Curious Cases.(Academy Awards nominees)(Movie review)

Is it the seamlessly blended amber and caramel colors, the slowly gliding camera work? Or is it the sentiments that fall like flakes of wet snow into the dialogue? Many elements join to make the beautifully crafted "Curious Case of Benjamin Button," with a running time of two hours and forty-seven minutes, the best picture in years for a postprandial rest (popcorn division). As you may have noticed, 2008 was not a great year for movies. There was nothing comparable to the hair-raising "There Will Be Blood," or the ravishing "Diving Bell and the Butterfly," or the sinister "No Country for Old Men," from 2007. Even so, a nod for best picture could have gone to more deserving movies, such as Jonathan Demme's "Rachel Getting Married," which settles down into a revelatory examination of a family's anguish and joy; or "Happy-Go-Lucky," Mike Leigh's startling look at the power and the limits of goodness; or even the animated masterpiece "WALL-E," with its vision of the end of industrial civilization and its ironic salvation in an anodyne space station decorated in cruise-liner moderne. The total of thirteen nominations for "Benjamin Button" has to be some sort of scandal. "Citizen Kane" received nine nominations, "The Godfather: Part II" eleven, and this movie, so smooth and mellow that it seems to have been dipped in bourbon aging since the Civil War, is nowhere close to those two. In fact, of the five nominees for best picture--"Milk," "Frost/Nixon," "The Reader," "Slumdog Millionaire," and "Benjamin Button"--only "Milk," a bio-pic with a thrilling sense of history and lots of jokes and sex, has the aesthetic life and human vitality that warrant its nomination.

"The Reader," based on Bernhard Schlink's novel, and "Frost / Nixon," based on Peter Morgan's play, have both, in their passage to movies, picked up an aura of preening importance that is not justified by what's onscreen. Schlink's intelligent book has been frozen in marmoreal stillness and hoisted onto a pedestal. His resonant reflections on postwar German guilt have been dropped, and what's left is a few good scenes set in nineteen-fifties Germany in which a tall, fifteen-year-old boy (David Kross) has the luck to fall into a terrific sexual relationship with a woman (Kate Winslet) twenty years older--a stern, secretive, yet hungry partner whom the boy doesn't realize is a former concentration-camp guard. The sex scenes border on kitsch, but I can't say that I didn't enjoy them, and the cocky grin that breaks out on the face of young David Kross is irresistible. Unfortunately, as he grows up he metamorphoses into Ralph Fiennes, and Fiennes, who seems to have made a career out of anguished sensitivity, suffers so passively and silently when his old girlfriend is put on trial that you want to hard-elbow him back into life. Winslet, acting with her strong shoulders, suggests alternating currents of shame and pride, but the movie goes dead, and the notion that a woman who has committed atrocities is redeemed by the serious books that her former lover sends her in prison is, as the Times' A. O. Scott has pointed out, shaky and sentimental at best.

In the well-acted "Frost / Nixon," a nice journalistic coup--David Frost's pushing Richard Nixon into semi-confessional mode, in 1977--has been elevated to a great transformative moment in history, which, alas, it was not. These two films may have been controlled more by their directors and their writers than by their studios, but they're still the kind of middlebrow pictures that the Academy used to nominate in the bad old studio-dominated days--the contemporary equivalents of "Judgment at Nuremburg" and "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner?" They are "important" pictures that "say" something about public issues. They're good for the industry's image.

The two movies likely to slug it out for the best-picture award, "Benjamin Button" and "Slumdog Millionaire," are something different: they are fairy tales for adults. "Benjamin Button" is based on an early story by F. Scott Fitzgerald, set in Baltimore, in which a child is born as a seventy-year-old man. In the story, Benjamin is about five feet eight inches tall at birth, as big as a baby giraffe, and he grows younger and smaller throughout his life until he dies a tiny infant. It's a deadpan science-fiction conceit that Fitzgerald transformed into social comedy: the upper-middle-class people Benjamin encounters are irritated by his oddity; he's not, they feel, playing his proper social role--he's willful, a nuisance. As adapted by the screenwriter, Eric Roth, and the director, David Fincher, the story is now about a baby ...