Benjamin Button (Brad Pitt) is born in New Orleans as the city celebrates the end of World War I. Although the size of a normal infant, he has the body of a man in his 80s preparing to return to the soil. Benjamin's father recoils from his hideous visage and his deeply wrinkled little body. He leaves the child at the doorstep of Queenie, who runs an old folks home. She takes the child in despite his deformity because, in her eyes, Benjamin is still one of God's children.
Benjamin's childhood is thusly rather morbid. Born old, he grows larger and younger while the elderly folks around him shrink and eventually fall prey to mortality. To compound the grave fates of those around him, a faith healing preacher falls dead shortly after laying hands on Benjamin. Surrounded by infirmity and death as well as being afflicted with a condition which made him an outcast, it's little wonder that he grows up to be rather stoic.
When youthful enough, Benjamin strikes out on his own by joining the crew of a tugboat led by Captain Mike, a colorful man clad in tattoos and with a great fondness for the drink. Our protagonist experiences life on the water as well as a fling with Elizabeth Abbott, the disgruntled wife of a British diplomat in the port of Murmansk. The film emphasizes Benjamin's outsider status via his narration in which he rather dispassionately observes the personalities of his fellow crew members as well as that of his inamorata. He describes them like a scientist describing the behaviors of lab rats. World War II hits home when the tugboat meets a German submarine in a close encounter which leaves Benjamin as the lone survivor. He returns home to New Orleans.
Benjamin's near indifference towards other is not boundless, however. He has great affection for Queenie throughout and falls in love with Daisy (Cate Blanchett), whom he first met when she was a girl visiting her grandmother at the home. She pursues a career as a dancer which is cut short due to an accident. Having led separate lives for too long, she returns to New Orleans and to him. She is ready to settle down while Benjamin has become a handsome man bereft of grey hair – both in the primes of their lives. But nothing good ever lasts. Benjamin leaves her in the middle of the night when he can no longer bear the thought of descending into infancy with her as she enters middle age.
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button feels like Fincher took what was essentially Forrest Gump 2 and made it darker. "Life is like a box of chocolates" has been replaced with the slightly menacing "You never know what's coming for you" as the memorable pithy phrase but Benjamin knows and, I would argue, all of the main characters know what is coming for them – the Grim Reaper. The film constantly reminds us that life is short. It heavily emphasizes the vita brevis at the expense of carpe diem. Only at the end of the film after Benjamin has left Daisy does the preaching swing from the former to the latter as we see a very youthful Benjamin out traveling the world. The narration here is very direct – seize the day. This sequence felt tacked on as if Fincher wanted a blatantly happy moment to take the edge off the previous two and a half hours of bittersweet. But it was too little too late; the floodgates just can't hold back the torrents of fatalism.
My other gripe with the film is Daisy. I found her character oddly uncompelling. In contrast to Benjamin, she is one dimensional with her sole motivation being to fulfill her feelings for him. She is deep but very narrow. More interesting, I felt, were some of the subsidiary characters who, although shallow, were also wide. Captain Mike's drunken proclamations about art, his father's legacy, and his willingness to sacrifice himself add a lot of complexity to a character that gets relatively little screentime. Elizabeth also had a myriad of motivations and conflicts in her life - regret at not having tried to swim the English Channel again, the loneliness of living far from home, and having a husband who is a spy. While comparatively shallow, the breadth of these two characters makes their pursuits of adding quality to their lives in the face of ever-decreasing quantity much more intriguing propositions than Daisy's status as love interest.
On a more technical note, the make-up and CGI work at add or subtract age from the characters was exceptional. Claudio Miranda's cinematography was beautiful but unexciting to my eyes while Alexandre Desplat's score was melodramatic as expected but the use of his music was admirably restrained, i.e. – not every scene had music trying to tell me how to feel.
I'm rather ambivalent about The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. On the one hand it's an engaging story that attempts to deal with profound themes. It also has some very touching moments, the most potent of which was seeing Daisy's face as she watches Benjamin leave her with neither saying a word. On the other I didn't find Daisy compelling and the film's happy near-ending stuck out like a sore thumb. In addition, much of it just felt clichéd, as if it was trying to hit all the right (ahem) buttons to get an Oscar. Most of the film was typical Hollywood fare, however glossy, and I found myself waiting for a curveball to be thrown at me, for something unexpected to rear its head but nothing ever did.
1 comment:
it was a little weird to see an old version of Brad Pitt's face pasted onto a kid's body, but i guess that's why they call it a "curious case"
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