Beautiful Button a Curious Fantasy
Benjamin Button (Brad Pitt) was born backwards. His infant form shriveled, falling apart, blind from cataracts that the lad’s industrialist father Thomas (Jason Flemyng) becomes so appalled he abandons the newborn on the steps of caretaker Queenie’s (Taraji P. Henson) home for senior citizens. Urged to the let the child be, she instead decides to care for it as her own, claiming every soul in this life is worthy of comfort and love no matter what its unfortunate situation.
Brad Pitt in Paramount Pictures' The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
Surprisingly, Benjamin bucks the odds, and as those around him in the New Orleans’ facility grow old and vanish, he in turn starts getting younger and stronger. Soon the young man finds the strength to join the crew of a tugboat sailing to Russia, romances the wife of a British spy (Tilda Swinton) who mistakes him for her senior and fights heroically in WWII, all before finally returning home to the woman he calls Mom.
Ultimately he reconnects with the only woman he’s ever romantically loved, one-time ballet dancer and best friend Daisy (Cate Blanchett). The two start an affair that takes them deep into their forties, the couple discovering themselves at right about the same genetic age for the very first time. But after what at first appears to be a miracle, Benjamin quickly realizes he must go, knowing that his continued spiral into infancy is a burden no one else but he should be forced to bear.
Technically and visually, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button is absolutely spellbinding. Director David Fincher, while not reaching the dizzying heights of Zodiac, still manages to weave an intoxicating web of dream-fueled fantasy impossible to turn away from. The film unfolds like an epic poem, and like Longfellow or Yates the imagery catapulting it across decade-long stanzas fly by so quickly the whole thing is over almost before you know it.
Unfortunately, emotionally this far-reaching journey of humanity transcending time and space kind of left me a tad unfulfilled. Say what you will negatively about writer Eric Roth’s script for Forrest Gump – much of valid – but claiming it didn’t have a heart is one complaint no one can make. While his work here (working from the F. Scott Fitzgerald’s short story) is far more fluid, interesting and subtly expressive, the film itself is still so observationally obtuse there is an odd disconnect between the viewer’s heart and mind.
Yet I was still more than impressed. Fincher’s epic opus floats above the heavens with an almost elegant virtuosity, going backwards and forwards with sublime ease. It is a delicate picture, one that feels as if it were made on the side of a soap bubble floating just out of reach of a small child’s reach.
In that regard, it is a masterful step forward for the auteur. From Alien 3 to Fight Club, from Se7en to Panic Room, Fincher has tended to attack his film like a pugilist trying to find that one perfect moment to go in for the knockout. This has worked, sometimes brilliantly, for the filmmaker, but that doesn’t mean I thought him capable of the self-discipline required to manufacture something like this. Much like Scorsese with The Last Temptation of Christ or Spielberg with Schindler’s List, Benjamin Button shows Fincher capable of switching gears and elevating his game in ways previously unheard of, instantly catapulting him into the upper echelon of directors qualified to craft just about anything.
Technically there has not been another motion picture this year that touches this one’s virtuosity. The effects allowing Pitt to age backward are without par, and while they sometimes tend to give the actors a bit of an artificial, almost plastic sheen (most notably in regards to Blanchett), this defect only adds to the fantastical nature of the world the director has meticulously crafted. Everything works in delirious tandem, cinematographer Claudio Miranda (Failure to Launch), production designer Donald Graham Burt (Donnie Brasco) and composer Alexandre Desplat (The Golden Compass) each at the top of their respective games.
As for the actors, they all do their best even if the reflectively episodic nature of the storyline doesn’t really allow for any of them to make as much of a lasting impression as they probably would have wished. As for Pitt, even though he’s in just about every scene (even as an infant), as he is chiefly an spectator to history and not an active participant he actually doesn’t get the opportunity to resonate. While the superstar leading man is fine in the role, it still isn’t one of his best, the world as seen through his eyes far more interesting than the man searching for answers behind them.
Be that as it may, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button is without question one of the holiday season’s few must-see events. Whether it gets inside your skin and takes over your heart or not, Fincher’s epic is still without few equals in either scope or imagination. It is a spellbinding fantasy of the head, captivating in so many of the right ways the ones it ends up falling short on just don’t matter.
- review reprinted courtesy of the SGN in Seattle
Film Rating: êêê1/2 (out of 4)
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