This article first appeared in the St. Louis Beacon, Jan. 27, 2009 - From time to time, I have conversations about movies with my fellow cinephile RD Zurick. These conversations often reflect our different college majors, his in art and mine in English. Sometimes I will like a film that tells a story well, and Roy will ask, “But is it cinematic?” I often argue that good storytelling and good cinema can go together. Here I offer three cases in point: “The Reader,” adapted from a novel originally in German; “Doubt,” rendered for the screen by the playwright; and “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button,” based on an F. Scott Fitzgerald short story.
Sometimes films fail to use the enormous resources of the cinema. They film a story as if it were a play, seldom using close-ups and never moving back and forth in time. These three films do not waste their opportunities.
The Reader
Even Roy would agree that a film must start with a good script. “The Reader” was fortunate that renowned playwright David Hare did the honors. Hare had great material to start with in Bernhard Schlink’s 1995 novel. The action opens with a sad, middle-age Michael Berg (Ralph Fiennes) looking back on his life: specifically, his love affair when he was 15 with a woman twice his age. Young Michael (David Kross) meets Hanna (Kate Winslet) quite by accident – an accident that doubles as fate, since their affair of a single summer colors both their lives.
Screenwriter Hare and director Stephen Daldry make a great novel into a great film partly by making the back-and-forward chronology even more complex and affecting. Michael and Hanna’s affair takes place after World War II. He sees her again in the '60s when he is a law student in the galleries and she is on trial for war crimes at Auschwitz. During the trial, through brief flashbacks to their affair, we learn that he now understands Hannah’s shameful secret.
These brief flashbacks would be impossible in print or on the stage. If memory serves, the novel’s chronology is also more straightforward, while the film’s more frequent movements in time subtly highlight cause-and-effect. For instance, while reading the novel, I had not thought of Michael’s affair with Hanna as implicated in the failure of his marriage, but the movie makes that connection clear.
Part of the magic of “The Reader” is the acting. Fiennes is always excellent; he communicates Michael’s sadness with a flat affect that is markedly different from that of his young self. David Kross is remarkable as the young Michael. But it is Kate Winslet’s performance that steals the movie. She manages to make a character who might seem monstrous into someone limited but human, someone who wants through literature to “reach the stars.” Film captures the many subtleties and changes in all the actors’ faces.
Young Michael’s first sexual experiences are intense and profound. So is Hanna’s demand that he read to her. Michael is getting a fine education in classics – from Homer to Mark Twain – at his excellent school. Hanna ultimately asks for reading first, sex after. The tremendous power of literature is a major theme. Scenes of Michael reading to her are even more effective in the film than in the novel because we can actually share in hearing the magic of the spoken word.
Often, when I have loved a book, I am disappointed in the film version. Not so with “The Reader.” I have urged friends who have read the novel to see the movie, a masterpiece of cinema.
Doubt
Though not on my Top 10 list of the year, “Doubt” is a very fine film based on an excellent stage play by John Patrick Shanley. The playwright manages to become both screenwriter and director, using the cinema to tell his story even better than he did on the stage.
Set in 1964 in the Bronx, the story centers on a Catholic parish school where Meryl Streep plays Sister Aloysius, mother superior and principal. Amy Adams is Sister James, an innocent young history teacher at the school, while Philip Seymour Hoffman is Father Flynn, rector of the church attached to the school. Sister Aloysius has taken an instinctive dislike to the young priest and ultimately accuses him, without real proof, of molesting an altar boy, Donald, the first African-American child in the school.
Unlike the stage play, the film version of “Doubt” can create this small world in its entirety: a working-class neighborhood, the church and its congregation, Sister James’ classroom complete with eighth-graders and much more. A notable case in point is the contrast between the sisters’ silent and comfortless meal, shot from above, following shots of the priests’ epicurean feast filled with alcohol and laughter, filmed head-on.
It reminded me of one definition of Puritanism: the suspicion that someone, somewhere, might be having a good time. It also showed the differences in privilege and freedom between nuns and priests, an obvious and understandable cause of Sister Aloysius’ resentment against Father Flynn. His sense of entitlement also shows in his entering Sister Aloysius’s office and sitting down in her own chair behind the desk!
Another case in point is the conversation between Sister Aloysius and the altar boy’s mother. They walk on a winter’s day among enormous, anonymous apartment buildings discussing young Donald’s fate. The very bricks seem full of indifference and even menace. And what a great acting performance from Viola Davis as the mother. No play could give even those in the first row the moving sight, in close-up, of her crying face.
Several important scenes are shot in an outdoor courtyard starting from above and moving in for close-ups. Besides their efficacy in advancing the drama, they are positively painterly in their composition. Also, no one reading the script – and few seeing the play – could see Streep’s and Hoffman’s and Adams’ faces during some very delicate scenes. What Sister James saw is crucial to the “case” Sister Aloysius builds against the priest. We see every nuance on the big screen – and we need to. This is not one of those films that can be saved for DVD.
Benjamin Button
The same is true of “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button,” a tour de force of acting and also of makeup and special effects. How else to show (rather than tell) the story of a person who is born very old and who gets younger as time goes by?
Writers Eric Roth and Robin Swicord adapted F. Scott Fitzgerald’s short story for the screen, and David Fincher directed. It’s a long and complicated film that begins and ends in New Orleans and travels to Siberia, Paris and India in between. The film takes full advantage of the various settings to show Benjamin’s adventurous life. While “The Reader” and “Doubt” are highly realistic, “Benjamin Button” feels more like a fable.
Lighting and set design contribute to this effect. With every assist Hollywood can offer, Brad Pitt plays Benjamin Button almost all the way from birth in old age to gorgeous youth and back to infancy. The makeup and special effects are remarkable. Taraji P. Henson plays his adoptive mother, the woman who finds him on the doorstep of a nursing home. She and Cate Blanchette, as his great love, age in the usual way as Benjamin goes the opposite. This reverse aging causes some heartbreaking problems. Not to be dismissed are the terrific period sets and costumes that help make the passage of time more real and more fairytale at the same time. This film didn’t make my Top 10, either – but close, especially as I found the end very moving.
It is “The Reader” that most haunts me, but all three of these end-of-2008 movies must be seen on the big screen. Hurry – and see how cinema can make a story add up to more than the sum of its parts.
The Lens is the blog of Cinema St. Louis, hosted by the Beacon.