The Curious Case of Benjamin Button

Forever Young“The Curious Case of Benjamin Button”By Jimmy So“The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” is about a man who takes 86 years to kick the bucket. The man, Benjamin Button (Brad Pitt), is born old and grows younger, but the curiosity is in seeing how the man is born and how he dies; the misfortune is that his demise takes two hours and forty-seven minutes. To my knowledge, nothing quite like this has been attempted on screen, unless you include the turn-back-the-clock efforts of Joan Rivers.So how didthey pull off giving birth to an old man with “a long smoke-colored beard” who can speak as soon as he was born, as F. Scott Fitzgerald intended in the short story the film is based on? The meaning of “based on” is taken as loosely as possible; screenwriters Eric Roth and Robin Swicord merely borrowed the idea of the story and none of the material, and certainly none of the light-heartedness of the social satire. Admittedly, Fitzgerald’s inchoate story doesn’t give the director, David Fincher, much to work with, but in some cases such a deficiency would free up the film maker to not be bothered with how best to convey the author’s style. Sure enough, Fincher isn’t cramped by Fitzgerald’s lack of curiosity, and the picture doesn’t deal with whether Button can go to Yale or Harvard (a big concern in the short story). But neither does Fincher offer his character anything but lumpy indulgence—Button is a bore with no personality and no moral core, and the man who plays him would win an Oscar if acting consists solely of gazing mutely out of the frame. The picture might as well be called “The Sluggish Stare of Brad Pitt."The film cares nothing for immediacy, despite a frantic search for it that has the screenwriters creating a clock that runs backwards, “So that the boys who died”—in the First World War—“will come home.” Button is then born on Armistice Day. But this metaphor is not connected in any way with his life; Button has no vision, no drive and does not live as if he was given a second chance. Button comes into the world with his mother dying in childbirth, is nearly thrown into the Mississippi River by his wealthy father Thomas (Jason Flemyng), and gets adopted by Queenie (Taraji P. Henson), a black woman who runs an elderly home. With a background like that, you’d think Button would do something about civil rights—or become President (there are some scenes where Pitt looks a little like Franklin Roosevelt with a great white mane)—but the film doesn’t once touch on race relations. And not only does Fincher adopt temporal illogicality, the incongruence extends to social relations—a black woman picking up a white baby in the South without anybody saying anything?Before anybody couldsay anything, Button has already messed with their idea of the irrevocable arrow of time, healthily ungrowing into a slightly less old, diminutive man. The reverse-aging basis offers Fincher an unrivalled opportunity to reproduce those computer-generated mouths they put on cats to make them talk. Button’s childhood (or is it his senility?) is forged on computer and detachedly mechanical. Dare we request Brad Pitt to competently portray an ancient creature with juvenile charm. (Pitt is not Robin Williams in “Jack” (1996), but then again, isanythingand anyonelike Williams in “Jack?”) Even if Pitt did any acting behind that wrinkled avatar, we wouldn’t be able to tell, and reviewing his track record we can safely assume he did none.This is a movie of strung-together anecdotes—an evangelical preacher dies for no reason, a man gets struck by lightning seven times (every one of those hits are shown), and the picture must present the most pointless recitation of “The First Part of Henry the Sixth” ever put to film. The dull tale of Benjamin Button is actually told by Julia Ormond’s character Caroline as she tends to her dying mother Daisy (Cate Blanchett), reading out loud the diary of Button, who was Daisy’s lover. There is one scene—really, just one look—that Blanchett was able to salvage from this distant film: a lioness stare, as Button abandons Daisy and their daughter. Button is a coward and a chauvinist for underestimating the strength of Daisy, assuming that she’ll be unable to raise a daughter anda retrograding husband, but the film makes no effort to engage the audience on the possibility or consequences of that drama. One look—that is all, and forget the other scenes. Blanchett can do nothing for them. Every time Button and Daisy meet, a bit of chemistry builds up, but Fincher—who hasn’t had a strong sense of visual imagination since “Se7en” (1995) and “Fight Club” (1999)—fails to provide any amplitude, and things fizzle out. What about the sex scenes between the two supposedly hottest stars on the planet? When Button and Daisy finally sleep together, they do soin the elderly home, and they couldn’t proceed more matter-of-factly.There is a klunky “Blind Chance” (1982)-like sequence that comes out of nowhere and goes away without doing its job, which is to disguise a deus ex machina. Thomas Button even runs into his son in a whorehouse—a nightmarish scenario for every father-and-son pair, and not a bad scene for a movie to find itself in. And what does Fincher do with this? Nothing. He doesn’t even bother, not in a Richard Lester way, but in a what-else-do-you-want-from-me way. “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” dies well before Benjamin Button is dead, which is remarkable because that effect is indigenous to a good number of Brad Pitt films—it must be written in his contract to drain a picture even before it begins. Consider “Meet Joe Black” (1998), “The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford” (2007) and “Legends of the Fall” (1994).But “Benjamin Button” most readily recalls “Forrest Gump” (1994). Fincher’s picture is little more than a series of vignettes that represents its characters through the news of Pearl Harbor, a Lusitania-like assault, Balanchine, “Carousel,” Bolshoi and a storm that’s supposed to bring to mind Hurricane Katrina. There’s even a Captain Mike (Jared Harris), the “Benjamin Button” version of Lieutenant Dan, and Queenie—though no Sally Fields—also has a drab line that is nearly identical to Momma Gump’s “you never know what you’re gonna get.” Both films are childishly naïve, but whereas “Forrest Gump” infuriated some viewers, “Benjamin Button” will leave them little more than blasé. But perhaps “Benjamin Button” is an imperviously effective, self-referential exercise—for anybody who’s ever doubted that they grow older and not younger, after a hundred and sixty-seven minutes, you’ll know you’re never getting that precious time back. ♦

EndFragment