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Directed by David Fincher
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The Curious Case of Benjamin
Button The strangest yet good film I’ve seen in ages is one that probably should never have been made; it’s “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button,” and no doubt you’ve heard that it’s the story of a man born, as a tiny baby, with all the characteristics of an 80-year-old man; wizened, bald, and so forth, who then grows younger year by year until he dies as a baby. Benjamin is played by Brad Pitt, who lacks the charisma of most stars but somehow seems the right choice to play a man who doesn’t really know how to handle his life. With an idea taken from a late-19th
century story and then F. Scott Fitzgerald’s version of it, the film
does work in an unexpected way.
It captures, scene by scene, moments and perhaps epiphanies in the
life of Benjamin, rather than taking what I’d have to call a biological
view of his story. It begins with his birth in New Orleans at the
start of the 20th century; his father, shocked by the strange
creature, and with his mother dying in childbirth, leaves him at the doorstep
of a nursing home, run by Queenie (Taraji P. Henson in a beautiful performance). He grows up there, gradually shedding
his old-man’s crutches, cane and stoop. His life in the home, and in that
beautiful city, is wonderfully done by director David Fincher, who’s
been known previously only for bizarre, strangely compelling films like
“Fight Club” and “Zodiac” and “Se7en.” These early episodes are magically photographed
(by Claudio Miranda); Benjamin loves to sit by the Mississippi and watch the
boats. One day a tugboat captain
asks for someone to come work on his ship; Benjamin signs on, the Second
World War comes and the tug is fitted for ocean work and sent to Murmansk. There Benjamin meets the wife of a
British agent (Tilda Swinton)
and they have a clandestine romance.
Back after the war he remeets Daisy (Cate Blanchett), the grandchild
of a nursing home resident; and as their ages come more or less together they
find they share a great, romantic love, shadowed by the knowledge that as she
grows older he will always grow younger. Again, Fincher and his writer Eric Roth find ways
to avoid a strict biological view of Benjamin, using a structure that puts us
always and only in the moments when time seems to stand still. He frames the story by having the
granddaughter of Blanchett read Daisy and
Benjamin’s correspondence as Daisy lies dying in a New Orleans hospital
as Hurricane Katrina is about to strike the city. In a sense, “The Curious Case of Benjamin
Button” is a film that should never have been made; and yet it works
for the most part and is strangely provocative; I give it high marks for
that. |