Review: “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button”

Rating: 90%

I have waited an extremely long time to watch “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button,” and I’m profoundly happy that I did, because it has proven to be one of the most divisive films of this year. Like its younger, more optimistic cousin “Forrest Gump,” this is a film that cannot produce a half-way reaction. A cursory glance over Rotten Tomatoes will reveal vomits from disgust and choruses of Hallelujah, and I’m always excited when a movie does this, because I know one way or another that I’m going to get a genuine experience for the price of my ticket. For that reason, I let the debates rage back and forth, between family members and friends and even my professors at USC, before I finally took the plunge to render my verdict. It almost surprised me to discover how simple my reaction was, when it was all said and done…

I loved it.

“Button” is a gigantic, possibly overblown, film that nearly broke its investors in two just getting produced. It’s long-winded, indulgent and syrupy, treating the people it examines with Biblical grandness, examining every emotion the characters produce as if it were the last time it would ever be felt. It’s frequently comedic, but the tone is dead serious and the irony does not dare to wink at you. There isn’t any wiggle room for interpretation, watching it could easily become an emotionally claustrophobic expereince. But the film works. I cared enormously about what happened, from beginning to end, and the world director David Fincher created was tangible, genuine, perhaps even real. I can, from a purely scientific point of view, observe and understand the reasons why many people hate this movie, but I cannot feel them—it wouldn’t be fair to a film which worked so hard for my trust, then used it so dilligently to say such grand, sweeping, heartbreaking things.

Let’s talk about why this thing worked.

The plot, as you probably know, revolves around a person named Benjamin Button, who is born an old man and climbs arduously through the process of aging in reverse. Many people, including the esteemed Roger Ebert, have argued very thoughtfully that this gimmick is the ultimate undoing of an otherwise excellent motion picture. They claim that such a plot device is ridiculous, fundamentally incapable of being a vessel for truth or meaning about the human experience. I disagree. Benjamin’s life cycle is definitely a painful strain on suspension of disbelif—after all, if he truly ages backward, why does he come out of the womb so small?—, and that is a thing you’re either comfortable with or not, but the rich intellectual vein it produces is more than worth it. “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” examines mortality in a way no other film can, because we are too accustomed to mortality to really look at it. By reversing the flow of time, Fincher and screenwriter Eric Roth show us the most fundamental aspect of our existence in a way we no longer recognize, and the result is so effective it’s almost jarring. Throughout the movie, I was repeatedly spellbound by obvious, almost moronic observations: time changes things, our bodies develop and this affects our lives, we are all eventually going to die. These are facts so worn down by cliche that we can’t taste their flavor anymore, and that’s why “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” is such an achievement: it lets us look at our condition, at ourselves.

Much has been made of the fact that scribe Eric Roth also penned “Forrest Gump,” and that the two films have many similar events. They absolutely do, but here is a useful example of how little that matters when the themes being addressed are like night and day. Forrest and Benjamin both are cared for by kind, Southern mothers, they both have absent fathers, they both go to war, they both pine for a worldly woman they met when very young, and so forth; the list keeps going, but these movies are about entirely different things. “Forrest Gump” was a story about a man whose disability made him more capable of a full life than those around him, but “Button’s” protagonist can never really live, even though he is awash in other people’s trials and tribulations. Gump was surrounded by people who were lost, Benjamin is surrounded by people who cannot find him. I wouldn’t say that “Button” condemns its protagonist, but it does sigh heavily at him, shaking its head at his inevitable decline. These are two movies with almost nothing in common.

The technical merits here are probably the one aspect that is never debated. David Fincher has established himself as a kind of second-coming-Ridley-Scott for years now, fanatically pouring over the visual details of his frame. In this film, he has matured even farther than his previous efforts, and even more than his other projects, “Button” benefits from his eye for detail. For cinematographer Claudio Miranda, who has worked as a gaffer on much of Fincher’s catalogue, this is at last a film which he can claim as a calling card. Credit must also go to the score by Alexandre Desplat and the editing by Kirk Baxter and Angus Wall, all of whom were completely invisible to me during the run time, and that is quite a compliment. Any effect their work had on me was not logged in my mind as “good music” or “nice cut on motion,” but simply “powerful scene.” They made me believe the film could have existed in no other form.

The acting on display here is very interesting. Cate Blanchette gives a predictably good performance, essaying a woman who grows from a very immature girl with great precision. Tilda Swinton is also in good shape, but this kind of literate, thoughtful woman is par for her course. Taraji P. Henson is the real surprise here as Benjamin’s surrogate mother; she’s simply wonderful, there isn’t any other way to put it.

And then there’s Brad Pitt. What to make of this incredibly somber, muted performance? I think it’s genius. His handling of the “young” Benjamin is where he gets to show off, and show off he does, but once the character hits middle age, Pitt pulls way back. Some have reacted coldly to this choice, feeling that the performance lacks heart, but I think it took only the bravest kind of actor to know that the film would be best served by a quiet, almost passive center. Benjamin is, after all, sort of gliding through his existence, tethering onto things here and there but mostly adrift. Pitt works hard to handle his protagonist delicately, to underplay every emotion and trust that his director knows how to capture the performance, and it pays off. We the audience are experiencing the movie the same way Benjamin Button experiences his life: at a slight distance. His detachment from the proceedings would be off-putting, except the movie makes us detach with him, so instead we go along. Many times, I wanted to leap through the screen and be with poor Benjamin in his time of need, because I understood how he felt in a way that the people in his world could not.

Like every other thing that humanity constructs, this movie is not perfect. The edit could have been tighter, and although Fincher never sags the pace like Peter Jackson did with “King Kong,” he does sometimes linger just to prove that he can. I was also underwhelmed by the fable about the backwards clock that sets up the movie, it was corny and unpolished, and I was very relieved when the rest of “Button” took a different tone. As for the method of discovering Benjamin’s life (an old woman having his diary read to her), I couldn’t decide whether it was totally necessary. In “Forrest Gump,” the narrative device was essential, but here I was occasionally frustrated when Fincher yanked me out of his moody, gothic New Orleans and plopped me in a hospital room with kind of static, obvious characters. Still, this setting paid off relatively well by the film’s close, so I won’t say it was a detraction from the whole, I just can’t help wondering if it was necessary.

“The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” is a big movie that takes big risks, and there is no surer sign of its success than the polarization of the people who see it. This is a brazen film that intends to stick up its pointer finger and pontificate about all of mankind, and such an endeavor should not be undertaken on eggshells. I like that David Fincher elected to swing for the fences, and I took enormous satisfaction as I sat in the theater, quietly becoming aware that the risk had paid off.