parcel of time that is shared by everyone in the universe, that led to Daisy's horrific accident. Daisy's accident would then lead to her humbling, and finally into Benjamin's arms, and then into a lifetime painfully shared in waiting and anticipating.

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button covers the entirety of Benjamin's lifetime. It is a lifetime that is spent on waiting. Benjamin, along with the multitude of people he meets, are mere passive components of history. They enter and exit moments in history for the sole reason of time's eventual passing, inactively anticipating until history catches up with them: as with Benjamin's sojourn in Russia where years of tugboating are interrupted by the arrival of the Second World War, and months of quiet floating in sea are ended by an encounter with an enemy submarine.

On aspects of their lives that are much more personal and intimate, there really isn't much difference in the way moments punctuate what essentially are static lives. We watch Benjamin Button as he patiently waits to grow young, for Daisy to love him, for death. We observe the people affected by Benjamin like Daisy biding her time, who grows from curious little girl to sexual creature to regretful mother; or Elizabeth Abbott (Tilda Swinton), the bored wife of a British spy, whose nightly vigils inside a Russian hotel transform into passionate nightcaps with Benjamin; or Thomas Button (Jason Flemyng), Benjamin's reluctant father, as he watches from afar as Benjamin grows from aged baby to a handsome man.

Life is nothing more than that interval in time separated by birth and death, a commonality that is shared by all of humanity. Fincher visualizes the end of life's interval with such poetic tenderness: Benjamin and Thomas facing the sunrise as the latter passes away, or Daisy nursing a dying Benjamin, nestled comfortably on her arms. When Fincher only suggests death, the effect is equally tremendous: as with all the deaths in the nursing home, or the death of Queenie (Taraji P. Henson), Benjamin's surrogate mother, or Daisy in a New Orleans hospital as the rest of the city is anticipating Katrina's historic landfall.

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button overt interest with mortality merely reinforces Fincher's curiosity with time: the way it staggers (the feeling one gets sitting through Zodiac (1997), with its fruitless decades of investigation on the identity of the Zodiac killer), the way it is stubborn and unmindful of human emotions (the little story in the beginning of the film about the clockmaker who pleads for time to move in reverse, to save those who became its hapless victims), the way it never stops, not even for moments of perfection: when Daisy and Benjamin, aging in reverse, meet up in the middle, make love, and cherish that momentary bliss. Yet it has to end, as with everything. They will succumb to dementia, to the pangs of aging, and finally, to death. Similarly, the world will have to face both triumphs and disasters as part of history's unpredictable course. All humanity needs to do is wait for time to pass.