Some terrific recent Oscar-nominated movies, such as Good Night, and Good Luck and Capote, came as close to nonfiction in their techniques and textures as movie drama could bear.
This year reverses the trend with vivid splashes of artifice and theatricality. Movies like The Curious Case of Benjamin Button and Slumdog Millionaire, and even Milk and Frost/Nixon, though rooted in reality, have won over still-widening audiences with touches of myth and fable and sometimes just plain make-believe.
The lives in Benjamin Button start on Mark Twain's Mississippi River and end with Hurricane Katrina, and merge into an amazing American odyssey. Just as crucial to Slumdog Millionaire as its gamelike structure and its love story is a tale as old as Cain and Abel - or as Warner Bros. classics such as A ngels With Dirty Faces - about two brothers or playmates taking vastly different routes out of the slums. Milk reaches its artistic peak when Harvey Milk's life ends in moments of operatic tragedy. And Frost/Nixon turned the David Frost-Richard Nixon interviews into a bout worthy of David and Goliath.
Still, what gives these films their spine is their utter currency: They are topical as well as timeless.
They make you feel as if the Oscars heard America talking. In giving Button 13 nominations, Slumdog 10, Milk eight and Frost/Nixon and The Reader both five, the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences chose to salute best picture nominees that reflect our national conversations about opportunities and responsibilities, big and small. These aren't matters of "subtext"; they are simply text.
The sprawling, poetry-charged Benjamin Button (my favorite) has a stroke of whimsical genius at the center: a man who is born old and ages backward. Yet as it roams over the entire 20th century, including two world wars, it hinges on a woman taking responsibility by caring for this old-young hero. And it turns on Button taking responsibility in a different way by leaving his child with his wife, so his daughter won't see him as a teen, a boy, an infant.
Slumdog Millionaire is set in Mumbai with a cast of Indian characters, yet it may be the most American movie on the list. It's about a tea-server at a cell-phone company who triumphs on the Indian version of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire by drawing on his nerve and honesty and everything he has - including every ounce of his hard-won street knowledge. He does so not just for material gain, but to be with the woman he's loved since both were slum-dwelling orphans.
