Karina on SpoutBlog

At the Kansas City Star’s TV Barn blog, Aaron Barnhart examines MSNBC’s strategy of devoting as much as a third of their schedule to “documentary” programming. Barnhart takes issue with the channel’s use of the word “documentary” to encompass content as disparate as, on one hand, Witness to Jonestown (an original production of the newish MSNBC Films combining new interviews with ample footage from NBC’s archives) and Dear Zachary (which MSNBC Films acquired in partnership with Oscilloscope straight from the festival circuit); and on the other, the schlocky stuff that makes up the bulk of their “Doc Blocks,” like the Lockup series of Dateline-style exposes set inside various North American prisons, and the COPS knock-off Caught on Camera.

Amazingly, when Barnhart went to Michael Rubin, who programs all of this stuff for the network, and asked, “What’s the deal?” Rubin basically went on the defensive. Not only did he call Lockup specifically “a jewel,” but he insisted that MSNBC’s viewers make no distinctions between high-brow and low-blow non-fiction content. As he puts it:

“I work in a new world,” said Rubin, a veteran of network news going back to the “West 57″ show on CBS. “I look for everything my viewers are interested in. They’re as interested in the inside of a prison as much as they are interested in Dear Zachary or Supersize Me (the Morgan Spurlock film also acquired by MSNBC).

“They’re interested in going somewhere they can’t get to on their own, whether it’s inside a prison or the story of Dr. Bagby. No matter what film we do, the viewer is guaranteed to be an eyewitness. Our tastes span the full spectrum — and so does human interest.”

What I find interesting about this (and potentially dangerous) is that once the assumption is made that in the “new world,” COPS rip-offs are equivalent in the eyes of the audience to documentaries with loads of film festival acclaim –– ie: when what many of us consider “art” is invited to sit at the table with “trash” –– what’s to stop a “jewel” like Lockup from crossing over to the realm of art? And, of course, there’s the question we always, always come back to: what are we going to do about The Hills?!?

Under discussion:

Revolutionary Road  (2008)

Being that it’s at once an embarrassing failure and an unignorable success, it’s a bit of a shock that Sam Mendes’ Revolutionary Road has thus far been received with fewer vitriolic open letters and impassioned defenses than shrugs of measured praise. Certainly the best work Mendes has ever produced for the screen, Revolutionary Road works (on the level that it does work) as a showcase for performances: big stars Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet are probably at the top of their game, a star-making performance is registered in less than a handful of scenes from Michael Shannon, and, in the ultimate nagging old lady role, Kathy Bates reminds us why she is the greatest living nagging old lady in all of cinema. That all of this talent is put to the service of an adaptation which fundamentally bastardizes the main project of Richard Yates’ novel and neuters its cruel vision of the inability of the individual to grapple with his/her own soul sickness without projecting toxicity outward, doesn’t diminish the actors’ achievements, but it does force us to question whether masterworks of the literary form should be adapted into prospective Oscar cash-ins to begin with, if it means necessarily stripping said masterworks of the daring that makes them masterful.

DiCaprio and Winslet play Frank and April Wheeler, beautiful, unique young snowflakes with the world at their feet, who wake up one day to find themselves less young, slightly less beautiful and not at all unique. Unhappily married and bitterly ensconced in suburbia with two unwanted kids, it’s clearly been some time since April and Frank could unite in hope for the future. After a spectacular knock-down marital spat –– which so organically bubbles up across a chain of miscommunications that we’re made to understand that its occurrence is not at all unusual –– April tries to save the marriage by salvaging a long-discarded fantasy of moving the family to Paris. The promise of an imminent escape from stultifying suburbia — and their shared joy in smugly bragging about said escape to the neighbors and co-workers whose ordinariness they despise — briefly invigorates the Wheelers’ marriage, as both husband and wife submerge their everyday drudgery in fantasies of a new life.

The dolts and bores the Wheelers plan to leave behind all question the practicality of the gambit, with the exception of John Givings (Shannon), the mentally imbalanced adult son of the couple’s invasive realtor (Bates). John initially commends Frank and April for being able to spot the “hopeless emptiness” at the center of their lives and daring to do something about it, but when life happens and the Wheelers are forced to choose between hiding under the covers of their solipsistic dream world or being grown ups and dealing with it, the institutionalized man child gives them the dressing down that they deserve. Though carried from book to screen almost to the letter, this subplot is one of many areas where Mendes grafts damaging tonal revisions on to the material. In the novel, when April and Frank agree that it feels good to be complimented by a lunatic, Yates is laughing at their compulsion to recast a red flag as a green light, at their determination to protect every self-delusion rather than risk self-examination. Mendes, on the other hand, as if feeling insecure about his undeserved Oscar and afraid that I’ll be take away, lunges for the Hollywood cliche: he makes the crazy guy the smartest guy in the room, the shining example of the punishment in store for anyone who dares to lash out against the constraints of a domesticated life. This fits with the odd feminist subtext which Mendes and Winslet have, through the course of promoting the film, repeatedly insisted is in the material; for this husband and wife creative team, April’s final, devastating act of violence against the marriage and herself, is heroic. To everyone else, it’s tragic, but also irredeemably crazy.

Mendes’ Revolutionary Road is thus the prime specimen of the adaptation that’s simultaneously “faithful” to the source, and totally contrary to its spirit. The brutal magic of Yates’ Revolutionary Road lies not in the things April and Frank say to each other, but in the bleak knowledge, which they keep completely inside of themselves, that they’re incapable of translating what they really think and feel, of who they sense they are and of what that means in opposition to the larger world, into any sort of honest language at all. Although his book is rarely what they call “funny haha,” Yates essentially plays this internal/external dichotomy towards turning his characters into punchlines; the author so convinces that his subjects are fools that if we feel sympathy for them at all, it’s not because we can sense that they’re really good people who don’t deserve their sad lot, but because it’s possible that nobody deserves to held under such unrelentingly vicious scrutiny. The film seems barely interested in this necessarily self-hatred-inducing split; when given expression at all, it’s through DiCaprio, who has some devastating moments-in-between moments, when Mendes allows us to glimpse Frank Wheeler silent and alone. In general, the most incisive and precise bits of Revolutionary Road occur when Frank and April stop talking and we’re allowed to simply watch them behaving withing the mise en scene (which is as strenuously designed for drabness as Mad Man is designed for sexiness). The last twenty minutes of the film, carried by Winslet in a performance so enigmatic as to be unnerving, are truly devastating.

But mostly Mendes dispenses with Yates withering gaze. A number of crucial excisions from the novel serve to humanize Frank while enhancing the notion that suburbia itself, and not her decidedly unconventional childhood, are responsible for April’s cruelty and hysteria. Particularly frustrating is the truncating of Frank’s affair with a wide-eyed secretary (Zoe Kazan), which Yates uses to confirm our suspicions that Frank would be calculatingly, destructively self-obsessed whether trapped with an emasculating wife/life or not. Mendes and screenwriter Justin Haythe begin this subplot spectacularly (DiCaprio is scarily spot-on as the cad engineering the seduction of an unsuspecting innocent), and then essentially let it hang in the wind. But more troubling than the direct changes and omissions from the source, is the pervasive sense in the material that has been directly, almost word-for-word adapted that Mendes and company either misread Yates’ critique, or willfully castrated. In the mid-section of the film, when the screen version of The Wheelers are in deep in their fantasy of entitlement, Mendes offers us countless scenes of the couple sitting around in a halcyonic whiskey daze, talking about how they’re talking about “real feelings” and how pretty soon their lives will be full of “living life like it matters,” all put together as if we’re supposed to be rooting for these crazy kids to take the next step, instead of with each passing moment understanding that their dreams are pathetic and childish, and that moving to Paris won’t do a bit to solve the deep rot within themselves.

I could go on, citing areas where Mendes chose to excavate the brutal truth from his source in order to recast what was a story about the blackest rot of human nature into a story of doomed love. But of what use is that to anyone who hasn’t read the book, who will walk into Revolutionary Road and walk out, I think, largely satisfied with a period soap opera containing performances of nuance and range and presented with a patience rarely seen on the mega-budget screen? In holding on to the things we love in the face of adaptation, at what point do we become bitter fanboys, griping over discrepancies, livid over subtleties that maybe couldn’t have survived a cross-media translation even if the director had taken more care to protect them? At which point can or should we allow ourselves to give up our personal visions of what an adaptation should look like, the images that played in our own heads during our first encounter with the source, and accept that a Hollywood adaptation reuniting the stars of the highest grossing film of all time would naturally have a different agenda than a novel written by an alcoholic shut-in who never intended to speak to (and certainly was not received by) a mass audience? If we wanted a film that would somehow confirm Yates’ misanthropy, Sam Mendes and his wife and his wife’s teenage playmate were never going to give it to us.

I take comfort that it’s not as bad as it could have been. When divorced from its source, Revolutionary Road is a pefectly servicable film. Mendes may dispose of much of the meat of Yates, but he hasn’t made a film without something to say. Road’s thesis is that the present is only tolerable when our minds are on the future, that self-hatred can only be ameliorated temporarily via fantasies about becoming someone else, and that withdrawl is preferable to either rebellion or acquiescence. This is not not worth saying, and, in its final shots in particular, this film says it rather beautifully. Maybe that’s enough.

Under discussion:

Forrest Gump  (1994)

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button  (2008)

No Country for Old Men  (2007)

To borrow a line from Lou Lumenick: The Curious Case of Benjamin Button is this year’s Forrest Gump. This is not really arguable. In addition to sharing a screenwriter (Eric Roth), Robert Zemeckis’ 1994 Best Picture winner and David Fincher’s 2008 Best Picture front-runner (at least, as of this writing) both put groundbreaking special effects to the service of sprawling stories, spanning many decades and weaving a breadcrumb trail through modern American history, in which a man holds a torch for a woman who can’t reciprocate his love until her dreams of autonomy are spectacularly dashed. For me, the Gump comparison is a pejorative, a shorthand way to say, “This film will likely make a lot of money and win a lot of awards, and yet is so phony and cloying and gimmicky that its success will some day be seen by some as a tragedy.” But to others, the second coming of Gump would be a blessing. An Oscars-bait blockbuster? As Lumenick put it, before seeing the film, “Paramount would be thrilled, and possibly the Academy would be as well.”

Watching Benjamin Button, occasionally I actively loathed it, but mostly I just felt genuinely disappointed that it seemed so lacking in the genuine feeling that makes a bloated, over-serious, firing-on-all-cylinders Hollywood blow-out even temporarily satisfying. Ultimately, we buy into films like the film Benjamin Button wants to be because they offer our only chance at that unique catharsis: they let us cry, in public, surrounded by and united with strangers who are also crying, regardless of our individual age, class or station in life.  But Benjamin Button cannot be effective as an audience-leveling tear-inducer, because it’s not a film about people. It’s a film about the feat of its own whiz-bang, Frankensteinian digital imagery, drunk on its own accomplishment to an extent that feels quasi-ethical.

This is a film in which the following things happen:

• Two new lovers recline on a sailboat somewhere in the Florida keys, where they are coincidentally treated to the sight of a NASA spacecraft taking off.
• An old woman lays dying in a New Orleans hospital, the very day that, coincidentally, Hurricane Katrina rages outside.
• A man and the son he gave up at birth coincidentally exit the same whorehouse at the same time, paving the way for the father to establish a relationship with his abandoned boy for the first time.
• There is a ten minute-ish Introduction to Chaos Theory sequence, presumably so that we, as viewers, are equipped to rationalize the film’s dependence on incidental coincidence.

But before any of that, there’s a prologue. Shot in the palette of the Zapruder film with scratches and fuzzy grain to match, this tells us that at some point during World War I, a French-born, New Orleans-based clockmaker was commissioned to make a piece for the local train station. The whole town comes out to see the clock, at which point the clockmaker reveals that he deliberately made a clock that ticked backwards, “so that the boys we lost in the war might come home again.” An initially befuddled crowd is thus turned awestruck and appreciative, to which the clockmaker barks in a heavily-accented monotone: “I hope you enjoy my clock.”

Cut to 1918, the last day of that war, and the birth of a baby “with all the infirmities not of a newborn but of a man well into his 80s, on the way to the grave”. When the mother dies in childbirth, the freaked-out father snatches the baby out of its cradle and runs it over to the back porch of an old age home, where it’s tripped over by the proprietor, Queenie (Taraji P. Henson). Because Queenie is a magical negro, she ignores her boyfriend’s non-interventionist admonitions and takes the baby in, raising it as her own kin.

“You never know what’s coming for you,” Queenie intones portentously when this opportunity arises. It’s a line that’ll be repeated throughout the film a number of times, and in the context of the film’s big fake Southern accents and big fake period detail, it plays like a whimsical, pie-eyed rewrite of the thesis statement of last year’s Best Picture winner; “You can’t stop what’s coming.”

What’s coming, of course, is that this aged baby will, thanks to the magic of a performance capture process developed for this purpose, slowly grow into a flawless specimen of man in the form of Brad Pitt. With few exceptions, the technology that puts Pitt’s head on the body of other actors for the first third of the film (to describe the process with more finesse would be to give the philosophy behind it too much credit) achieves its intended result: it fools the eye, it almost looks real enough to drown out the inner knowledge that it is not real at all. But it’s hard not to question whether or not this lavish effects process is really necessary, if it’s anything more than a show-offy gimmick. In the last section of the film, when Benjamin ages backward from drinking age to infancy, he’s played by child actors who bear a resemblance to Pitt but aren’t asked to digitally wear his face. Fincher obviously thought pure casting was sufficient for his final act, so why wasn’t it good enough for his first?

Even if one were able to completely get over the gimmickry that makes that verisimilitude possible, there’s still something that feels off about this first section of the film, in the way the characters often seem to interact with Benjamin as if playing to the back row of a theater instead of to a person, smaller than them and right there in close quarters. This sense of a disconnect dissipates as the character ages and becomes more recognizably embodied by Pitt, but Fincher never goes long without finding an excuse to let an effect fill the frame and distract from what’s going on between people. In one of the first scenes where Benjamin is actually connecting to someone on an intimate level, he does so amidst a fog of almost comically painterly CGI snow. A few scenes later, a hummingbird (which, it’s implied, carries the spirit of Button’s counterpart to Forrest Gump’s Lt. Dan) buzzes over a scene of World War II carnage, swooping across the screen like Tinkerbell. When this hummingbird popped up again, very near the end of the film, I half expected it to be wearing a tiny little Brad Pitt visage.

Though the use of certain of these effects may be unprecedented, there is precedent to the genre of the romantic effects epic, and while I’m not the biggest fan of Titanic, or of Peter Jackson’s King Kong, those films succeed on a level where Button fails: their spectacular effects serve to support the romance at the core of the story, while Button’s effects only get in the way. The inner evolution of the characters seems incidental to Fincher. Increasingly as the film wears on, it seems as though the crux of each scene is not an emotional conflict, but the juxtaposition of a slightly younger Brad Pitt with a slightly older Cate Blanchett, and Fincher seems to move from one juxtaposition to next as quickly as possible as if he’s convinced that if he just hits every point on his predetermined timeline, the relationship itself will happen organically. It doesn’t.

And this isn’t fully the fault of the effects. There’s no doubt that Fincher is in love with his imagery (this is the only explanation I can come up with for that chaos theory sequence, which plays as nothing but a flaunting of Fincher’s contractual right to final cut), but he doesn’t seem to trust it. Eric Roth’s script tells us over and over again, in very literal language and often via narration, that this is a film about loneliness and difference. Every feeling and every story detail is telegraphed in advance, underlined throughout and commented on after the fact.

Button is the opposite of Pitt’s last Oscar hopeful in that respect: The Assassination of Jesse James was a film in which every frame seemed to invite contemplation. Benjamin Button is a film in which every cut seems designed to block thought. Maybe the earlier film’s failure says it all about the philosophy behind Button’s construction: for audiences and Oscar voters, thinking is bad. Spoon-fed artifice is good.

This review was published in slightly different form here.