Grandpa Pitt

Is there anything worse than a movie that's been made for only one purpose: to win Oscars?

I'm talking, of course, about Ron Howard's Frost/Nixon and David Fincher's The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. Here are two handsomely mounted productions that take no risks, offer no insights, and are just polite enough to win the Academy's favor. That's not to say these movies are bad, but they ARE boring. Don't let anyone tell you any different.

Howard has been making movies to win Oscars pretty much since Apollo 13. Sometimes he'll devote his talents to personal projects like EdTV and commercial ones like The DaVinci Code, but those have all been artistic failures. It's with the prestige pictures that he feels most at home, and that's fine. He's made some good movies in this period, including A Beautiful Mind and the unfortunately titled Cinderella Man. Still, there's something cynical about directing movies to win not the audience's heart but the hearts of Academy Awards voters. If he wants to appeal to voters, then he should make like Schwarzenegger, run for office and stop wasting my time.

Fincher is a different story, and his film is the bigger disappointment. This is the creator of the anarchic, generation-defining Fight Club and such classically dark entertainments as Seven and Zodiac. What a tragedy that he's turned into a big softie, essentially remaking Forrest Gump without a soul. Based on a short story by F. Scott Fitzgerald, Benjamin Button is a 2-hour and 45-minute epic in which exactly two things happen: Brad Pitt is born as an old man, and Brad Pitt dies as a baby. Nothing of interest happens in between. I kinda dug the part when Benjamin joined the crew of a World War II-era tugboat, and of course Fincher brings his usual technical wizardry to the makeup and computer effects. But the whole package is a great big blah.

Frost/Nixon is the more tightly structured and thematically coherent of the two films, but Howard is playing with fire here, sentimentalizing the memory of one of America's least sympathetic political figures. The syrupy music that plays over many of Nixon's scenes made me want to puke. Howard has no respect for the historical record. Just as he sensationalized John Nash's schizophrenia in A Beautiful Mind, he distorts the interview sessions Nixon conducted with British journalist David Frost. Don't believe me? Then read this. It pretty much reveals the film's climax to be nothing more than hooey.

The funny thing is that the holiday movie season has provided some good entertainment, none of it designed to win Oscars. Cadillac Records is a terrifically well acted retelling of the rise of Chess Records, while The Yes Man is a solid high-concept vehicle for Jim Carrey – not as great as Will Ferrell's Stranger than Fiction, but still quite good. Go figure. Sometimes ambition is anathema to artistic value.