Film Review: A 'curious' love story in 'Benjamin Button'
Adapted and expanded from a story in F. Scott Fitzgerald's 1922 collection "Tales of the Jazz Age," "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button" -- the tale of a person who ages backward, from senility to virile adulthood, and then to childhood and infancy -- really is one of the more curious movies of this or any other holiday season.
It's also extremely moving. Its final half-hour is powerful enough to make much of the first 136 minutes (!) seem even more indulgent than you suspected while you watched them unfold, with something of the measured patience of the wizened Benjamin unfolding himself from his wheelchair at a tent revival.
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"The Curious Case of Benjamin Button" stars Brad Pitt, Cate Blanchett, Taraji P. Henson, Julia Ormond and Jason Flemyng in a Paramount release. Rated PG-13 for brief war violence, sexual content and smoking. Watch »
Merrick Morton/Paramount Pictures
Brad Pitt stars as Benjamin Button and Cate Blanchett stars as Daisy in “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button.”
Rated PG-13 for brief war violence, sexual content and smoking
Length: 168 minutes
Released: December 25, 2008 NationwideScore: 4.0
Cast: Brad Pitt, Cate Blanchett, Taraji P. Henson, Julia Ormond, Jason Flemyng
Director: David FincherProducer: Frank Marshall, Kathleen Kennedy, Ceán Chaffin
Writer: F. Scott Fitzgerald, Eric Roth
Genre: Drama, SciFi/Fantasy, Romance
Distributor: Paramount
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Epic in scope as well as length, "Benjamin Button" could be a cinema cousin to "Forrest Gump" (1994), a comparison that will scare off as many people as it attracts.
Both movies were written by Eric Roth, and both focus on an odd, well-intentioned, kind-hearted man-child whose adventures span the globe and the decades.
Like "Gump," which was groundbreaking in its day, "Benjamin Button" uses state-of-the-art special effects to tell a human-centered story that is as dependent on trickery for its realization as any science-fiction blockbuster, but in a much less showy way. In this case, digital effects are mixed with doubles and Greg Cannom's amazing makeup work to give the illusion that a wrinkled, arthritic baby with "the infirmities of a man of 80" is growing into a progressively younger Brad Pitt.
"Gump" (a movie that initially was overrated and now is unfairly disdained) was directed by Robert Zemeckis, with the crowd-pleasing instincts of his sometime mentor, Steven Spielberg. "Benjamin Button" was directed by the grimmer David Fincher ("Fight Club," "Se7en"), whose previous movie, "Zodiac," was arguably last year's best film. "Button" confirms Fincher's talent, and affirms his status as one of America's more interesting filmmakers.
With its appreciation of motherhood and true love, and its inevitably nostalgic relationship to the past (Forrest Gump influences Elvis, Benjamin Button twists to the Beatles), "Button" is as sentimental, in its way, as "Gump." But if Tom Hanks was lovable, Pitt -- or at least the digital amalgam of Pitt's aged face with various dwarflike and shriveled bodies -- is initially sort of spooky, for all Benjamin's gentleness. Forrest Gump told us life's like a box of chocolates; Benjamin Button reminds us of the melted, shriveled and petrified future of those candies. Benjamin tells us: "Nothing lasts."
"Benjamin Button" is narrated in Benjamin's voice after a woman (Julia Ormond) at the bedside of her dying mother begins to read from her mother's copy of Benjamin's diary, which she never has seen before. The mother and daughter are in a New Orleans hospital, and Hurricane Katrina is on its way. Why place the story's framing device within such a fraught context? This is one of the film's many mysteries.
After a preface involving a clockmaker (Elias Koteas) who manufactures a monumental public timepiece that runs backward, the story proper begins in New Orleans on the night in 1918 when Benjamin is born.
Abandoned as a horror, the "prematurely old" baby is adopted as a "miracle" by Queenie (Taraji P. Henson, of "Hustle & Flow"), a live-in servant at an old folks' home -- an appropriate place for Benjamin to come of age, or come of youth, or however one wants to phrase it.
As Benjamin becomes more robust, the story follows him on several tangents, including a friendship with a dapper pygmy (Rampai Mohadi); his service on a tugboat (as opposed to a shrimp boat) during World War II; and his affair in Russia with the wife (Tilda Swinton) of an American ambassador. But Benjamin always returns to New Orleans, drawn by the tug of home and his lifelong love for Daisy (Cate Blanchett), a ballet dancer whose natural forward aging causes her eventually to meet Benjamin in the middle, so to speak. But can this love last? "Every day I have more wrinkles, not fewer," Daisy mourns.
Beautifully photographed and designed and staged without a misstep, "Benjamin Button" may find its most appreciative audience in years to come, as a cult film, rather than in theaters today. Fincher's calm, deliberate, judicious approach to this emotionally loaded material requires matching patience from the viewer. Sympathetic moviegoers may find that the fantasy context enhances rather than dilutes the story's impact. We all have to watch people we know and love age and die, but something about Benjamin's unique situation is particularly heartbreaking. Many of us have to deal with aging parents or spouses, but Daisy finds herself with a lover who is moving toward a "second childhood" that's really his first -- a literal childhood.
Fincher makes ingenious use of his famous lead actors. Because Benjamin is introduced as an old man and Daisy as a little girl, the moviegoer has to wait a while to see the two attractive movie stars in their glamorous glory. When they do meet in the middle, as Blanchett's character says, Benjamin puts his arm around Daisy and poses in front of a mirror. "I want to remember us just as we are now," he says. "Benjamin Button" reminds us that even the world's most privileged and beautiful people are as doomed as anyone.
-- John Beifuss: 529-2394
Movie review
'The Curious Case of Benjamin Button'
Rated PG-13 for brief violence, sexual content and some profanity.
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