Tilda Swinton: The One (or Two) and Only

Nobody looks like Tilda Swinton—besides, maybe David Bowie, who shares her androgynous, fashion-forward persona. She was the best thing in The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, and is generally the best thing in any movie she appears in. As part of the star chamber that awarded the Best Supporting Actress Oscar to Penelope Cruz, Swinton did not disappoint. Her outfit was puzzling and unusual, and her handling of the whole thing seemed to say: Right, let’s just let Tilda keep the statuette, shall we?

Seeing her in the Oscars telecast reminded me of what might be the quintessential Swinton role, that of Orlando, in Sally Potter’s eponymous 1992 film. Based on the novel by Virginia Woolf, Orlando spans four hundred years as it tells the story of a young man born into wealth in Renaissance England. Yes, that was four hundred years, and yes, Swinton plays a man. But, if you’re keeping track, sometime around 1700, Orlando turns into a woman.


Potter’s casting of Swinton is an inspired choice. No one else could possibly have played the role (except, again, David Bowie--but Bowie’s acting chops are a bit below Swinton’s level). Even though Potter’s film is far from naturalistic—Swinton’s performance includes a handful of moments when she twitches her head imperceptibly towards the camera and delivers a one-line commentary on the action—Swinton deserves enormous credit for so thoroughly seeming to inhabit the skin of both a male and a female character. When Orlando is a young man, Swinton’s walk and movements—even the way she holds her head—are somehow clearly male. When Orlando is a woman, everything changes, softening, becoming somehow fuller. Swinton doesn’t simply reproduce stereotypes; this is the same individual rendered in two genders.


Potter plays around with gender—as she must, if she is to adapt Woolf’s novel for film—through the film. Quentin Crisp is creepily good as a long-haired Queen Elizabeth. Later, during the nineteenth-century portion of the story, Potter tweaks the Victorian trope of the injured female to be rescued by the man. She anticipates Ang Lee’s Sense and Sensibility by three years, as Orlando rescues Shelmerdine (easily the strangest name in all of literature) from his broken ankle. Billy Zane’s hair is almost as long as Kate Winslet’s Marianne’s.



But see for yourself. And read Woolf’s odd 1928 book. Though I first read Orlando more than twenty-five years ago, Woolf’s description of the Little Ice Age that allowed for festivals on the Thames during the Renaissance has remained vivid in my memory. Potter does a nice job recreating the scenes on film, though Woolf’s evocation wins the competition.

Orlando is indeed a writer’s movie. Orlando’s final incarnation is as a single woman, a single mother, and a writer. Taking the manuscript of her life’s story into the steel-and-glass office of a publisher, she runs into the characteristic writer’s experience: rejection. As the editor puts it:

“It’s very, very good. Written from the heart. I think it’ll sell. Provided you rewrite it. You know: increase the love interest, give it a happy ending. By the way, how long did this draft take you?”

Orlando’s reaction? Another one of those glances at the camera. The next shot shows her kick-starting her motorcycle and driving away with her child. Revision be damned!

The Problem of Benjamin Button

Virtually all the press about The Curious Case of Benjamin Button presents the film as a story of triumph and uplift. As reviewers and advertisements would have it, the film offers us the satisfyingly chastening reminder that love can transcend time—and, more importantly, can overcome the normal and gradual aging of the human body. Of course, we say. How shallow we have been to forget this truth (or, god forbid, not to believe it). How lucky that David Fincher has come along to remind us of it.

The problem with Benjamin Button—and there are several—is that the film that Fincher has put together does exactly the opposite of what he has set out to convince us of. Rather than show us how the mind and heart can defy the limitations of the body, Benjamin Button suggests that the body determines and defines us.

The poignancy of Benjamin Button’s situation is supposed to come from the dissonance between his chronological and physical age. He is a child who cannot walk or run, then a young man whose back and knees ache, and then an elderly man with the smooth face of a boy. But besides a fairly workmanlike voice-over, we never see Benjamin’s thoughts, except for one lovely moment that shows that Brad Pitt is a better actor than anyone has ever asked him to be (about which more later). We are left with a story of looks—and here is the trouble.

When Brad Pitt looks twenty, dancing the twist in a 60s apartment, we should be aware that he possesses the wisdom of a seventy-year-old man. It’s an interesting conundrum: what would you do if you had all that knowledge and the body that allowed you to act on it? But we look at the young man and can’t help but notice that the woman he loves has crow’s feet and a pre-Botox-era forehead. Scene after scene—on the motorcycle, on the sailboat—Fincher shoots Pitt in glamour poses bathed with golden light. Pitt’s youth is what we long for, not Benjamin Button’s wisdom. The film reinforces such a typical Hollywood fantasy that it almost seems unfair to point it out.

I went to see Benjamin Button with my eighty-four-year old mother—a woman who is in amazing shape for her age, but who would trade experience and wisdom in a heartbeat for the chance to look twenty. As the film began, with the unnecessary frame narrative of Julia Ormond reading Benjamin Button’s diary to her dying mother, I could hear my own mother grumbling about the unpleasantness of the scene. She would watch Ormond, but kept turning away from the sight of Cate Blanchett made up to look old (but still blessed with high cheekbones). I was sure my mother would ask me to take her home, but I needn’t have worried. She turned out to be the perfect audience for the film, audibly sighing with relief when Brad Pitt appeared at his youngest incarnation, late in the movie.

Granted, who can blame an old woman for longing for the time when her skin was unlined and her body was at its most vigorous? And surely, at her age and widowed for five years, the sight of a death-bed can only remind her of my father’s time in one. But if The Curious Case of Benjamin Button had done its job, my mother and I would both have walked out of the theater reassured that the body is just the vehicle for the far more valuable thoughts and feelings it contains.

There is some triumph in the movie, all the same—and it’s in Tilda Swinton’s too-brief appearance, and in Fincher’s technical abilities. But most of all, it’s in that scene that shows what Brad Pitt can do as an actor. Blanchett’s Daisy lies in a hospital bed with a body broken from a car crash when Benjamin comes to see her, looking roughly like a forty-year-old. “God, you’re perfect,” she says to him, with a tinge of spite. He doesn’t respond, but the look on Pitt’s face—or, rather, the series of looks—says it all. It conveys all the sadness, isolation, pleasure, and wistfulness of a life in which the mind and the body have never been at peace. That is something to make a movie out of.

Watching The Wrestler: or How I Learned to Stop Cringing and Love Mickey Rourke

More uplift. In this case, it’s not the story of Randy Ramzinski, the aging wrestler in Darren Aronofsky’s eponymous movie, but the story of Mickey Rourke. Here is a man whose promising career descended so low that he shared a category with Jerry Lewis (American Performers Most Loved By The French), and now he has won a Golden Globe and a BAFTA and may go on to win more.

Maybe I wasn’t paying attention, but I had the impression that The Wrestler was a superb movie with a story that somehow told you everything would be all right. I was only half-correct. The Wrestler is indeed a superb movie, but it makes you want to watch hours of Winnie-the-Pooh afterwards to cancel out its bleakness.

What’s bleak can be itemized quickly enough: the trailer home with the power cut off; the beaten-up body; the dingy strip club that passes for community; the tiny audiences; the autograph-signings that look like bingo at the nursing home. What’s superb requires a longer list. Aronofsky’s movie does everything right—from the script, to the un-annoying hand-held camera, to the portrayal of its two main characters, Randy the Ram whose real name is Robin, and Marisa Tomei’s Cassidy whose real name is Pam.

The similarity of their names is no accident. These two are through-the-looking-glass versions of each other, and each is a distorted mirror-image of him or her self. Both of them are performers, selling their bodies for a simulacrum of attraction and acceptance, and, in the case of Randy, confusing the simulacrum with the real. Pam understands all this, muttering her real name as she leaves the club for good, as if it were the password to a new life. But for Robin Ramzinski, the persona of the Ram is a trap he does not want to get out of—or considers himself undeserving to escape.

Perhaps the saddest scene in this very sad film takes place in neither of the two main spheres of its story (club and ring), but in a bar near the second-hand store where Randy meets Pam to buy a gift for his daughter. (Even here, there’s the hint of self-delusion: Pam’s “vintage” store is another person’s thrift shop.) When old-fashioned rock and roll comes on the bar’s speakers, both characters glory in the music, and Randy dances for Pam in a neat reversal of their usual roles. But their usual roles make Pam and Randy utterly out of place in the daytime bar. After they kiss, Pam hurries to get out of there—and we should thank Aronofsky for that. In one of the movie’s saddest scenes, he gives us the first sign that at least Pam gets it: you can’t live the role in the real world. Get out or die trying.

No spoilers here, so I leave it at that. Except to say that the people making Benjamin Button need have looked no further than The Wrestler if they wanted to talk about bodies that defy old age. Rourke is in surprising shape and Tomei looks like a twenty-five-year old, except for her realistically and beautifully expressive face.

As for Rourke? I cringed twice during The Wrestler (not counting the horribly violent wrestling scenes and the bloodletting Mel Gibson would be proud of). Once during a close-up shot of Rourke’s butt, and once during the heartbreaking scene in the bar. The rest of the time, I was marveling at Rourke’s creation of such a vivid, sad, and moving character.