The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (2008)
Grade:B+
And so comes the behemoth Oscar pic of 2008: David Fincher’s The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. Lucky for the studio, the ultimate final cut of the film is pretty good, but it has a few pesky problems that keep it from being a full-blown masterpiece.
The film starts extremely well, even from the opening logos, which are ingeniously reinterpreted. I don’t want to ruin it for you, but I found them marvelously subtle and a beacon of hope for the three hours to come, and for a while, the film fulfilled these expectations: the first twenty or thirty minutes are devoid of any real flaws.
As we start the film, Daisy (Cate Blanchett) is on her death bed in a New Orleans hospital. Her daughter Caroline (Julia Ormond) sits dutifully by, waiting for the end. Daisy asks her daughter to fetch a journal from her suitcase and read to her, and the journal is not Daisy’s, but Benjamin Button’s (Brad Pitt). As Caroline reads from the diary, we see the story unfold.
Benjamin Button’s is a curious case indeed: born an old man, he ages backwards. After being left on the steps of an old-age home, an attendant named Queenie (Taraji P. Henson) takes care of Benjamin, raising him as her own. Around the age of 18, Benjamin leaves for a variety of travels, including excursions working on a tugboat, a taste of World War II, and an extended stay in Russia where he falls in love for the first time with a lonely statesman’s wife (Tilda Swinton).
But his true love is Daisy, and his true home is back in New Orleans at Queenie’s home. Towards the middle bulk of the film, it becomes more of a love story between Benjamin and Daisy and the fragility of their time together: she’s only getting older and he’s only getting younger.
I mentioned that the film opens well, but it also ends extremely well. Once Benjamin faces the realities of his condition as he enters “adolescence,” the film becomes an incredibly moving elegy to a life lived well. Numerous people die in this film, but it’s never morose. It’s certainly sad, though, especially in the poignant final minutes of the film that close the film on a brilliant note.
There’s that pesky middle chunk, though. The primary problem that Fincher and screenwriter Eric Roth have is that Benjamin is not a particularly interesting character, save for his reverse-chronology. As he ventures out into the world, we have sixty to ninety minutes of Forrest Gump-lite, with Benjamin managing to wiggle his way into history. My litmus test for gimmicky films like these is to judge whether or not the film would be interesting without the gimmick, and unfortunately, this falls flat on that count. Take out the fact that Benjamin is aging backwards and you’d have a story that wouldn’t have made it past a first draft before requiring a rewrite.
To delve deeper into this issue, I’d like to point out one vignette of the film: Benjamin’s first love affair. As his lover, Tilda Swinton doesn’t have a lot to do, and her screen time is limited, but she’s Tilda Swinton, so she does just fine. The problem with this and other vignettes in the film (like Benjamin’s gun battle at sea during the war or his extended exchanges with the tugboat captain) is that they’re self-contained units and don’t propel the story very far, and that’s the main problem that the film faces. After a strong start, it coasts for the majority of its run time and then pulls out all the stops for the last reel.
One other nagging feeling I have concerns the framing structure of Daisy’s daughter reading Benjamin’s diaries. The filmmakers have chosen to set these modern-day bits in 2005 as Hurricane Katrina hits New Orleans. It serves absolutely no purpose, to the point of being offensively brazen. There’s little reason to use Katrina beyond functioning as an incredibly blatant commentary on how mishandled the disaster was.
And while we’re on blatancy, the film could have benefitted from a more subtle handling of the central issues of mortality. It seems there’s a clock in every scene with obvious ticking on the soundtrack, and each character exclaims at least once that they regret wasting their life or that they’re getting old or blah blah blah. It gets to be a bit much.
All these qualms aside, the film is a beautifully-shot production, with period detail handled exquisitely and never fetishized. The performances are all wonderful, especially from Henson as Benjamin’s surrogate mother. Blanchett sometimes seems dangerously close to going a bit crazy with the Southern accent, but she keeps it in check for the most part and is simply brilliant in her final moments; finally, Pitt is convincing at all ages that he plays, but he just has to get the accent correct and not too terribly much else. Pair the strong performances with the amazing makeup work to age these actors into their senior years, as well as the subtle use of special effects and the film is a handsome production that is never boring to look at.
It’s just all a verifiably mixed bag by the time the credits roll. It’s a very good film, yes, but it’s one of those cases (a curious one, if you will) where you know that a truly great film is buried under the flaws of the one we’re left with. If the thematic sledgehammer had been put away and a more compelling story crafted around an already compelling premise, we’d have a sure-fire Best Picture winner. As it is, we have yet another film where the pedigree and promotional campaign promised a better motion picture than was ultimately delivered.
Bottom Line:
With Benjamin Button, brilliant production values serve to cover up some structural and thematic issues that in lesser hands may have derailed the film.
© 2004-2009 Ben Waldorf. Posted December 25, 2008. IMDB