This is an abridged version of a review I wrote for Christianity Today Movies. To read the rest of this review, click here.
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button is an epic, not of scale, but of time. It is the story of an infant born suffering the infirmities of old age who lives his life in reverse, growing younger with each passing year until he dies in infancy. The film is a thick, tangled, lush narrative dense enough to lose yourself in. It is a charmed, enchanted fable steeped in melancholy and wistful serenity. And it is an artistic and narrative triumph, which, while colder and more emotionally remote than necessary, embodies one of the most beautiful love stories set to screen in a very long time. Benjamin Button is not the finest film of the year, but it gets awfully close.
Benjamin Button is based on F. Scott Fitzgerald’s 1921 short story about a man in 1860s Baltimore who is born as a 70-year-old man, grows up, marries, has a son, and eventually attends kindergarten with his own grandchild. Screenwriter Eric Roth, the latest in a long line of scribes to take a whack at the material, borrows the famed American author’s central premise, but quickly diverges to create a richer, lusher narrative than the short story could ever convey. Roth changes Baltimore to New Orleans, a city of Old South gentility and infinite color and spice, and bookends the film between World War I and Hurricane Katrina.
The less-than-inspired framing story is set in a modern hospital room where the vanguard of Hurricane Katrina lashes against the windows outside. Inside, tucked into a bed ringed by tubes and medical equipment is an elderly woman named Daisy (Cate Blanchett), who, we learn, is dying and will most likely not last the day. Her 40-something daughter Caroline (Julia Ormond) is trying to ease her mother’s discomfort and attempts to distract her by reading from the diary of her friend, Benjamin Button.
Benjamin (Brad Pitt) loses his mother in childbirth and his father, a button manufacturer (Jason Flemying), is so horrified by the child’s ravaged appearance that he abandons him on the steps of a rest home, where he is discovered by Queenie (Taraji P. Henson), a loving black employee. Queenie raises Benjamin as her own among the elderly patrons. Even as a toddler, Benjamin fits right in. Stooped, balding, bespeckled, hard of hearing and confined to a wheelchair, Benjamin, who the doctor claims has one foot in the grave already, spends his days on the porch of the old folk’s home, attentively watching the world go by. But instead of dying, Benjamin grows taller, stronger…and younger.
When pre-pubescent (though he looks like a man in his 70s), Benjamin meets the granddaughter of one of the residents, the red-haired beauty named Daisy and is instantly smitten. If Daisy minds the attention paid her by the shriveled, little man, she doesn’t show it. Perhaps she senses his youthfulness and is drawn to him. As the years pass, Benjamin and Daisy retain a connection. Daisy is Benjamin’s only anchor in an ever-changing world viewed in reverse. Benjamin Button is primarily a love story between these two characters, though the film is in no rush to consummate their relationship. Both have a lot of growing up to do first.
As Benjamin, who is beginning to notice changes to his body — hair coming in, muscles firming up, the ability to walk without the use of a wheelchair or cane — grows up, he begins to sample the delights of the outside world. He takes a job with a hard-drinking Irish tugboat captain (Jared Harris) who introduces his ancient looking, but innocent-in-the-ways-of-the-world employee to the pleasures of drink and the flesh. Benjamin’s travels take him to Russia, where he has an affair with a British diplomat’s wife (Tilda Swinton), a relationship from which he learns about both love and lust.
But Benjamin’s heart remains with Daisy, now an up-and-coming, headstrong ballet dancer in New York City, whose selfishness, bohemian lifestyle and unabashed sensuality take him aback. No matter how Benjamin pursues his childhood crush, he is rebuffed at every turn. Only after Daisy suffers a terrible tragedy, does her perspective realign and she sees Benjamin for the man he really is.
Much of Benjamin Button’s allure is its reliance on precise calculations to ensure Benjamin and Daisy come together at just the right time. They can meet in the middle only once. Too early or too late and it smacks of a May/December romance. More than just timing, however, Benjamin and Daisy’s romance throbs with an ephemeral poignancy at once ethereal and tragic that pervades every cell of the film — physically, the lovers are headed in opposite directions. As Benjamin grows ever younger, Daisy will become an old woman, and at some point he will catch up to the young daughter their lovemaking produces. The question they are forced to ask is, what form will their love take then?
This omnipresent impermanence informs every frame of Benjamin Button. The film is elegiac and blisteringly aware of human mortality. For Benjamin, death is a constant companion, from the retirement home constantly claiming its aged tenets to the liquid battlefields of Europe where he squares off against a Nazi U-boat. Like the dirge of science fiction’s immortals, Benjamin’s inverted life invites profound loneliness. It is the bittersweet pill he must swallow. Happiness may be fleeting but it is still happiness. Life may be temporal, but it is still the only stage on which we perform. The transitive nature of life and love and the need to embrace it with gusto when it is at last within our grasp is one of Benjamin Button’s most abiding thematic elements.
The composition of Roth’s central character is fascinating. He makes Benjamin Button a passive character, not a swashbuckling adventurer who uses his unique situation to achieve greatness or wrestle intellectually with the philosophical implications of his condition. Blanchett’s Daisy more fits that mold. Benjamin is reactive rather than proactive. In this way, he is a blank slate, an impressionable template on which the audience imprints itself, gaining a more profound access to the character’s internal pathos than would otherwise be possible.
Benjamin Button is filled with larger than life, storybook characters, and the performances are uniformity tremendous. Pitt and Blanchett are as compelling as ever. He gives a performance of subtlety and gentle sympathy, she one of fire and zest. But the true accolades belong to supporting actress, Taraji P. Henson as Benjamin’s surrogate mother. Her Queenie is equal parts ferocious lover and dominating matriarch. Her gentle, grace-filled spirit is exactly the salvation the young Benjamin needs not only to survive, but to be healthy enough to deal with the unique challenges of his circumstances.
This is the third collaboration between director David Fincher and actor Brad Pitt (the previous outings being Se7en and Fight Club). The two have done exceptionally well by each other. The latter’s trust in the former’s artistic and philosophical fitness is well placed, even when the material veers far off course from the director’s previous work, as this does. Benjamin Button is the work of a director of brazen confidence and limitless imagination. Fincher controls every moment with a sure hand and fastidious devotion, fully confident in his narrative and acutely aware of the thematic and tonal elements that inform it.
Scene after scene is stitched together with breathtaking beauty and composition. Shot mostly in deep focus to draw the eye to a surplus of detail, director Fincher and lenser Claudio Miranda’s painterly cinematography takes on a magical, surreal, dreamlike imagery. Alexandre Desplat’s score is the perfect compliment to the images it supports, exquisite and unobtrusive.
Benjamin Button has all the historical sweep of Forest Gump and none of its occasional mawkish sentimentality. Screenwriter Eric Roth, who penned both scripts, has evolved as an artist, fabricating a film that recalls his earlier success — the arc of the love affair between Benjamin and Daisy will remind many of that between Forrest and Jenny — but builds upon it with a maturity only time can provide.
Benjamin Button represents something new in the hybridization of computer effects and cinematic storytelling — technology placed completely in the service of story and character, instead of the other way around. We are dazzled by the collaboration of old fashion make-up effects and computer wizardry (Pitt’s head was placed on other actors’ bodies during the course of the character’s life), but it is so good that it never once calls attention to itself. When the contemporary Pitt finally strides onscreen, after more than an hour buried beneath make-up, he is like an Adonis, eliciting gasps and sheepish giggles from the audience. As he continues to age backward, he becomes the Brad Pitt of Thelma and Louise and A River Runs through It, digitally airbrushed to look half as old as he is now. When we are first introduced to Blanchett’s Daisy, unblemished skin aglow under soft lights and focus, our breath catches in our throats.
At just shy of three hours, Benjamin Button is admittedly a long film. Yet the time slides by effortlessly, without indulgence or extravagance. Certainly the narrative could have been compressed, but then the arc would lose countless tiny, spindly legs that support the epic story; they are inconsequential in isolation but indispensable as a collective.
Yet for all its formidability, this is not a perfect film. Benjamin Button is rich yet remote. Though haunting, it is uneven, and though engrossing, it holds the viewer at an unfortunate emotional arm’s length. The picture lacks a certain warmth. It is as if, in an effort to avoid maudlin sentimentality, the filmmakers went too far, retreating to a point so remote that the audience will struggle to find the emotional touchstones a film of lesser and more obvious sappiness would garishly provide. Though a substantial charge, it seems paltry compared to the sum of the film’s parts, which are strong enough to overcome even this hurdle.
In his song, “Start with the Ending,” folk crooner David Wilcox laments that life’s best comes at the beginning when we do not have the maturity to consciously enjoy it, while the worst part arrives at the end when we can feel it with all the sharp keenness of experience. If only we could “start with the ending, get it out of the way,” he sings. The metaphor is peculiarly haunting. We may not live our lives backward, but Benjamin’s story — a whimsical yearning for love and connection, a desire to hold on to that which is necessarily transitory, an acceptance that we are not in control but guided by forces beyond ourselves — is acutely universal.
© Copyright 2008 Brandon Fibbs. All rights reserved.
