Half-Assed Movie Reviews

February 15, 2009:  The Curious Case of Benjamin Button

Oh, David Fincher, when will you let me rave again about your films?  I know the critics liked Zodiac and I don’t take issue with that.  Panic Room wasn’t a masterpiece although it still had the basic meat of a “Fincheresque” film.  But I still cling mightily to the one-two punch of Se7en (1995) and Fight Club (1999), both of which immediately launched themselves into my top 25 favourite films of all time, and there aren’t a lot of other directors who could manage that.  I even advocate for Alien3, although only in its director’s cut form.

But now I need to wrap my head around The Curious Case of Benjamin Button.

I had heard plenty about this film, and read the widely mixed but ultimately negatively skewed reviews, and when the Oscar nominations came out it led with 13 (a near-record, only topped by the 14 nominations each for All About Eve from 1950 and Titanic from 1997).  But I’ve been following this Oscar stuff for long enough to know that 10+ nominations doesn’t necessarily mean I’ll like the movie.  And you know what?  I didn’t like this movie.  It’s hard to put my finger on exactly why that is, but it’s probably in large part because IT DIDN’T MAKE SENSE!

This is the story of a boy who is born old, and becomes younger throughout his life.  That seems reasonable.  It’s based on a short story by F. Scott Fitzgerald, which I haven’t read but definitely want to, in order to make the comparison and think about how I might have approached this adaptation differently.  He meets a girl when they are both about 10 years old (i.e. she’s a child of 10, and he appears to be a man about 10 years younger than dead), and they meet up periodically through the years, finally enjoying a romantic interlude when they are both physically 40-ish.  They struggle with how to deal with the certainty that he will become younger and less mature as she grows older, and whether they can even still know each other once this crossover period has been swept away by the winds of time.

Now, while this review will conclude with an overwhelming negative opinion of the film, that’s not to suggest there isn’t great potential here or even that none of it is realized.  There are some great moments during Benjamin’s life arc, but they are ultimately negated by sappy or weak sequences which arose from the choice to follow the entire arc from birth to death.  The contrivance of Benjamin Button’s backwards aging serves to emphasize how chance meetings really do drive our lives, and how there really may be only a handful of points in people’s lives where they make that first connection with someone special, and outside of those key points, they will otherwise misfire.  These are valuable observations about life and how it’s lived, and about connections among people, and I’m glad the movie brought these to me to think about.

So what’s the problem?  Well, as noted earlier, the whole thing really doesn’t make sense.  Why is Benjamin born baby-size, if he’s supposed to age backwards?  He grows up, and then shrinks again, and that’s not what happens to real people, even backwards.  The script provokes obvious and not necessarily favourable comparisons with Forrest Gump (1994), with the same slow/deliberate speaking style of the main protagonist, his quiet observation of the world while participating in his own way (working on a fishing boat, helping during the war), the fact that he ends up coming into money to ease the logistical pressures around an oddball character needing to make a regular living, and finding himself in historical situations by chance.  The two films have the same screenwriter which explains a lot of the similarity, but it makes Benjamin Button seem derivative – didn’t we see a lot of this 15 years ago, without the overlaid confusion of the physical strangeness of the main character?  Also, the story is told by Benjamin’s one-time love as she lives out her final days in a New Orleans hospital against the backdrop of the approaching 2005 Hurricane Katrina, for no apparent reason.  Again, it’s not that there isn’t potential in that setting, but if it’s realized, I certainly didn’t notice it.

So what this really comes down to for me is the question of whether The Curious Case of Benjamin Button is a departure from style for David Fincher, or a brilliantly dark movie masquerading as a whimsical one.  I like to think it’s the latter, but the brilliance is lost on me, and I don’t know why that is.  But I don’t feel compelled to view the film a few more times to find out, and that’s really the key.  I have to warn potential viewers against this film, but I wouldn’t go so far as to discourage them from trying to find the intended experience in it.  Se7en and Fight Club buy Fincher a lot of leeway with me, and I’ll keep seeing his films as long as he keeps making them, but I don’t promise to love them all.

Brilliant?  Maybe, but I couldn’t tell.