The Times of Harvey Milk (1984) +

An exceptionally effective documentary profile of the brief political life of Harvey Milk, the first openly gay man to be elected to public office in a major U.S. city. This documentary is about as conventional as they come. Precise narrative detailing the biographical dimensions of a historical incident, fortified by aptly chosen archival footage and diversely compelling talking heads. The first feature-length documentary on gay themes to win an Academy Award, the film is startling today both for its simple frankness and emotional immediacy. It's remarkable to witness these folks relive the experience of Harvey Milk's political ascendancy and subsequent assassination with only about 5 or so years separating them from the events depicted. Likewise, it's astonishing to see this account of gay life in the late 1970s and early 1980s and realize that AIDS is never mentioned. It's an astonishing time capsule -- a snapshot of what tragedy in the gay community looked like before AIDS took over in scripting gay male devastation. In some way, I think it was important to me, in the later 1980s, to have this film as a touchstone of how grief might serve as a politicizing touchstone. The absence of AIDS in this film also is suggestive of how distant the recent gay past was for me as a young gay man coming to intellectual and political consciousness in the later 1980s. I'm struck by how much Dustin Lance Black's screenplay for the narrative feature film Milk owes to the narrative structure of the first two thirds of Epstein's film (opening with the recorded "in the event of my death by assassination" message; the narrative of folks arriving to the memorial rally and saddened by the lack of people at city hall only to realize the vast swath just around the corner). I'm also struck by the feature film's excision of Sally Gearhart and the Chinese American guy. The feature's narrative, in addition to being much more attentive to Harvey's personal life, is also much less attentive to Harvey's apparent commitment to racial and gender equity. Seeing this film now makes me realize how much the Van Sant film really is unconsciously about white male privilege (which might be why the Diego Luna bit proves so discomfiting). What's interesting to me is how much this film registers for me now, in ways I might not have been aware in the late 1980s, as a emotionally and politically complex document of what gay politics looked like before the onslaught of AIDS. I'm also struck by how different the two most marvelous actions: the vigil and the riot. Both reactions were startling in their eloquence in 1978, but they were also novelties. By the later 1980s when I first fell in love with this film, eloquent articulations of collective grief as well as increasingly confrontational modes of political demonstration were becoming ever more the norm. The historical distance of the recent gay past. The concomitant imperative of entering such stories into the archive. It was fascinating to watch this film, having been so recently reminded of the basic contours of the story. Easily one of the most important films in my political, intellectual and academic consciousness. I'm fascinated now to troll through the special features and listen to the audio commentaries.

Absolute Beginners (1986) +

An enthralling, if confounding, pastiche of a musical film. The film ostensibly tells the story of a pair lovers -- the boy a photographer, the girl a fashion designer -- and their estrangement from each other (as well as their sustaining community of outsiders) in the Notting Hill district of London in the summer months just prior to the legendary Notting Hill Riots of 1958. The film is both about this period of cultural and racial transformation in post-WWII Britain even as it is also an excavation of the anxieties of authenticity in post-punk/big80s Britain. The film riffs off every musical you might imagine: from the teenybopper rock films to Tommy to Rocky Horror to West Side Story to Michael Jackson/Madonna to the most baroque of MGM musical production designs of the 1950s. What I admired about the film though, and what sustained me through its often numbing obtuseness, was director Julien Temple's searching inquisitiveness -- the film is about the characters, about the music, about the history, about the film's contemporary moment but even more than all of that this film seems to be about the perilous adventure of making a film in the first place. In discussions of 1980s postmodernism and pastiche over the last 15 years or so, it seems the conversations too readily lapse toward the an interest in irony, especially the notion of ironic certainty as a subject position for the either artist/auteur or audience/auteur. Yet I'm reminded how that television theory book Channels of Discourse used Pee-Wee's Playhouse as its example lesson of post-modernism. And though there was much irony in all of Pee-Wee, there was -- especially in the tv show and first film -- a great deal of sincerity. And this is the aspect of postmodern pastiche that I think often gets forgotten: the reassemblage and referentiality in these pastiche productions derive as much from appreciation as it does from derision. I admired this tension in Temple's film -- there is a sincerity to the production that doesn't diminish the archness of his commentary. And this is the complexity of postmodernism that sometimes, it seems to me, gets overlooked. The film is a fascinating (and possibly failed, I'm not sure) experiment that I appreciated more and more as the film wore on. Yes, I was relieved to see it end, but even then I was stunned by the hopefulness of the its basically cynical conclusion. This, it seems to me, was the aspiration of post-modernism, to deconstruct familiar forms so that an audience's habituated reactions might be challenged and transformed. And this, interestingly enough, is what Temple's film accomplishes. I don't know that I'd recommend it, nor would I necessarily seek out an occasion to screen it again, but I do admire and appreciate the film, both as a time-capsule of a very brief moment in mainstream media production and also as a fundamentally aspirational piece of cinema-making. Temple's trying something here (just look at the care/attention to production design and choreography), something substantial and something worthwhile, and it's worth noting. Finally, I think it's important to note Temple's insistence on including queers in his vision of an urban utopia -- remember, in 1986, it was still fairly unusual to explicitly (and affirmatively) include fags/dykes in cinematic microcosms, let alone underscore queer instrumentality in sustaining diverse community. Yes, Big Jill is played in drag queen style instead of as a bulldyke, but still. I don't know. I liked this film, a lot I think, for reasons I don't entirely understand.

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (2008) -

A cloying spectacle of melancholic whimsy. The conceit is simple, even simplistic. Benjamin is a boy born old, a child trapped in a old man's body. However, marvelously, as Benjamin ages, his body becomes ever more youthful. Of course, this "simple" scifi paradox obliges all kinds of narrative cleverness to facilitate a legible story. I can't even bring myself to summarize it fully. The meandering maneuvers of this film detail an epic life in John Irving style, poignant quirkiness piles atop quirky poignancy, as delightful eccentrics punctuate the life path of our putative hero, Benjamin. There's the man struck by lightning seven times, the tugboat captain who's really an artist, a lovelorn woman who almost swam the English Channel, a faith healer with a heart condition, and an African man who performed as a "pygmy" in the monkey cages at the zoo. (I knew I was in trouble when the pygmy showed up shortly after a Kipling story had been read.) So, through this pile of poignant quirk, David Fincher stitches two main narrative subthemes (the peculiar estrangement intrinsic to parental love and the devastating vicissitudes of romantic timing) within the high concept's main conceit, itself a pensive riff on the glib aphorism "youth is wasted on the young." Basically, the film is a 168 minute affirmation of the idea that spiritual maturity is defined by the capacity to acknowledge and accept loss. But to make these ostensibly "big" ideas cinematic, Fincher et al decide to make a visually sumptuous film -- an epic of implausibly enlightening beauty. Indeed, the film feels, at times, like someone decided to tell someone else's life story using only those motivational prints they sell in the skymall catalog, the ones that have some aspirational ideal ("Make It Happen!") emblazoned beneath some impossibly beautiful vista (like a climber arriving to the apex of a snowy mountain). And, after a certain point, for me, the film's slideshow of profound poignancy became merely tedious, as though I was following in the footsteps of someone else's trudge of happy destiny. In short, the film -- while often captivating -- lacked an emotional urgency and/or a compelling mystery to sustain my fascination. I just wanted the many narrative threads to resolve. Indeed, one of the inadvertent problems of the film is that it depends so much on an elaborately aged Brad Pitt for its emotional hook that the one of few genuine aspects of suspense derives from the question: when is Brad gonna get pretty? And, once he does, it becomes a fleeting disappointment as we know this "real" Brad will shortly disappear again into some other elaborate cgi/make-up apparatus. (Two other problems emerge here: one, the convergence of the "unaltered" Brad and Cate almost cheapens the rest of the film, as it seems to suggest that the true height of lived experience is one's 40s; second, the filmmaker's choice to use unaltered children instead of elaborately crafted concoctions for the last years of Benjamin's life cheats the audience of the experience of our own loss of this strange, lovely creature.) But, really, whatever. The film is an elaborate, spangly concoction. I actually quite liked the way the film approached the intimate estrangement of parental love, how parenting is always a kind of loss. But the fated, destined love affair was obvious and lame. The only thing that really pissed me off, though, was the character given to Taraji P. Henson (an instinctively maternal, religiously devoted, sassy black female caregiver named "Queenie"). The day after admiring Doubt's Mrs. Muller as a black female character nearly bereft of cliche, I'm faced with a black female character that leaves no cliche un-embraced. Taraji Henson is a brilliant, charismatic actress, a actor who is gloriously capable of adding irreverent, complicating humor to even the most boilerplate of characters. And she is utterly effective in this Mammy role. But, cripes, why must her gifts be confined to this sassy black mammy character? And why is this character/ization being so celebrated? (The audience I saw the film with giggled and guffawed at the revival meeting in a way that was just beyond uncomfortable. No other group -- not even the bohemian Greenwich village hipsters or the tugboat crew -- suffers the same degree of spectacular mockery.) Taraji Henson is waaaaaaay overdue for recognition by awards bodies but this just...unfortunate. That said, I'm impressed at how -- once again -- the two most accomplished performances in this film (Taraji Henson's and Tilda Swinton's) help to underscore what is for me the central failing of the film: its inconstant, even incoherent, tone. Henson, Swinton, and even the lightning man all remind us that this film is a whimsical fantasy, even as much of the film seeps toward lugubrious epic style. Indeed, had this film been treated as a wacky, whimsical comedy approaching profound themes, I might have really been caught in its swoon. But at it was it felt like a really long episode of Touched by an Angel, or something else brought to you by the Hallmark Hall of Fame. The film is a formidable accomplishment and (judging by the audible reaction of the audience I saw it with) the film promises to be enduring crowd pleaser. (On the way out of the theatre, I overheard three separate intergenerational clusters of female moviegoers enthusing about buying the dvd when it comes out. The men in the pissoir, on the other hand, mostly chatted about either how long or how strange the film was.) I might have liked the film had it told the same story in about half the time but no measure of miraculous hummingbirds flying could assure me that I hadn't been sold a pile of piffle under the label of cinematic profundity. Gah.

Doubt (2008) +

A confounding little parable of rightness and wrongness, of doubt and certainty, sustained by an accumulation of intriguing performances. I don't know the play. I've avoided it, in part, because it has long impressed me as one of those essentially middle-brow moral puzzlers that tend to delight middle-brow theatre audiences (an impression fortified by its cinematic adaptation here). Yet I also understood that the piece provided four delicious roles for actors to really show their mettle (another impression fortified by this cinematic adaptation) as they maneuvered the uncertainty surround allegations regarding a priest's possibly inappropriate relationship with an adolescent boy (a boy who happens, also, to be the first African American student at a Catholic grammar school in New York, I think). In the pre-Oscar blur/buzz, much has been made of the three female performances, with conventional wisdom aligning fairly neatly as follows: Viola Davis is electrifying in the scene-stealing role of the boy's mother; Amy Adams is the weakest link as the nicest nun who happens to instigate the tempest in this particular teapot; and Meryl Streep is over-the-top and often off-pitch as the raging gorgon of a Mother Superior who leads the charge for removal of the offending priest. Generally forgotten amidst this rapidly consolidated commonsense is Phillip Seymour Hoffman as said priest, his stature as a "great actor" unquestioned as his performance goes relatively uninterrogated. So that's the set-up. MrStinky articulated my main reaction to the film as a story/narrative/piece of cinema when he said something to the effect of: "I loved the characters, the basic scenario, and the whole catholic thing -- but the story was weird." Ditto. Shanley, in adapting and directing this for the screen, made the basic mistake most films make when removing "idea dramas" from theatre. He took the roof off the story, opening it up in ways not as carefully calibrated. It seems to me that the finely tuned dramaturgy of the piece is one dependent on the tightness, the confinedness of the campus of the church/school/abbey/rectory. When Shanley moves beyond the hermetic seal of that zone, the results range from decidedly ok (as with the walking conversation between Streep and Davis) to just bad (the stylized enactment of the gossip sermon) -- but they rarely serve to amplify the internal tension within the narrative. In contrast, the scenes that provide a "behind the scenes" look at life within the insularity of the disparate Catholic worlds contained on that campus are often thrilling. (Especially effective is the juxtaposition of the partying priests and the ascetic nuns, while each group is at dinner.) However, even when such detail amplifies our appreciation of the cultural life of urban US catholicism just after midcentury, all such scenes end up diminishing the dramatic power of the narrative's driving question: did he do it? In giving us so much more to appreciate about this moment in US Catholic cultural life, Shanley and his ensemble inadvertently diminish the dramatic force of what is, ostensibly, the narrative's main urgency. The narrative, it seems to me, is about the stark polarity of a transcendant yes/no diverting into four competing and highly personal truths. This journey is muddied by the dimensions added to this film version, and it's a signal of the peril of adapting such intimate dramas for the screen. However, to return to the performances, I find it interesting that the performances have borne what is to my mind more than their share of fault for Shanley's misguided but understandable choices. First, I don't agree at all that Amy Adams is the weak link. I think she's absolutely perfect in the part. The role requires that Sister James be pure and simple, the embodiment of the audience's hope that faith will be enough in times of deep uncertainty. Adams is preternaturally gifted toward sweetness and she melds that talent with just the right level of complexity: her Sister James may yet be blessed with a simple faith but she's no simpleton. I personally found her absolutely lovely -- humane and human -- in the role and whatever grief she's gotten from the Oscar punditocracy is, to my mind, utterly undeserved. (Indeed, I would not be at all surprised if Adams sneaks through to snag the trophy this year.) As for Viola Davis, her performance is the true gem in this film, possibly my personal favorite bit of supporting actressness all year. Davis is absolutely good in a role that is ripe with depth, dimension and surprise -- and a startling absence of cliche -- and thus a possibly unique character/ization within the entire catalog of African American supporting actress nominations. As for Meryl: she's brilliant, utterly brilliant...smart, funny, scary, larger than life and profoundly human. As Sister Aloysius, Streep does what she did in Prada: giving us a character we think we know, delivering all the anticipated delights of this stock character with electrifying alacrity, while also startling us with just enough glimpses behind the mask. Streep's Aloysius is a larger than life broad who happens to wear a habit. It's a very interesting performance, one that will likely endure well beyond the grousing of this Oscar season. It's Hoffman (by whom, yes, I tend to be unimpressed) who is least effective here. Hoffman carries a beleaguered defensiveness in many of his roles; when he fights, he so often does so with an "ow - I can't believe you hit me" kind of pathos, and it's that quality that I find least effective in his work generally, and this role specifically. He's puddly when he should be rigid, shrill when he might be stolid. When Hoffman's Father Flynn sits at Sister Aloysius's desk, it seems more impolitic than an assertion of his own belief in his authority. I just don't "get" Father Flynn's sense of entitlement, especially over and against the authority of a mere nun, in Hoffman's performance. And Hoffman's clumsy handling of Flynn's overconfidence, it seems to me, mishandles an essential dimension of the character. So, again, Hoffman's the weak link, in my view, not Adams. Finally, even though I've yammered on way too long as it is, two more things. First, I'm not sure whether I like that the film "shows its hand" regarding Flynn's guilt or not. I really like that we get to see some of the kids, especially Lloyd Clay Brown as Jimmy Hurley and Joseph Foster as Donald Miller. These young actors are really solid in their roles, and Brown's Jimmy is a compelling presence on screen, so much so that it tips the narrative balance a little. Two potential readings emerge, which might both be right: one that Jimmy Hurley is Shanley's own autobiographical proxy (the idea being that in the film Shanley could put his own story in the film a little) and the other that Jimmy Hurley was actually the kid that Father Flynn was messing with (the idea being that the Sisters Aloysius and James have the right idea about the wrong kid). It's fascinating narrative thread, but one that confuses as much as it intrigues. Finally, Sister Aloysius's doubts: I really regret that the film confuses this scene as much as it did. My interpretation is, based on this single screening, is that Sister Aloysius does not doubt Flynn's guilt but the wisdom of her the church she has made a vow to serve. However, MrStinky was confused by this speech, hearing it as being about her doubting her certainty about Father Flynn. Both might be accurate interpretations but I'm sorry that the film lets this complexity read as confusion. It diminishes the Aloysius character in unproductive ways as it also dampens the power of the film. A fair to middling film, sustained by a collection of spectacular female performances.

Synecdoche, New York (2008) +

An enthralling excavation of the delicious, taunting terror of intimacy. Charlie Kauffman's film is most basically about emotional insecurity and uncertainty. The film's protagonist Caden Cotard (Philip Seymour Hoffman, generous and inconspicuous in the role), is an underconfident theatre director teetering on the cusp of serious success/obscurity when his artist wife (Catherine Keener doing Catherine Keener) leaves him, taking their young daughter with her to Europe where the ex-wife achieves unforeseen, formidable acclaim. At about the same time, Hoffman's Caden is named the recipient of a MacArthur genius grant and begins an ambiguous affair with, first, the quirky box office girl (Samantha Morton, in a consistently compelling and enigmatic performance) and, second, his actress-y leading lady (Michelle Williams, absolutely brilliant at the start, fair to middling toward the end). All of this soap operatic sturm and drang is mediated by Caden's own fractured powers of comprehension. He mishears words; he doesn't always understand what he is himself saying. The character, at least at the beginning, seems always just shy of understanding the world around him. With his MacArthur genius grant, Caden commences building his masterpiece -- an epic theatrical creation that is about nothing but the competing truths in daily life. The remainder of the film -- looped as it is with the romantic sagas that mark Caden's life -- explores the collision between art and life as Caden still seeks to resolve his originary pain (the loss of his wife and daughter to a life other than his) through the new work -- and life -- he's creating. The film is beyond legible explanation. Characters refract and multiply promiscuously. Narrative threads stitch knots and braids as well as seams. The film rarely makes sense, especially as Caden gets deeper into the rabbithole of his ever-more massive creation. (He basically builds a replica of his life -- the buildings as well as the people -- within an airplane hangar and he and his collaborators compose the script each day as they rehearse.) Conceit of the whole shebang is deceptively simple: how can you fully live your life if you are constantly imagining how you might adapt and adjust it to be closer to your own ideal of truth? It's the basic problem that informs most "artist dilemma" movies yet, somehow, Kaufman maintains the emotional immediacy of his experiment in ways that are astonishing. Even as the film becomes less scrutable, and more and more meta, Kaufman and his cast are somehow able to maintain not only an emotional accessibility but also a crucial sense of personal urgency. I continued to care about these characters even though I had little affection for them and had no idea who they actually were. The film is plump with excellent supporting actresses -- Jennifer Jason Leigh, Hope Davis, Emily Watson and Dianne Wiest -- each of whom do gorgeous work. (Indeed, Keener is the only mediocre link, and that's just because she's so familiar in the role.) I also really admired Tom Noonan's work as the strange actor who takes on the role of Caden. But the thing I most admired about the film is that, even though it was a complete rabbithole, I never felt frustrated or lost (the way I sometimes do at such moments in films by, say, David Lynch or Woody Allen). I found the film consistently emotionally compelling and the culminating set of scenes in which Dianne Wiest guides Hoffman's Caden toward the acceptance of his own limited mortality were -- like Wiest -- quite simply, luminous. I didn't expect to like this film much at all, having not been much of a fan of Kaufman's previous work. (Indeed, I sometimes feel I'm the only person who was utterly underwhelmed by Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, though I did love Confessions of a Dangerous Mind.) But as a director, I found Kaufman's vision much more immediate, much kinder, and much more human than I had before. I guess I had attributed the über-clever twisty smartypantsness to him. Here, his vision is brilliantly vulnerable and it's an astonishing experience. One last bit to remember: I was amazed by the strange bits of character detail. Hope Davis crammed and blistered into shoes too small for her. Emily Watson wearing a black bra with a backless dress. Samantha Morton's Hazel wearing only jewel tones. (Of course, nearly all the women have abundant bosoms which seems less about their individual characters and more about something else entirely.) But the attention to strange, compelling detail for each of these strange, compelling characters was a thrill to observe - a signal that I was pleased to be traveling this confounding, strange and surprising cinematic journey. Mortality, intimacy, creativity -- big abstract ideas that Kaufman brings to the screen with haunting immediacy. A bizarre, generous bit of genius.

Slumdog Millionaire (2008) -

A visually stylish fairy tale, laden with enough easy laughs (and easier sentiment) to maintain what is basically a tediously schematic plot. The basic scenario is simple: Jamal (played as a young adult by the appealing Dev Patel) is a kid from the Mumbai slums who has somehow landed in the "hotseat" of the Indian version of the game show Who Wants To Be A Millionaire. As the film begins, he has been jailed under allegations that he has somehow cheated his way to the final question. Danny Boyle uses this scenario deftly. As Jamal's being interrogated by the cops, we revisit the previous nights episode via a videotape which shows Jamal answering increasingly difficult questions. The police inspector (the always better than he needs to be Irfan Khan) questions Jamal about how he knew each answer and thus, however unknowingly, solicits Jamal's entire life story (beginning with his childhood fascination with a film star and the death of his mother in a religious riot). The film thus charts Jamal's life from about the age of 6 to about the age of 12 to about the age of 18 or 19, when he see him on the game show. It's an emotionally appealing story, in the fashion of any number of life-improving reality teevee programs, with Danny Boyle's exhilarating camera work (as well as the stunning complexity of Mumbai street life) amplifying the pleasures of the story. The flashback story, however, is pretty banal. Jamal is the quiet, sensitive brother and Salim is the elder, more mercenary and more violent. Latika is the girl child, also orphaned during the religious riot, to whom Jamal becomes immediately devoted, much to Salim's annoyance. The fates of these three characters -- Jamal, Salim, Latika -- thus become entwined and the film's romantic throughline is derived from Jamal's nearly obsessive devotion to his quest to be reunited with the beautiful Latika. All kinds of awful things befall the threesome, individually and collectively, and the nodes of their story comprise the life experiences from which Jamal draws as he answers each Millionaire question correctly and which he explains to Khan's inspector (and by extension, us). It's a gloriously clever framework, one which permits all kinds of thrilling emotional and visual flourish, even as the narrative itself quickly becomes utterly unsurprising. The narrative builds to a climactic sequence in which everything -- Jamal's reconciliation with Latika, Salim's final chance to act the hero, the hope of all Mumbai -- rides on whether or not Jamal can answer his final question and thus win the million. It's not much of a spoiler to say that he does, because the film works the adrenaline of the moment in a way that reminds us -- at every step -- that this is a fairy tale. Everything resolves in a way that's ostensibly happy and the film concludes gloriously with a Bollywood-style dance number on the fateful train platform. The film is loaded with exhilarating imagery, surprising humor (I love the first node, in which the youngest Jamal suffers a poopy fate to earn the autograph of his hero) and great locations. However, as much as there was to thrill with in this film, I found most of the enterprise to be tedious. In some ways, I wanted Boyle to embrace the formula less cynically -- to really make the movie scripted by the screenplay: a Charles Dickens tale told in contemporary Bollywood colors. Instead, it seemed to me, that Boyle was trying to dress up the romance and fantasy with some "real" and "gritty" touches of the violence, degradation and inhumanities of life in contemporary Mumbai. It's not exactly that Boyle seemed to want to avoid the sentiment, but that he wanted to dress it up with gritty reality to that people didn't turn off to the sentiment itself. Which is too bad, because it's the sentiment -- the romantic fantasy -- of the story that remains the most appealing. This is an epic melodrama and the film worked best for me when it went there, unapologetically. (Indeed, the only genuinely moving moment in the film came during the final dance as images of the adult Latika and Jamal dancing were intercut with the child actors dancing as well. A simple, sentimental juxtaposition of images -- but its where the honest truth of the narrative rests, this implausible, innocent, heroic romance.) Many folks have faulted the film's final act as being a little too over-the-top, as being too obviously contrived and formulaic, and thus (nearly or actually) ruining the film's previous pleasures. However, I see this critique as verification of Boyle's savviness in tarting up the melodrama with a gritty/real/muliculti veneer -- as proof that contemporary critics/moviegoers would really not admit how much the pleasures of melodrama inform their delight at the cinema. But this is also the source of my boredom with the film: in the end, it's a tricksy gimmick of a film. Appealing, affecting, stimulating, exciting -- but a tricksy gimmick. I was ready to love Slumdog Millionaire and was dismayed by the curious ways Boyle's strategic cynicism in packaging the story diminished the full weight of this epic, formulaic, brazenly sentimental melodrama.