Movie Review: The Curious Case of Benjamin Button

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button is the latest film from David Fincher (Se7en, Fight Club, Zodiac). It stars Brad Pitt and is based on an idea from an F. Scott Fitzgerald short story about a man who was born physically old and gets physically younger as he ages. It has a framing device where Benjamin's love Daisy (Cate Blanchett) is dying in a New Orleans hospital as an old woman, while her daughter comforts her by reading Benjamin's dairy.

He's abandoned as an infant in 1918 at a New Orleans nursing home where he is raised. His physical appearance matches those of the residents. He doesn't go to school but he does meet Daisy the young granddaughter of one of the residents and they begin a lifelong romance. Every love story needs something keeping the characters apart; in this case it's their (apparent) ages. They each go off on their own lives and meet up occasionally. We wait until they can be played by their actors without much makeup and they can be together, albeit briefly.

Button is lusciously filmed. Started with sepia tones and scratches but that quickly stopped. After that, I didn't notice many Fincher flourishes as with Fight Club or Zodiac. The effects used to age the characters are wonderfully done, particularly for Benjamin. For Daisy I liked the stuff that made her young, and very old in the hospital; but I wasn't as impressed with how they had her in what I suspect was her sixties.

In the first half hour I was worried that it was going to be a very long film. It is over two and a half hours long, but the beginning felt very long to me. I have to say that it picked up for me and I enjoyed the last hour and half very much. The group I saw it with all thought it was better than we expected and found it hard not to shed a tear at the end.

The reviews are fairly mixed, I think mostly because of the screenplay by Eric Roth (Forrest Gump, Munich, The Good Shepherd). Ebert was confused because "There is no lesson to be learned." I read his review shortly after seeing the film and thought he missed the whole point about appreciating what we have. Of growing old with someone and experiencing life with them. But the more I think about it, the more I agree with him.

Yes you can find that theme, but it isn't really explored. Benjamin is under developed. His entire character is based on one fact, that he ages backwards. He isn't educated, but he does have a job as a sailor and is in World War II but then he stops maturing. It seems like things happen to him and he is merely an observer of his own life (the narration doesn't help to disprove this). He acts completely naive well into his (real) forties. I thought of him as a perpetual 12 year-old, but a lot of his dialog sounds like it could have been spoken by Forest Gump.

George Bernard Shaw said "Love like youth is wasted on the young." This shouldn't be the case for Benjamin. We don't see much of him in his (apparent) twenties, but he spends it as a drifter, wandering the world in an unremarkable way. This seems to me to be a complete waste of his unique condition. You'd expect him to have fascinating stories (this is fiction after all), but I suspect if you met him in a bar, when he was in his apparent twenties, he'd still be really boring. His time in the nursing home draws some interesting parallels between our lives as children and geriatrics, but it was rather superficial.

I enjoyed it better in the theater than thinking about it afterwards. Overall, I think it was an interesting concept, filming very well, but ultimately underdeveloped. For those that have seen it, here are some thoughts with spoilers...

*SPOILERS*

Benjamin states the theme in the voice over. There are no rules to life and we all choose to go through it as we wish. Some play piano, some dance, some read Shakespear, etc. My problem is what did Benjamin do? I've seen comments that all these people enriched his life, but I think they were merely present and it doesn't seem like it had much impact on him. Certainly not on any of the actions he took with his life.

He wasn't a very good son. He didn't keep up with his mother, didn't know when she died, and didn't know about his step sister. When he became wealthy it's not at all clear that he supported her. She was still working in the same place (though that might have been her choice). We don't know what happened to Queenie's daughter. Was she the one at the home telling him that Queenie died?

HIs real father shows up again seemingly to just give him money to be wealthy. He doesn't need a profession and he doesn't seem to have any interests. He rides his motorcycle looking like Brando and sails a boat and moves into a home like a young Redford. But these are just images. When we saw the old Tilda Swinton having swam the English Channel, I thought we'd see more of the other characters he met, but that was it.

I think Daisy is the most interesting character in the film. As a child she was kind and as a teenager a bit wild. In her twenties she was at the top of her profession and a world traveller and perhaps a bit self-indulgent. A tragic accident ended that. She had to recover, and build a new life. She did this with Benjamin, raised a daughter and used her experiences to teach others. While not stated, it was probably very rewarding. But the film didn't do much with her after Benjamin leaves her. She found a good man, raised a child, cared for Benjamin and died years later in a hospital. I think it would have been much more interesting if she gave the diary to her daughter when she was a little younger and they could discuss it.

Given Pitt's philanthropism for post-Katrina New Orleans I suspect he had the setting and storm added to film, but it's not done in any significant way. I spent some time in New Orleans in the 1990s and this film didn't do much to remind me of it's charms. The fact that the framing device was set at the onset of Katrina seemed completely tacked on.

The story about the clockmaker was obviously more thematically connected, but I think the film would have been better without it. In fact, the clockmaker's thought that running time backwards would make the world better, or even to remind us to make the world better, is to some extent disproved by Benjamin's life.

I didn't understand the significance of the two appearances of the hummingbird. Someone want to explain that to me?