Philadelphia Weekly

New Releases

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
Directed by David Fincher
C-
Reviewed by Matt Prigge
Opens Thurs., Dec. 25

There's one bit of solace to take from David Fincher's unexpected segue into Oscar-bait territory: His heart doesn't appear to be in it. A project that's bounced around Hollywood for more than a decade, Benjamin Button-- based on an F. Scott Fitzgerald short about a man who ages in reverse--has wound up in the hands of an excessively talented filmmaker in desperate need of a movie that'll actually make money. So please, American moviegoers, rush to this punishingly banal piece of shit--if only so its maker can comfortably crank out more three-hour movies about obsessive-compulsive disorder.

Indeed, apart from the David Fincher Look (i.e., a burnished yellow with deep, dark shadows) and first-rate (if extremely creepy) special effects, there's little about Button that screams Fincher. Though coming off the best film of 2007 (Zodiac), he appears to have ceded most of the authorial control over to dreaded screenwriter Eric Roth.

Roth, of course, scored an Oscar for Forrest Gump, to which Benjamin Button bares more than a passing resemblance. Despite a story spanning most of the 20th century, Roth largely refrains from dropping Pitt in front of countless historical episodes, though at least Gump, however risible, didn't feature a wraparound story set in New Orleans during Katrina.

Born a wrinkly old man with cataracts and failing organs, Pitt's Button winds up spending several decades getting younger and more like Thelma and Louise-era Brad Pitt as his beloved--a ballerina eventually played by Cate Blanchett--ages normally. And that's it, really. No gut-punching metaphor, no overarching themes--just three hours of a guy who often looks the opposite of his age begging for your tissues. Roth seems to think the premise speaks for itself, while Fincher busies himself digitally placing Pitt's head on top of Button's old-man body simply because he can.

Granted, this might've been slightly compelling if Button himself weren't such an aggravatingly bland blank slate. Despite his experiences he never gains a personality trait beyond naive wonderment, and moreover he's saddled with a broad Southern accent featuring pronounciation like "soy-cumstances." Pitt is a sporadically brilliant actor--as Burn After Reading recently evidenced--but here, like his director, he's barely roused to try.

Please give these guys Oscars so they can get back to doing real work.

The Reader
Directed by Stephen Daldry
C+
Reviewed by Matt Prigge
Opens Thurs., Dec. 25

"You do a film about the Holocaust, you're guaranteed an Oscar," Kate Winslet famously quipped on Extras. Apparently that was both gag and prophesy because here she is playing the horniest former S.S. officer since Dirk Bogarde in The Night Porter.

We'll see about that long overdue trophy, but at least The Reader isn't a Holocaust movie in the vein of The Boy In the Striped Pajamas. Its first section plays like the T&A classic Private Lessons, only classier.

Winslet essays Hannah Schmidt, a mysteriously private and weary mid-30s tram conductor in post-WWII Germany who seduces 15-year-old Michael Berg (David Kross). They have a special relationship: He reads her the greatest hits of classic literature and then she works his bones. After a couple sweaty months Schmidt abruptly disappears. It's eight years before Berg sees her again, this time as a law student sitting in on her war crimes trial.

An international co-production dropped into a Holocaust- centric award season, The Reader refrains from the genre's easy answers. Schmidt did unspeakable things, and Winslet gives her a curtness that's off-putting; she dares us not to pity her while her eyes, red with sorrow, tell us the opposite.

But The Reader's beef isn't with Germans like her but the very notion of punishment itself. The war crimes trials, as one character helpfully points out, is a bullshit scapegoating game meant to punish a few to make the whole country feel better. The Reader dares to consider what happens to the punished. "You want catharsis, go to the theater," Lena Olin's survivor bluntly advises the miserable, grown-up Berg (Ralph Fiennes).

If this sounds like too much for a director like Stephen Daldry (Billy Elliott, The Hours), it is. David Hare's screenplay is almost touchingly clumsy, fumbling around to make a point but not sure what it wants to say, and far too careful not to offend. Daldry, meanwhile, can't let a moment go that isn't suffocatingly earnest, creating a film that goes to some uncomfortable places but does so on tiptoes.