Review: The Curious Case of Benjamin Button

Dir. David Fincher
Starring: Brad Pitt, Cate Blanchett

Grade: B

F. Scott Fitzgerald, author of the 1921 short story on which the film is (loosely…very loosely) based describes the meeting between father and newborn son in the “crying room” of a hospital thus:

Mr. Button's eyes followed her pointing finger, and this is what he saw. Wrapped in a voluminous white blanket, and partly crammed into one of the cribs, there sat an old man apparently about seventy years of age. His sparse hair was almost white, and from his chin dripped a long smoke-coloured beard, which waved absurdly back and forth, fanned by the breeze coming in at the window. He looked up at Mr. Button with dim, faded eyes in which lurked a puzzled question.

I include this passage because, save for some fundamental elements, Eric Roth’s script is far from a faithful adaptation of the Fitzgerald original. So for you purists out there, this movie might not be for you. If you want to check out the short story (or re-visit it), click here. Glad that’s settled.

But this most curious film might not even be for non-purists, for “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button,” while a substantial triumph of CGI technology, is under all the beautiful imagery an ultimately unsatisfying cinematic experience. While some of the performances are beautiful, and even charming at times, the film comes up short in the end. The film explores what it would be like to experience life backwards, but when the subject appears to be as emotionally disconnected from most of the people and events around him as Brad Pitt’s Button is, it’s tough for the audience to make an emotional investment that goes, for the most part, unrewarded. More...

The Plot

After setting up a clunky framing story and the film’s narrative device, which consists of a young woman called Caroline (a sleep-walking Julia Ormond) reading to her elderly mother, Daisy (an unrecognizable Cate Blanchett) aloud from Benjamin Button’s diary, the movie gets going with a beautifully imaginative sequence. Affecting a Hollywood Southern accent, we hear Pitt as Benjamin Button, who introduces the reader to a blind clockmaker named Monsieur Gateau (Elias Koteas) who is commissioned to manufacture a large clock to be featured in a local train station in New Orleans. This soft-spoken man and his wife raise a young boy who, as most young boys of that era, eventually goes off to fight in WWI. As he continues his work on the clock, the man learns that his son has died. Utterly distraught, he finishes the clock, but this is not an ordinary clock: it moves backward. In a low-key, terse speech, the man explains that this was done intentionally and as a tribute to all the young soldiers who perished fighting in the war. This speech is accompanied by images of the war in reverse motion, evoking in me memories of Vonnegut’s backward movie sequence in “Slaughterhouse Five.”

And, with that, we are transported to the night Benjamin is born, which happens to coincide with the end of WWI. A man named Thomas Button (and the owner of a button manufacturing company), is seen running desperately amidst the celebratory crowds in the dark streets of New Orleans (transplanting Fitzgerald’s story from its Baltimore setting). Once he arrives home, Button is informed that his wife, who has just given birth, will not be making it. Button promises his dying wife to take care of their son. But upon laying eyes on the child, who he later describes as looking like a sort of monster, he grabs the screaming child and runs out of the house, looking for a place to dispose of it. While contemplating throwing his newborn baby to the river, Button is interrupted by a police officer who gives chase to him. Button ultimately ends up at the steps of a lively home, which we later learn is a home for the elderly. He leaves the helpless child there but not before hastily placing $14 in the baby’s blanket.

Fortunately for Benjamin, Queenie (a solid Taraji P. Henson) and her boyfriend find him. Queenie, who we are told cannot have children, instantly takes in Benjamin as one of her own, to the noticeable chagrin of her partner. Queenie is loving to her child, who looks like a miniature version of an elderly Jean Renoir. Through truly miraculous CGI visual effects, we see “young” Benjamin grow from a baby to a toddler, to a young boy. Notably, he has the advantage of being raised around elderly people who share many of his conditions and who imbue him with an emotionally advanced outlook on life.

In his case, it did take a village to raise young Benjamin. Growing up in loving and warm environment, he nevertheless learns about loss very early on, but also about the wisdom found in old age. As a result, Benjamin is a pensive child (and adult), observing those around him, constantly learning, but not being particularly active. Colorful characters enter and exit his life – an adventurous Pygmy, a man who has been struck by lightning seven times while doing the most mundane things (these sequences are shown in playful black and white flashbacks to hilarious effect), an opera singer with a preference for Wagner, and, later in life, a foul-mouthed tugboat captain. Still, it is Daisy, the young girl he meets as a boy, who will have the strongest effect in Benjamin’s life.

The film follows Benjamin as he leaves home to work as a sailor with a drunken Irish tugboat owner named Lieutenant Dan Captain Mike (played with gusto by Jared Harris) who introduces him to the finer things in life – visits to a brothel included. While on his travels, Benjamin meets a British woman (a fetching Tilda Swinton), with whom he shares his first taste of adult love. It is a beautifully crafted section that succeeds all of its own and could have functioned as its own movie.

Love is fleeting and mysterious, and soon Benjamin is back in the New Orleans, having experienced both heart-break and war. This is the moment where the film moves from a very effective bildungsroman to an almost conventional love story. Benjamin reconnects with Daisy, an aspiring ballerina, on more than a few occasions – but unfortunately for the two, the timing is off. Daisy receives the Jenny (from "Forrest Gump") treatment from the script: she lives life to its fullest, is bold and reckless, and so she must be punished, but her punishment is necessary (almost obligatory) to the fulfillment of the male protagonist.

The film takes us through various continents alongside Benjamin, some more successfully than others (later in the film, be it because of the camerawork, the costuming, or both, I felt like I was watching Pitt’s home movies of his well-publicized globe trotting adventures). And we all bear witness to the romance between Daisy and Benjamin – a romance that is as unlikely as it is beautiful and as heart-breaking as it is believable.

In order to avoid major spoilers, I will spare you the plot details that make up the bulk of their story or an eventual (and again, almost obligatory) revelation involving the Caroline character. Suffice it to say that to one relatively familiar with the Hollywood romance canon, there is nothing surprising about the resolution of the film’s themes since, for all of its out of this world imagery and ostensibly transcendental ideas of life and death, the film remains curiously traditional in its telling, a path that, lamentably, cheats the film out of its magical possibilities.

The Performances

The film features some wonderful performances. Taraji P. Henson is the soul of the film, but I found her character was woefully underdeveloped and in several moments I winced at having to witness a fine actor being reduced to playing what amounted to nothing more than a caricature or comic-relief. While she had some fine moments with Pitt (their mother-son talks in the dark were beautiful), her character seemed to exist solely for this. But this is more a gripe with the script than her performance. Faring much better is Tilda Swinton, who is hypnotizing as Benjamin’s first adult fling. Here’s an actress who can telegraph emotion effortlessly and gracefully and who would have been right at home on the set of "Camille" or "Queen Christina."

Perhaps the biggest disappointment in the film for me is Pitt’s performance. Pitt, who has given two of his best performances in quick succession during the past couple of years (in “Babel” and “The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford”) almost pulls off a miracle here, but is sold short either by the script or by the direction. After an enthralling hour and a half where we see him get used to his elderly body and drink in those around him, he quickly recedes back to a well-worn bag of tricks that amount to not much more than staring blankly and posing – or more often both. This is devastating for the film – Benjamin is not a cipher or a robot, he’s a person who has seen a lot of both good and bad, but seems unaffected by either. Pitt’s Benjamin barely emotes when his mother dies or when he finally meets his father. For some reason he becomes a blank slate and only briefly does he emerge from that trance. And I fully understand that perhaps that was the point – that because Benjamin learned about death from a very young age, that he was always consciously expectant of this eventuality and did not have the same fears and melancholy about losing loved ones the rest of us do. And yet I can’t buy that argument. It’s almost too easy an answer and robs the whole enterprise of legitimacy. Again, I was not expecting a sob fest, but for a movie that deals very much so with loss, it glosses over the accompanying emotions with disturbing ease. To be honest, I can’t help but think what someone like Leonardo DiCaprio or Matt Damon could have done with the role of Benjamin.

But, like Benjamin, the film finds salvation in the form of Cate Blanchett, who gives a beautifully-crafted performance as Daisy. Looking ethereally beautiful in her early scenes, Blanchett expertly paints a portrait of reckless youth and dignified old age. She is magnetic enough that she transcends some god-awful plot imaginings to give us the most three-dimensional, human character of the film. If the film succeeds in many ways during the second half, it is due in large measure to her.

Overall

“Button” is a beautiful film to behold. Its cinematography (by Claudio Miranda) is at times jaw-droppingly beautiful and guaranteed an Oscar next year. In fact, all of the technical elements in the film mesh seamlessly. And yet, all of the visual magnificence in the world cannot make up for a flawed screenplay and a central performance that curiously loses steam in the middle of an almost three-hour long journey. Sadly, Button is a pleasant enough journey that could have been great.