On DVD: “Burn After Reading”

Dir. Ethan Coen and Joel Coen
(R) ★ ½

Seldom has a movie that started with such intrigue ended as such piffle. Burn After Reading is too grim to work as comedy, too arch to work as drama, too senseless to work as a story, and too thoughtless to work as satire. The longer it goes on, the less of it there is, until it vanishes into thin air. It has nothing to say, nothing to show, and precious little to entertain us by. The emperor has no clothes, and there’s no emperor either.

The film draws us in immediately, with rapid footfalls that echo through a long corridor as CIA analyst Osbourne Cox (John Malkovich) makes his way to an office, where he will be ambushed with the news that he has been fired. There is no exposition; we do not know what led to this scene or where it will lead. There’s an underlying mystery in the early going as we are introduced to characters and wonder how it will all connect, until we realize that none of it will connect.

There is Osbourne’s wife, Katie (Tilda Swinton), who is having an affair with a married man, Harry Pfarrer (George Clooney), who in turn is having multiple affairs through an internet dating service. One of the women he meets is Linda Litzke (Frances McDormand), a physical trainer at a gym; Linda is too dim to realize that her manager, Ted (Richard Jenkins), is in love with her, and Ted is too dim to realize he’s better off without her. There’s a third character at the gym: Chad Feldheimer (Brad Pitt) — that a character with that name is played by that actor tells you all you need to know about the casting. Tell you that he spends most of the film dressed in Lycra and I’ve given away the whole joke.

Chad and Linda stumble upon a CD filled with what they believe to be sensitive government secrets. Instead of destroying it, they decide to blackmail its owner, Osbourne, in the hopes of collecting a handsome reward. The rest of the film is a merry-go-round of covert liaisons involving the retrieval of the CD and the myriad infidelities. Funny thing about a merry-go-round, though — you’re always moving, but you never get anywhere.

Two characters observe the action from afar. Credited only as “CIA Officer” (David Rasche) and “CIA Superior” (J.K. Simmons), they meet periodically to discuss developments in the plot. The officer relays the information, and the superior regards it with a puzzled look, struggling to understand what it means and why it matters. He speaks for the audience.

This mess was perpetrated by the Coen brothers, whose previous film, No Country for Old Men, was at the top of my list of the best films of 2007 and won them three Oscars, including Best Picture. Their screenplay for Burn develops a few interesting characters, but they willfully, almost maliciously squander them. The most frequent criticism of the Coens I encounter is that they condescend to their characters; this is unfounded for a masterpiece such as No Country, but there are films where I can see where they’re coming from, even though I disagree (Fargo). Burn, however, demonstrates a mean-spiritedness that is indefensible.

There comes a moment of extreme violence that completely forfeits their claim to comedy — I won’t reveal it, but you’ll know it when you see it. It’s not funny. Nothing that comes after it can be funny. For filmmakers who swept the previous awards season with a drama so insightful about the nature of violence, it represents a profound lapse in judgment. And it’s so cavalier that it shocks the conscience.

It would be bad enough if the film had a purpose, but it doesn’t. It ends with such a shrug that it made me angry — angry that it wasted my time, angry that it wasted the time of its cast, which includes three Oscar-winners and two who are nominated this year. I was angry that the Coens wasted their own time. They’re better than this.

Academy Awards 2009: Notes on the Nominees

• We shoulda known: the Caped Crusader and the loveable robot got the cold shoulder from Oscar voters when it came to nominating the year’s five best pictures. Oscar’s choice instead was the stuffy Holocaust drama The Reader, which scored a lowly 58 on MetaCritic; that makes it the worst reviewed movie nominated for Best Picture this decade. The irony is that The Dark Knight and WALL-E both received more nominations: eight and six, respectively, compared to Reader’s five.

• Hooray for independent thinking! The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences proved wise in 2004 when they rejected the preposterously fraudulent campaign for Keisha Castle-Hughes as a supporting actress in Whale Rider — they nominated her in the lead category instead. This year, Kate Winslet’s widely criticized supporting campaign for The Reader was ignored as well; the result is her sixth Oscar nomination, her fourth as Best Actress. The good news for her, I suspect, is that she will not have to contend against ambivalence about awarding her for a film the industry had little affection for — Revolutionary Road, which nevertheless managed three nominations. Despite the mixed reviews for the film, consensus is nearly unanimous that Winslet is superb in The Reader. I believe she is now the woman to beat.

• Most shocking omissions: Sally Hawkins, who swept the critics awards for Happy-Go-Lucky, was overlooked in favor of Melissa Leo’s gritty performance as a poor mother of two in Frozen River. Clint Eastwood, according to whom Gran Torino is his last acting performance, was also snubbed in favor of a character actor in a small indie: the very deserving Richard Jenkins in The Visitor.

• Most shocking inclusions: sure In Bruges reaped three Golden Globe nominations and one victory — for star Colin Farrell — but the Globes have separate categories for comedies, and sometimes it’s slim pickings (also nominated for Globes this year: Mamma Mia!). Its nomination for Best Original Screenplay is one of the year’s biggest surprises. In Best Supporting Actor, fringe candidate Michael Shannon (Revolutionary Road), managed to make the cut despite the snubs of his better known co-stars and despite his absence from precursor awards. The odd man out was Slumdog Millionaire’s Dev Patel, who I suspect split votes between supporting and lead.

• Slumdog Millionaire earned two nominations for Best Original Song … I didn’t even know the film had two songs to nominate. The third and final nominee was “Down to Earth” from WALL-E. This category marks one of the year’s strangest; conspicuously absent are the title songs from Gran Torino (co-written by Clint Eastwood) and The Wrestler (written by Bruce Springsteen!), as well as the sublimely twisted “Rock Me Sexy Jesus” from Hamlet 2. It was one of last year’s strangest categories also — they nominated three songs from Enchanted and ignored Eddie Vedder’s entire acclaimed song score from Into the Wild. I think it’s time to reconsider how this category is judged.

• Predictions: I correctly guessed 31 out of the 40 nominees in the top eight categories — 31.5 if you count Winslet, who I rightly predicted would be nominated, but for a different film.

Below are the nominees in eleven top categories:

BEST PICTURE

• The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
What I wrote: “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, adapted from a short story by F. Scott Fitzgerald, is a curious case indeed. It’s a beautiful film, with some of the most exquisitely integrated digital and makeup effects of the year, and the production design by Donald Graham Burt and cinematography by Claudio Miranda give it a glow that evokes fantasy and memory. But in the final analysis, what is it about?”

• Frost/Nixon
What I wrote: “The film feels diffuse in the early going, perhaps too much so … The film improves the more closely it focuses on its main characters. Director Ron Howard does an excellent job during the last and most important interview, discussing Watergate. He cuts away the cameras, the crew, and the backstage quarterbacks from both camps. Intense closeups keep the characters on the hook, especially Nixon, whose artifice can be seen crumbling as he walks into questions he has no way out of.”

• Milk
What I wrote: “Milk is a stirring film and an important one, if only to dramatize the early stages of the gay rights movement and to pay tribute to a man without whom our national progress would not have come so far so fast.”

• The Reader
What I wrote: “There are few bad scenes in The Reader. Several good ones. Many that don’t quite work. And the persistent feeling throughout that you should be getting more out of them than you are, that you should be focused on character and story but instead are preoccupied by nagging problems in narrative structure, strange distractions in its style, and telling the time.”

• Slumdog Millionaire
What I wrote: “Boyle films with a frenetic style that is reminiscent of City of God, but he lacks Fernando Meirelles’s elegance of camera and narrative. At times, we wish he’d stay still and conjure more of the gentle warmth he brought to his other fable of young boys, 2004’s Millions.”

BEST DIRECTOR
Danny Boyle, Slumdog Millionaire
Stephen Daldry, The Reader
Ron Howard, Frost/Nixon
David Fincher, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
Gus Van Sant, Milk

BEST ACTOR
Richard Jenkins, The Visitor
Frank Langella, Frost/Nixon
Sean Penn, Milk
Brad Pitt, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
Mickey Rourke, The Wrestler

BEST ACTRESS
Anne Hathaway, Rachel Getting Married
Angelina Jolie, Changeling
Melissa Leo, Frozen River
Meryl Streep, Doubt
Kate Winslet, The Reader

BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR
Josh Brolin, Milk
Robert Downey Jr., Tropic Thunder
Philip Seymour Hoffman, Doubt
Heath Ledger, The Dark Knight
Michael Shannon, Revolutionary Road

BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS
Amy Adams, Doubt
Penelope Cruz, Vicky Cristina Barcelona
Viola Davis, Doubt
Taraji P. Henson, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
Marisa Tomei, The Wrestler

BEST ORIGINAL SCREENPLAY
Frozen River — Courtney Hunt
Happy-Go-Lucky — Mike Leigh
In Bruges — Martin McDonagh
Milk — Dustin Lance Black
WALL-E — Andrew Stanton, Jim Reardon, Pete Docter

BEST ADAPTED SCREENPLAY
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button — Eric Roth, Robin Swicord
Doubt — John Patrick Shanley
Frost/Nixon — Peter Morgan
The Reader — David Hare
Slumdog Millionaire — Simon Beaufoy

BEST ANIMATED FEATURE
Bolt
Kung Fu Panda
WALL-E

BEST DOCUMENTARY FEATURE
The Betrayal (Nerakhoon)
Encounters at the End of the World
The Garden
Man on Wire
Trouble the Water

BEST FOREIGN LANGUAGE FILM
The Baader Meinhof Complex — Germany
The Class — France
Departures — Japan
Revanche — Austria
Waltz with Bashir — Israel

Academy Awards 2009: Predicting the Nominees

The Academy Award nominations are announced on January 22, two days from now, so it’s time for me to put my money where my mouth is. Here are my predictions for who will hear their names called on Thursday morning.

BEST PICTURE

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
The Dark Knight
Frost/Nixon
Milk
Slumdog Millionaire

A clear consensus has developed around four candidates. Slumdog Millionaire, currently the film to beat in this race, is guaranteed a spot; widespread support from critics and industry organizations would be enough, but its emotional uplift makes it a film voters will rally behind. Next are The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, which has received mixed critical response but has earned enough passionate support from the guilds to make it a good bet, and Milk, which suffered significant snubs at the Golden Globes, but that didn’t stop Crash.

Frost/Nixon is a surprising candidate, but by now seems safe. It is a small-scale, two-character historical drama, the kind you’d expect to see in the acting races, but not in Best Picture. However, the Screen Actors Guild (SAG), Producers Guild of America (PGA), Directors Guild (DGA), and Writers Guild (WGA) have all given it the rubber stamp. And remember, The Queen was an a similar position two years ago, and it made the final five. So will Frost/Nixon.

The last spot is up for grabs. Revolutionary Road has the right pedigree — its director, Sam Mendes, ushered American Beauty to a Best Picture win nine years ago, and it reunites the stars of a little film called Titanic — but opinions of the film have ranged from glowing to unkind. Doubt is a major contender for its performances, but has just as many detractors. Ditto The Reader. All three films have received scattered support at best from the major guilds. They seem to be longshots.

It turns out the likeliest candidates are also the unlikeliest if you consider Oscar history. The Dark Knight, a superhero movie from its cape to its cowl, had rapturous reviews and was a huge money-maker, but the same was true of Spider-Man 2. However, what the Spidey sequel didn’t have were nominations from the PGA, DGA, and WGA, and it didn’t feature a blazing performance from a sentimental favorite (the late Heath Ledger). Then there’s WALL-E, which was snubbed by the major guilds, but the animated film wasn’t eligible for the directors’ or writers’ guild prizes, so its omissions may be misleading. I predict The Dark Knight because the Academy loves a hit, and it’s the biggest hit since Titanic. But the Academy is also notorious for its snobbery, so if they deem both the comic book movie and the cartoon unworthy, all bets are off.

BEST DIRECTOR

Danny Boyle, Slumdog Millionaire
David Fincher, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
Ron Howard, Frost/Nixon
Mike Leigh, Happy-Go-Lucky
Gus Van Sant, Milk

The Best Picture winner usually wins the directing prize along with it, but the nominees seldom line up five-to-five. This year, I suspect the victim will be Christopher Nolan, who will suffer from Academy ambivalence about caped crusaders competing at the Oscars. In his place, I’ve got a hunch it will be Mike Leigh, whose Happy-Go-Lucky has been romping through the major critics awards, including wins from the National Society of Film Critics and the New York Film Critics Circle. Though it is a light, stylistically understated film, the Academy loves him; he is a five-time nominee, including a surprise nod four years ago for directing Vera Drake. I think he’ll be back.

BEST ACTOR

Clint Eastwood, Gran Torino
Frank Langella, Frost/Nixon
Sean Penn, Milk
Brad Pitt, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
Mickey Rourke, The Wrestler

Three locks: Penn, Langella, and Rourke. Several candidates vie for the remaining spots. Clint Eastwood has been snubbed throughout awards season for what he claims will be the last acting performance of his career. He got an early push from the National Board of Review, but received no critics’ prizes after that, was snubbed by the Golden Globes, and then again by SAG. But he’s Clint Eastwood. Clint. Eastwood. He’s got four Oscars already, and none for acting, so if Eastwood means what he says this will be their last chance. They’ll take the bait.

The last spot is a tough call. Brad Pitt has had trouble earning kudos for his acting since his Best Supporting Actor nomination for 12 Monkeys in 1996: no nomination for last year’s Assassination of Jesse James, and none for Babel, which was a Best Picture nominee. Curious Case is another Best Picture hopeful, and that should be enough to get the leading man back into the Oscar spotlight, but his understated performance and the intensive visual effects work that contributed to the role make him vulnerable. If he loses out, expect his spot to go to Richard Jenkins for The Visitor; he was nominated by SAG, and it was SAG that two years ago predicted the nomination for another actor in a low-key indie: Ryan Gosling in Half-Nelson.

And outside chance: Leonardo DiCaprio for Revolutionary Road. It’s a showy, emotional performance, and heck they nominated him for Blood Diamond of all things, so never rule him out.

BEST ACTRESS

Anne Hathaway, Rachel Getting Married
Sally Hawkins, Happy-Go-Lucky
Angelina Jolie, Changeling
Meryl Streep, Doubt
Kate Winslet, Revolutionary Road

As with Best Actor, there are three safe bets among the leading ladies: Hathaway as a emotionally erratic substance abuser (Oscar loves those), Streep as a ferocious nun (Oscar loves her), and Winslet as an unhappy suburbanite (Oscar may finally be ready to show her love with her first win). After that, I expect to see Sally Hawkins recognized for Happy-Go-Lucky; the Academy loves Mike Leigh, and they love his leading ladies just as much, having nominated Brenda Blethyn (Secrets & Lies) and Imelda Staunton (Vera Drake) in years past for his films. What’s more, Hawkins pulled an impressive hat trick by winning the three biggest critics’ prizes: New York, Los Angeles, and the National Society. Despite her surprising snub from the British Academy (BAFTA), Oscar will likely take notice.

Four women contend for the last nomination. Kristin Scott Thomas earned raves and a Golden Globe nod for the French-language I’ve Loved You So Long, but the film has lost its momentum and she’ll likely fall through the cracks. Melissa Leo was nominated by SAG for Frozen River and has a fighting chance, but it’s an un-glamorous performance in a small indie, and sadly Oscar prefers to reward un-glamorous performances from young, sexy starlets (Charlize Theron, Halle Berry, Nicole Kidman, Marion Cotillard).

Cate Blanchett has struggled for notice this awards season for The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, but Oscar voters love her; they nominated her twice last year, for Elizabeth: The Golden Age and I’m Not There, neither of which had much support otherwise. Last is Angelina Jolie. Her performance in Changeling is sympathetic and emotionally charged, and she’s directed by Clint Eastwood, which never hurts. But she seemed like a slam dunk last year for A Mighty Heart, and voters nevertheless slammed the door. As with her husband Pitt, I expect Jolie to just sneak in.

BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR

Josh Brolin, Milk
Robert Downey Jr., Tropic Thunder
Philip Seymour Hoffman, Doubt
Heath Ledger, The Dark Knight
Dev Patel, Slumdog Millionaire

A misleading category, because a couple of the frontrunners — Hoffman and Patel — are actually leads in their films. They’ve been campaigned as supporting actors to protect them from the crowded and competitive lead-actor field, and it will probably pay off for both. Hoffman has been consistently recognized for his work as the accused priest in Doubt, and though the 18-year-old Patel is a relative unknown, the support for Slumdog is likely to carry him along to a nomination.

Ledger is a foregone conclusion, and after the standing ovation for his posthumous Golden Globe victory, it’s hard to imagine him losing. Josh Brolin is on a hot streak, starring in last year’s Best Picture-winner, No Country for Old Men, and giving two admired performances in 2008 — as President George W. Bush in W. and as the murderous city supervisor Dan White in Milk. The latter will earn him his first Academy Award nomination.

As for Downey Jr., it would be unusual, to put it mildly, for Academy voters to select a broad comic performance by an actor in blackface, but Downey has enormous industry support after the tremendous success of both Iron Man and Tropic Thunder, and in Thunder he is playing not only against type but against race and adopts not one but two unique accents.

Anyone else would be an upset; for a major surprise, this is the category to watch. Could it be James Franco, Brolin’s co-star in Milk? I think Brolin will nab all of Franco’s votes for that film, and it’s not a showy performance. Ralph Fiennes? He could get in for The Reader or The Duchess, but has little support for either and will likely split his own vote. Eddie Marsan in Happy-Go-Lucky? Possible, but he is a little-known actor, and I don’t think Academy support for the film will extend that far. Michael Shannon in Revolutionary Road? He’d be a good bet if the film were a stronger contender.

BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS

Amy Adams, Doubt
Penelope Cruz, Vicky Cristina Barcelona
Viola Davis, Doubt
Marisa Tomei, The Wrestler
Kate Winslet, The Reader

There are only two locks: Cruz and Davis. After them, it’s a game of musical chairs with four actors competing for the three remaining spots. Amy Adams earned SAG and Golden Globe nods for Doubt, but she may suffer under the shadow of co-star Viola Davis’s performance in the same film. Marisa Tomei is a previous winner and earned a Golden Globe nomination for The Wrestler, but her SAG snub may be a very bad sign for such a subtle performance in a film where all the attention has gone to Mickey Rourke’s comeback. Kate Winslet, on paper, would be a lock for a nomination and a frontrunner to win, but most believe she clearly gives a lead performance in The Reader, including BAFTA, which nominated her twice for lead actress; if Oscar voters try to place her there, it may threaten her nominations for both this film and Revolutionary Road. And Taraji P. Henson, playing the doting mother in The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, got a very important SAG nomination, but I have trouble imagining that voters will rank her highly on their preferential ballots, where only number-one votes count.

My prediction amounts to my best guess. I say Henson will be the odd woman out.

BEST ADAPTED SCREENPLAY

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button — Eric Roth, Robin Swicord
Doubt — John Patrick Shanley
Frost/Nixon — Peter Morgan
The Reader — David Hare
Slumdog Millionaire — Simon Beaufoy

Four safe bets: likely Best Picture nominees Benjamin Button, Frost/Nixon, and Slumdog, plus the prestigious adaptation of the Pulitzer Prize-winning play Doubt. For the fifth slot, there are only three serious contenders: The Dark Knight got a surprise WGA nod, but WGA is traditionally more welcoming of popular entertainments (The 40-Year-Old Virgin, Clueless, Mean Girls, Knocked Up). Oscar snobbery will likely block the film’s scribes, even though Christopher and Jonathan Nolan were previously nominated for Memento. Revolutionary Road has a strong literary pedigree — Richard Yates’s novel is lauded, though the adaptation is controversial. The Reader also has its share of detractors, but in addition to its prestige it was adapted by David Hare, who was nominated for The Hours — I give him the slight edge.

BEST ORIGINAL SCREENPLAY

Happy-Go-Lucky — Mike Leigh
Milk — Dustin Lance Black
Rachel Getting Married — Jenny Lumet
Vicky Cristina Barcelona — Woody Allen
WALL-E — Andrew Stanton, Pete Docter, Jim Reardon

Though most of the Best Picture hopefuls will be competing for adapted screenplay, it is the original screenplay race that is the hardest to peg. Only one sure thing: Milk, which is likely to be the only Best Picture nominee represented in this category, may already have this award in the bag. But if WALL-E sneaks into Best Picture, it’ll pose a serious threat here. Though the Academy has been unwilling to nominate animated films for the top prize, they frequently nominate their screenplays as a consolation prize (Toy Story, Shrek, Finding Nemo, The Incredibles, Ratatouille). Though WALL-E features limited dialogue, expect it to continue the trend.

Rachel Getting Married was surprisingly snubbed by the WGA, but it has received consistent love from critics organizations and should rebound at Oscar time.

That leaves five films competing for the two remaining spots: Burn After Reading, The Visitor, The Wrestler, Vicky Cristina Barcelona, and Happy-Go-Lucky. I suspect the Academy will reward its veterans. Though the dialogue of Happy-Go-Lucky is mostly improvised, that hasn’t stopped voters before: Leigh has three previous nominations in this category. And Woody Allen is one of the most beloved filmmakers in Oscar history, with twenty-one nominations and three wins, including two for writing. He received a nomination for his London holiday Match Point. I think he’ll be nominated again for his trip to Barcelona.

On DVD: “Man on Wire”

Dir. James Marsh
(PG-13) ★ ★ ★ ½

It is rare that I am as quickly absorbed by a film as I was during the opening minutes of Man on Wire. Using interviews and black-and-white re-enactments, director James Marsh recounts the fateful morning in 1974 when Philippe Petit and his accomplices made their way to the World Trade Center, where he would walk between the towers along a high wire. According to the friends who helped him, part of the appeal for Petit was getting away with it, like in the caper films he watched to psych himself up. It is appropriate, then, that Marsh makes it come alive like Ocean’s Eleven; after all, the real satisfaction of a caper film comes not from the money but from the act of pulling it off.

Petit is presented by the film as a genius, an artist, a crackpot, and a kook. He has the imagination of a child, and sometimes the maturity of same. But he is a man of indefatigable passion, and his charisma pulls you in like a gravitational field. He is single-minded in his pursuit, and oh what a pursuit!

Marsh does not simply tell the story of Petit’s high-wire act. He evokes the man himself, with playful treatments even of his talking heads: Petit shown impishly peeking through a curtain as he explains how he evaded a guard around a wide column; dramatic, spotlit shots of his co-conspirators, some of whom get nicknames like “Inside Man” or “the Australian” — we half expect others to be introduced as “Joey the Hammer” or “Pretty Boy Malloy.” Self-important? Just the opposite. Marsh’s grandiose style is tongue-in-cheek; these men are harmless eccentrics only playing at being crooks.

The best parts of the film are the re-enactments, which suggest that Marsh in a previous life might have been a great silent film director. I was delighted by these images — of a lantern pulsing on and off, of two men sneaking by a guard with their giant spools of wire, of a nude Philippe searching in the dark for an arrow shot from the opposite tower. They’re timeless and beautiful; it’s as if we’re viewing these events in a dream.

The period footage is nearly as good. We see Petit performing his death-defying acts at the Harbor Bridge in Sydney, Australia, and at Notre Dame in Paris. From a distance you can scarcely see the wires at all, only the man, floating in mid-air. In 2008, a French daredevil, Alain Robert, climbed the New York Times building in Manhattan; what a tool, I thought. Another man, New Yorker Renaldo Clarke, attempted the same stunt only hours later — a wannabe tool. Robert’s reason was to protest global warming. Clarke was protesting malaria. The officers who arrested them I suppose were protesting ineffectual protests on the sides of buildings. What distinguishes Petit is that he had no statement to make. He was following his bliss, performing feats for their own sake, and we are swept up in his passion. There is a moment where Annie Allix, Petit’s then-girlfriend, describes the feeling of seeing him suspended in the sky between the towers; she is overcome with emotion, and so are we.

The film’s narrative is slightly tangled, cutting back and forth between the event and its planning. As a result, the momentum ebbs and flows, but what flows! The DVD includes The Man Who Walked Between the Towers, a ten-minute animated short that is equally touching. I think both films have the right idea; a conventional biopic or straight-ahead documentary would have flattened this material. It may not be possible to quite understand Philippe Petit, but to even come close, you have to join him up in the clouds.

On DVD: “Generation Kill” (HBO)

Aired in seven parts on HBO. Now available on DVD.
(TV-MA) ★ ★ ★ ★

By now I’ve seen the Iraq War backwards and forwards. We at home are as close to the ground as anyone has ever been during an American conflict. The age of multimedia communications has obliterated the distance between Here and There, which, of course, is not to say that those of us Here can understand what it’s like for those who are There. Over the end credits of episode six we hear the voices of the characters expressing one of the miniseries’s most important truths: Civilians don’t get it, and we can’t get it, because we’re not them.

Generation Kill is the anti-Band of Brothers. That is not to say that the soldiers depicted therein are not brothers, only that we’re a long way away from the Greatest Generation and its depictions of noble sacrifice. And nowhere is Tom Hanks the schoolteacher standing tall and affirming the value of the mission. The volunteer servicemen and servicewomen in today’s military are a different species, and I don’t understand them. There’s a bloodlust in many among them that I find disquieting, and an eagerness that seems better suited to playing Halo than to killing real people in real combat. I believe the characterizations in Generation Kill because I have seen them before, in the documentary I Am an American Soldier, which was not partisan; it observed the 101st Airborne Division of the US Army during a year of their service in Iraq. Of one soldier, I wrote: “He explains that the best way to inspire Iraqi cooperation is to threaten them with arrest. I can’t help but feel his approach is all wrong. We see him bind and blindfold a civilian, asking him to identify insurgents, but I feel more sympathy with the Iraqi than with this particular soldier.”

Consider then Lance Cpl. Trombley (Billy Lush), who grins the most unsettling grin at the prospect of killing — not just enemy combatants. He wants to fire rounds and end lives — of dogs even. He explains after one scene, during which he is fired upon and neglects to seek cover, that he feels at peace in the battlefield and is curious to know what it’s like to be shot. His fellow Marines joke that he’s a psycho — half-joke. I’m not joking at all. He has severe emotional and psychological impairments, and I spent all of his scenes afraid for him and of him. Werner Herzog’s film Encounters at the End of the World showcases the strange personalities who have made Antarctica their home away from home; such a remote place draws philosophical and artistic temperaments. In the same way, a volunteer army will inevitably draw some men and women who get something out of shooting and getting shot at. For its own sake.

Last week, I saw Standard Operating Procedure, Errol Morris’s documentary about the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse scandal of 2003, which showcased men and women like these in a different circumstance, but who are alike in that Iraq has shown them things they’d have been better off not seeing, and if they had it to do over again, they may not have signed up at all. Generation Kill showcases men of remarkable thoughtfulness and clarity of purpose — scratch that, it showcases men of common sense, butting against superiors of persistent stupidity. Executive producer David Simon finds a theme in Iraq much like the one he explored on The Wire: the further up you get on the food chain, the less things make sense. The men given the orders in Generation Kill are up close to the war, and we’re so close to them that we can’t analyze the overarching strategy — or lack thereof — of the War in Iraq; like them, all we can do is observe the mistakes along the way. Like how the entire battalion has one Arabic translator. One translator. In Iraq. And from the looks of him, who knows what he’s actually translating. Like how the battalion is ordered into an ambush instead of rerouted through a demonstrably safer route. Like how ill equipped Humvees are sent into battle scenarios they aren’t prepared for. Like how a commanding officer berates a soldier for losing his helmet, not one day after the officer made a reckless command decision that cost the marines an entire supply truck. Like how a small village contains nothing but women and children but is obliterated in a heartbeat because there were enemy combatants there yesterday.

We identify most strongly with two characters: Sgt. Brad “Iceman” Colbert (Alexander Skarsgard) and Lt. Nathaniel Fick (Stark Sands). They receive their orders with jaws agape, but their careers are built on a catch-22. To disobey an order is to cause dissension and disorder and risks the stability of the unit. But to obey a stupid order risks their lives. They can’t win. How does a subordinate stop Capt. Dave “Captain America” McGraw (Eric Nenninger) from bayonetting a surrendered prisoner? Should he tackle his commanding officer and accept disciplinary action? Or should he permit the fiasco and instead accept the blame for the incident? Captain America gets off with a slap on the wrist. Lt. Col. Stephen “Godfather” Ferrando (Chance Kelly), a reasonable leader, has a valuable speech about the need to put trust in his soldiers, but one doesn’t need special skills of perception to know that Captain America is dangerously incompetent. You don’t even need to be a soldier or know what an army is. All you need is eyes, ears, and the good sense God gave a fruit fly — and you could probably do without the eyes and ears. But the higher up you get in the chain of command, the less you are able to see how things are on ground level. Get all the way to the top, and there’s George W. Bush, who I suspect needs special help to tie his shoes.

I struggled with the first three episodes. I could not locate the film’s point of view. Only a mass of soldiers who talk about killing with relish and exchange racist and homophobic slurs like artillery fire. I thought, I only have so much benefit of the doubt to give these men. (The end of episode six explains this part of military culture as well, but I still don’t get it. I think I’d rather not get it.) Eventually, the film settles into its characters, and we settle into them. There is an embedded reporter for Rolling Stone, Evan Wright (Lee Tergesen), whose book about his experience inspired this miniseries. He is not a well developed character and is not meant to be: the miniseries isn’t about him, it’s about what he sees. He sees a blunt-force military that kills as many civilians as insurgents — probably more. He sees low-level soldiers hung out to dry. He sees erratic tactics, inconsistent orders, and rules of engagement that change with the breeze. The soldiers he’s embedded with don’t know why they’re there; the closer they get to Baghdad, the less they know why they’re there. I’d like to send them a DVD of No End in Sight, the great documentary that explains exactly how little sense it makes, but it hadn’t been made yet. Victory against Saddam was a foregone conclusion, so how could it possibly have been so sloppy, so poorly conceived, so beneath the abilities of those involved?

Generation Kill is shot in an objective, unadorned style and told with a sad bewilderment that sees, like The Wire did, how a broken system has failed its characters a basic human level. I imagine a conversation between these soldiers and the low-level MIs at Abu Ghraib:

“What’s up with all the naked prisoners?”

(Shrug) “They told us to soften them up for interrogation.”

“Is that how it works?”

“Beats me. They were doing this crazy stuff when we got here. How about you? I heard you killed some kids.”

(Shrug) “They told us to consider them hostile.”

“Whatever it takes to keep America safe.”

“Yeah, but this isn’t exactly what I had in mind when I enlisted.”

“Me neither.”

“Let the Right One In”

Dir. Tomas Alfredson
(R) ★ ★ ★ ½

“I’ve been twelve for a long time,” says Eli (Lina Leandersson). She has moved in next door to Oskar (Kåre Hedebrant), an alienated boy who is the same age, except not. When he asks her if she’s a vampire, she answers, “I live off blood, yes” — if vampire is the word for it she can hardly say. I don’t think anyone bothered to explain it to her back when she really was twelve-years-old five, fifty, maybe five-hundred years ago — we’re never told for sure. I don’t think she understands it even now. She hungers, and she responds to that hunger. She copes as well as she can.

Let the Right One In, from Sweden, showcases terrific direction by Tomas Alfredson, who with cinematographer Hoyte Van Hoytema creates images of eerie elegance. Their camera stalks, conceals, slowly pans across its mysteries, or hangs back like a silent witness. Two gruesome killings are shot from afar, to emphasize their darkness and isolation. And one bravura shot shows an event from an obscured point of view under the water of a swimming pool.

Others shots I can’t quite explain, but they cast a strange spell. One that is particularly effective shows a train in the distance, seen through the windows of a darkened room at night. You don’t need this shot to tell the story, but accompanied by Johan Söderqvist’s score it pulls us in and escalates our dread.

Adapting his novel, John Ajvide Lindqvist writes a screenplay that doesn’t require much exposition because it communicates to us more by showing than telling. Eli explains to Oskar some of the rules of vampirism, but they are evoked more vividly in a subplot involving one of Eli’s victims, who wakes up one morning and discovers that it’s painful to open the blinds and receive sunlight.

Another mystery is solved — in a way. The screenplay does not emphasize the question or indicate explicitly that it is providing an answer, but what Lindqvist implies, I think, points to profound tragedy. At the beginning of the film, Eli comes to town with a helper, Haken (Per Ragnar), who does horrible things in her service. Who is he? A brother? A friend? Does he worship vampires? Is he under her thrall? I believe the very last shot explains it all, and it suggests what the future holds.

“Frozen River”

Dir. Courtney Hunt
(R) ★ ★ ★ ½

In a movie season filled with mixed decisions, it’s a pleasant surprise to see a film that simply works. Frozen River, the feature writing and directing debut of Courtney Hunt, is a compelling story, features characters presented with understanding and insight, and develops according to who they are and what they need.

Melissa Leo, in a brilliant performance, brings toughness and pragmatism to Ray Eddy, a woman living with her two sons in a trailer park in upstate New York. When the film opens, she is awaiting the delivery of a double-wide trailer for her family that she can’t pay for; her husband, a gambling addict, has stolen the money and left for parts unknown. Will he ever come back? Perhaps — Ray lets her sons believe what they want to believe, but she’d much rather have the money back than the husband.

In searching for him, Ray discovers Lila (Misty Upham), a Mohawk Indian woman who found his car at a bus depot with the keys still inside and took off with it. The car has a spacious trunk, important in Lila’s line of business. She manipulates Ray into a trip across the Canadian border, where they pick up illegal immigrants to smuggle across the frozen river back into the United States. Ray’s presence is advantageous; white women don’t get pulled over. And as she watches Lila collect money for the deliveries — $1200 for pickup and another $1200 for drop-off — Ray’s next decision seems inevitable. Is it dangerous? Seems straightforward enough. Is it immoral? Yes, but so is letting your children starve.

I resist discussing the plot. Characters behave according to their circumstances, and the story ends where it must. What Courtney Hunt does most effectively is observe her characters as they muddle through. Ray’s relationship with her older son, T.J. (Charlie McDermott), is of particular interest. He wants to get a job to support the family, but Ray wants him to finish school. He doesn’t understand that she is trying to protect him. For him, teenage rebellion isn’t staying out late or cutting class, it’s taking a blowtorch under the house to thaw the pipes.

The blowtorch is important. T.J. got it from his father, and it comes to symbolize the father and reflect how the boy and his mother view him. T.J. cherishes it as a gift; he idealizes his dad and blames Ray for chasing him away. But Ray doesn’t want him to touch it: When his father gave it to him, he was passing off his responsibilities along with it. T.J. has a five-year-old younger brother (James Reilly) and is as close to a father as the child has ever had.

Ray and Lila grow closer. There is a moving scene where Ray watches through a window as Lila encounters her infant son, who was taken away from her by her in-laws. It is meaningful because it represents a turning point in their relationship: Ray sees the mother in Lila and in that moment understands her as an equal.

Frozen River is more about motherhood than about human trafficking or illegal immigration. Ray and Lila make the decisions they make for the sake of their children, and faced with poverty you choose from the options you have. There’s the border. There’s the river to cross. That’s where the opportunity lies. That’s where the money is. When we see it through their eyes it’s a no-brainer — pop the trunk and drive.

On DVD: “Standard Operating Procedure”

Dir. Errol Morris
(R) ★ ★ ★ ★

Movies like this should explode upon the national consciousness like a hydrogen bomb. They should be rigorously discussed by the public, and the evening news should be taking the ball and running with it, instead of devoting precious hours of their time and ours to finding out what Sasha and Malia are having for lunch today. They should be exhibited in sold-out multiplexes to curious audiences with a hunger to understand who we are as a nation, instead of relegated to art-house theaters for documentary junkies and cineastes while the masses flock to Beverly Hills Chihuahua. They shine a bright light into our eyes and excite the brain; we think more critically, with greater insight and compassion.

Standard Operating Procedure is directed by Errol Morris, who made one of the best documentaries I’ve seen, 1988’s The Thin Blue Line. It details the 2003 prisoner abuse scandal at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. I admit that I did not know very much about the scandal and that it had left my mind along with the media coverage. I know now.

I watched the film twice — the second time with Morris’s DVD commentary; it’s a film that, for me at least, demanded a repeat viewing. The first time around I was distracted by Morris’s excessive use of high-speed video photography, which he uses to present heavy-handed images and re-enactments in extreme slow motion. I struggled to piece together the varying accounts of the dozen or so interview subjects. And I was stricken by the infamous photographs, which show profound acts of humiliation and degradation.

The second time, I knew the players and their stories and the picture became clearer — or as clear as it could be when trying to understand such events. I was stricken even more by the photographs, which are so shocking and graphic that there is no anesthetizing yourself from them. As for the slow-motion, it was still obtrusive, but this time I didn’t so much care. An excess of style can be forgiven in the midst of such searing journalism.

Morris defends but does not excuse the soldiers who posed for and took the photos. During the commentary, he describes critics of the film who accuse him of being too lenient towards them. It had been so long since I had heard about the scandal that I had forgotten I was supposed to hate them. Watching the film, it never crossed my mind.

Lynndie England, more than any other soldier, became the face of the scandal. I remembered that face well: the bright smile set against the suffering of Iraqi prisoners, who were forced to remove their clothing and assume humiliating sexual positions. The snapshots are damning and indefensible, but the Lynndie we see in the film is quite different: her face fuller, more sullen, her voice deep with cynicism and regret. Does she regret posing for the pictures? She regrets a lot of things.

Another notable soldier is Sabrina Harman, who wrote letters to her life partner back home while serving in Iraq, and they are alarming in how greatly they vindicate her. She began to take pictures to document what she considered immoral and unlawful treatment of prisoners, and she smiled for the camera to get along. She participated in the acts of degradation, yes, but she also took photographs that brought to light the murder of a prisoner, who died as the result of torture during interrogation. For those photographs she was accused of evidence tampering, and she served a year in prison; the victim’s killer has not served a day.

Morris’s aim is to examine the nature of photos, which capture moments isolated from their context; they may seem to show us one thing but mean another, and they obscure that which does not appear within the frame. We see Lynndie, smiling gleefully as prisoners are abused. We don’t see the manipulation of her then-boyfriend Charles Graner, who was fourteen years her senior, or the military policies that produced such conditions. We see Sabrina giving a thumbs up while standing over the body of the murdered prisoner. We don’t see the interrogator who killed him.

Morris casts light on the shadows. He gives us a glimpse of the hidden world beyond the pictures and shows that these young soldiers became entwined in a system that was already churning when they got there. Under constant attack from within and without the prison walls and ordered by superiors to do whatever it took to protect American lives, these men and women had their morality reprogrammed and were then thrown under a bus for publicly embarrassing the US military. We don’t see that in the pictures, but it’s there.

Composer Danny Elfman provides the score, which has a driving, propulsive energy that lends the film greater urgency. Morris limits his own exposure and lets his interview subjects — mostly the soldiers who were held responsible for the scandal — speak directly into the camera, which makes the film intensely personal in its effect. The photos are disturbing — that goes without saying — and perhaps more disturbing than one can be prepared for. Standard Operating Procedure is a tough, tough, tough sit, but an elevating experience. I am better for having seen these images; they do not exist in a vacuum, and they document crimes being committed in our name.

“The Curious Case of Benjamin Button”

Dir. David Fincher
(PG-13) ★ ★ ★

They say youth is wasted on the young. Not so for Benjamin Button (Brad Pitt), who is born with one foot already in the grave, showing the symptoms of a man dying of old age. But he doesn’t die — he ages in reverse, his body developing into that of a younger and younger man while those around him grow older and older. The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, adapted from a short story by F. Scott Fitzgerald, is a curious case indeed. It’s a beautiful film, with some of the most exquisitely integrated digital and makeup effects of the year, and the production design by Donald Graham Burt and cinematography by Claudio Miranda give it a glow that evokes fantasy and memory. But in the final analysis, what is it about?

Over the course of its 166 minutes, Curious Case develops a lot of good ideas but fails to organize them into a cogent theme; it’s a fable that isn’t sure what it wants to teach us, only that it wants to teach us … something. The result is a lot of diffuse life lessons, each of them touching when taken on their own, but they fail to bring the complete picture into clear focus.

Very early in his life — or is it late in his life? — Benjamin learns to make his peace with death. His birth father, stricken with panic over his son’s deformities, leaves him on the doorstep of Queenie (Taraji P. Henson), who runs a home for the elderly. Alike in infirmity, Benjamin identifies with the aged tenants and watches fondly as they come and go, but he does not view death with despair. He comes to see it as a visitor, who comes along as a sad, but natural and inevitable part of life. Says one of the residents he befriends, “We’re meant to lose the people we love. How else are we supposed to know how important they are?”

When he turns seventeen, he sets out to come of age — such as it is for a man aging backwards. He works on a tugboat captained by Mike (Jared Harris), an eccentric who has extensively tattooed his own body. After the bombing of Pearl Harbor in 1941, the tugboat is commissioned by the US Navy, and in battle Benjamin encounters yet more death. At a port of call in Russia, he encounters an older — or is it younger? — woman, Elizabeth Abbott (Tilda Swinton, mysterious and poignant). In one of my favorite interludes of the film, Benjamin and Elizabeth grow intimate, and he learns about the dreams that have passed her by.

Benjamin’s true love is Daisy (played as an adult by Cate Blanchett). They reunite throughout their lives, crossing each other along their opposite paths of aging. Daisy tells their story from her deathbed in modern-day New Orleans; her daughter Caroline (Julia Ormond) rummages through artifacts of her past and reads to her passages from Benjamin’s diary.

Benjamin recorded the important lessons of his life: “I was thinking how nothing lasts, and how sad it is.” “Your life is defined by its opportunities, even the ones you miss.” “It’s never too late … to be whoever you want to be.” “You can curse the fates, but when it comes to the end, you have to let go.” On the page they read like the interiors of Hallmark cards, or fortune cookies. In the film, however, bolstered by a dreamy style that earns such sentimentality, they work.

The problem lies not with the sentiments themselves, but with the film’s central assumption, that Benjamin Button possesses special wisdom as the result of his condition. Not so. Though he regresses physically, he develops emotionally and psychologically much the same way the rest of us do. What insights can we gain from him that we cannot gain from anyone else? Benjamin cannot tell us anything new about aging because, as he says, he’s always looking out his own eyes, and those eyes are always looking forward.

But let’s take a step back. Though Benjamin himself cannot teach us lessons about life, that he ages in reverse allows director David Fincher (Zodiac) and screenwriter Eric Roth (Munich) to bring our attention to their subject: the passage of time — how it gives and takes away, how it can be a companion or a nemesis, how we let things slip from our grasp or hold them tight, and how our lives intertwine, imperceptibly but irrevocably. There is an impressive sequence where Benjamin details the minute circumstances that led a group of characters into a life-changing car accident. How he knows the details isn’t important — this is not a film where we are concerned with realism. What matters is how we affect each other throughout our lives.

Yet when we arrive at the end, we notice Roth grasping at straws. The narrated montage that closes the film — I will not reveal specifics — feels like he’s still searching for his meaning, and Fincher tries to imbue the words with a profundity that isn’t there. We’re left with scattered notions and noble sentiments floating in a sweeping narrative with nothing to unite them.

Still, I am struck by Benjamin himself, whose condition, I think, is ideally suited to the human learning curve: he endures feebleness during childhood and takes his lumps along the way, and when he’s learned his lessons has the vigor to live as fully as his heart desires. If youth is wasted on the young, none of us should be young until we are old enough to make the most of it.

On DVD: “Flight of the Red Balloon”

Dir. Hou Hsiao-hsien
(NR) ★ ★

I am not well suited to review this film. When I watch a movie, I still expect it to be a movie and not an inert diorama about life that purports to contain the Meaning of It All. I do not mean to be unduly derisive of Hou Hsiao-hsien’s Flight of the Red Balloon; I have no antipathy for it, only apathy. It floated across my screen for two hours, and I sat there attentively viewing it, distinctly aware that I couldn’t see inside of it. Like British filmmaker Mike Leigh, Hou wrote his film without dialogue, and collaborated with the actors to shape the characters and story, but I strain to identify any story at all, and its characters are undeveloped occupants of the cavernous narrative space.

Here’s what I know: Juliette Binoche stars, in an effective performance, as Suzanne, a frazzled voice-actress in a puppet theater, while her son Simon (Simon Iteanu) is cared for mostly by his new nanny, Song (Fang Song). Suzanne has an estranged husband living in Montreal, a daughter living in Brussels, and is in a legal dispute with her downstairs tennant, who has not paid his rent for a year. Meanwhile, a red balloon floats mysteriously through their lives — like an observer, or a specter, or a memory? Roger Ebert says, “If you have to ask what something symbolizes, it doesn’t,” and I’m inclined to take his advice.

When the end credits rolled, I was still waiting for the movie to begin. It all feels like a prelude to … something. I looked into the film on MetaCritic, where it scored a whopping 86, but the reviews from its most passionate fans are not edifying; they are equally obtuse. John Anderson of The Washington Post says, “… [Hou’s] movies are like the ocean — rhythmic, hypnotic, seemingly pacific yet roiling with color, motion and drama.” Manohla Dargis of The New York Times writes of the director, “In Flight of the Red Balloon he makes particularly expressive use of glass, as when Simon stares out a window and his gaze is met by his own reflection, a doubling that echoes the scene before, when the red balloon pauses next to its painted twinned image floating on a mural” — an expressive use of glass, Dargis says, but she doesn’t indicate what Hou is expressing.

I quote these critics not to belittle their opinions, but to observe that they are on a different wavelength from me. Of the balloon, Dargis writes that it “invokes the spirit of liberty and its elusiveness” and is “like a prowler (or an angel).” Boston Globe’s Ty Burr says, “It seems to be telling us something.” To Anderson, it “plays a far smaller role that in its predecessor, but it means the same thing: happiness.” Chicago Tribune’s Michael Phillips adds that it is “like a surrogate nanny.” I take from this that no one really knows what the heck it means, that it means everything or nothing depending on the feelings of the viewer. What matters is that it was meaningful to those critics, but not to me.

This review amounts to taking the long way to reach a simple conclusion: I didn’t get it. Inspired by the beloved 1956 French film The Red Balloon, Flight of the Red Balloon is written in invisible ink, and all I can see is the blankness of the page. It is composed of long, languorous shots, but where others have attributed great emotion to them I found Hou’s camera indifferent, uninvolved. But if I am wrong, it wouldn’t be the first time; there may be great beauty in it … somewhere.