Review: The Curious Case of Benjamin Button

I walked away from the predictable end of Benjamin Button with three nagging sensations: A sore butt from three hours’ sitting, a staunch conviction (read: cognitive dissonance) that those three hours were worth it, and the guilty satisfaction that you get from spending too much time in Self Help at the local Barnes and Noble. By the day’s end, only the sore butt endured.

I toyed with writing this review in reverse, but ultimately decided that two gimmicks do not add up to profundity. So here’s the score straight up:

A child is born. He goes through the typical brattiness of early adolescence and the aimless wanderings and rebellion of late adolescence. Then he gets married and has a kid. Goes through a mid-life crisis; abandons his family; pursues an unsatisfying affair with a younger woman. The world turns with him and he finds himself sucked into war. He comes back older, wiser; has a satisfying affair with an appropriately aged woman. Eventually, wise and grizzled, he retires into obscurity.

This man has led an unremarkable life. Play it in reverse, and you have The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. Somewhat gimmicky, and equally unremarkable, Benjamin Button falls into that category of movies that take all the right turns to keep the plot moving, employ all the usual tropes to wring the obligatory tear, and bust in with the sexy camera candy to keep us from craving something deeper. Let’s call them the Million Dollar Baby Movie.

Such a movie manages to quench the theater goer’s thirst for popcorn-chewing fairytainment without bothering to surprise him with any new style of telling the same old story, or impart anything poignant to take home. This is a genre movie. David Fincher, director of such innovative films as Fight Club and Se7en, seems a waste on something so straight forward as a typical, if reverse order, Kleenex promo.

Kate Blanchet's performance as Benjamin’s enduring love interest nails the evolving mannerisms of a woman at the pivotal stages of her life. She evokes the immature twenty-year-old, struggling for an idea of self, just as well as she plays the middle-aged woman with her accomplishments behind her, facing the impending fade of youth. Brad Pitt, on the other hand, does nothing more than help suppress the ickiness factor in the film’s early scenes by lending his Pitt-ness to aged decrepitude. Like the film, Pitt accomplishes no more and no less than he is supposed to. Both performances are heavily overshadowed by the cool CGI aging effects – Pitt’s lines are nowhere near as interesting as watching his youth emerge like a butterfly from its cocoon.

Benjamin Button does push an interesting idea: It does not matter how (or in which direction) we live our lives because our fondest memories consist of discrete moments. The hummingbird, which occasionally revisits the plot, signifies how each split-second wing beat is, momentarily, the most important beat of that bird’s life.

Of course this bit of cozy comfort slams into a wall we like to call “consequences.” Alas, outside of fairytales, people’s actions tend to produce reactions; they often affect the lives of other people. But this is not a movie about hard feelings. In Benjamin Button, hesitation and regret last about three seconds apiece. Benjamin forgives his own abandonment as cheaply has he later abandons his beloved: each instance serves as conventional plot advancement rather than seized as a potential for depth. Benjamin Button would have made a more stirring drama had the characters struggled with the price of their decisions rather than smiled through life like oblivious Forrest Gumps.

And that’s where we come full circle, because Benjamin Button’s screen adaptation was penned by none other than Forrest Gump writer, Eric Roth. But while Gump inspired suspension of disbelief by poking fun at itself, Benjamin Button’s magical realism stalls in the mire of its own effort at gravity.

The result? A good but unremarkable film.

3/4 stars

Review: Jean-Claude Can Act?

Jean-Claude Van Damme is an enigma. No, a mystery wrapped in an enigma. Cause in the Ninjas vs. Pirates debate, Van Damme would be like the ninja who drunkenly swaggers over and kills the moderator with a silent kick to the groin – a ninja-pirate hybrid if you will. And even more amazingly, he’s kind of Belgian, which is a type of French. In fact, he and I have something in common: We both learned English around the same time, and our first American movie was Bloodsport -- though you can guess which side of screen I was on. And watching Van Damme kick ass taught me this: no one kicks ass like the French.

And then I grew up and learned a thing or two.

And, so, apparently did Van Damme.

So now he’s making his come-back. JCVD is a foreign indie that has got just about everything an American mainstream needs: comedy, violence, melodrama. There’s no gratuitous sex, but we are treated to a bit of mind-fuckery with French pseudo-intellectualism that is meta-fiction. Our biopic’s titular character is played by none other than JCVD himself.

An aging, dejected Van Damme sits in Family Court. He listens to his ex-wife’s lawyer condemn his parenting, capping off each jab with the emphatic drop of ultraviolent B-movies as they form a pile on the exhibits desk. Exhibit D: Fourth crap movie in two years makes Jean-Claude a shitty parent. The logic here is not so great (French legal consultants maybe?) but JCVD’s daughter gets it. She decides to go live with mum because dad’s just too, well, embarrassing. The consummate fan within me weeps, “Jean-Claude, what happened to you? What happened?”

JCVD asks the same as it carries us through a few “what if” scenarios. What if Van Damme went back to Brussels, to recuperate let’s say, hopped into a bank, and found himself among the hostages in a robbery? What if the robbers decided to capitalize on Van Damme’s fame – and recent money troubles – to trick the cops outside into thinking that JCVD was the mastermind of said robbery?

As we watch the Muscles from Brussels struggle with a not-so-interesting ontological quandary (Is he a human being? Is he superstar? Can one be both?), he sneaks up on us with a surprising revelation: Van Damme can act!

About midway through the climax, Van Damme ascends to the ceiling and lapses into Shakespearean soliloquy. He whispers, struggles in part-French, part-English slang as he expounds on what it means to lose your identity to fame and money – to bleach yourself a dry, empty, Hollywood trademark. And, finally, he cries, “Je ne suis pas un animal! Je suis un être humain!”

Very good, but cameras don’t talk back!

Holding a lens to our image-obsessed culture, JCVD casts harsh light on the delusion of self-branding as predetermination. Jean-Claude is not at all what he seems. He’s not a superhero and, despite such wisdom as “one plus one is sometimes eleven” and “be aware,” he’s not even a philosopher. Indeed, only when he throws off his pseudo-philosophical bullshit and finally owns up to what he is (a failed has-been) does he regain a modicum of self respect and, ostensibly, the possibility of future success.

In his transatlantic debut, Director Mabrouk El Mechri blends the touching and the gritty. Grainy filters, artistic camera angles, and understated humor produces something between a British heist and a redemption flick (think Snatch meets The Verdict). Of course, Mechri’s greatest accomplishment is the surgical precision with which he unravels our hero’s layers and exposes the raw, human underbelly of a man we’ve only so far known through tabloids and internet memes.

JCVD expunges the life of a human brand, and then rebrands its hero once again. Even the film’s villains – only one of whom is really evil – stand in awe of the superstar in their midst, half hoping, half expecting that he’ll bust out with the fabled moves and do something cool. And Van Damme delivers. He shows us that among the jeered at has-beens, true heroes can still redeem their childhood fans.

3.5/4 stars