Out of Frame: The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
There's a tug of war going on throughout Benjamin Button's lengthy running time. On one side of the moat, there's director David Fincher, as always with an eye towards burrowing into the darker side of the human experience. Anchoring him is the ghost of F. Scott Fitzgerald, whose strange and somewhat clinical short story provides the inspiration for the film. Opposing those two is screenwriter Eric Roth, the writer of a couple of quite good films, but mostly of unwieldy junk with highbrow aspirations, the worst offender (and most appropriate to discussions of Button) being Forrest Gump. Giving him support is Alexandre Desplat, who provides an overbearing heartstring-tugger of a score, and, more importantly, a cadre of studio executives hell-bent on getting a weepy crowd-pleaser in the spirit of Titanic and Gump for their $150 million dollar investment. Who's going to win?
Well, the only element left of Fitzgerald's story is the title and the basic premise of a man born looking 70 years old and gradually aging backwards. Beyond that, Roth has little use for the source material, resetting the time and location of the start of the tale from Civil War-era Baltimore to WWI-era New Orleans, and scrapping the rest of the plot along with it. Roth's vision is of a tragic love story. Brad Pitt, as the title character, is born as a very wrinkly and decrepit looking baby and, as accident and good fortune would have it, is left on the doorstep of a rest home. A few years later, the child-like but elderly Benjamin (played by Brad Pitt) meets the actual child Daisy (Cate Blanchett), and an odd friendship blooms that turns into star-crossed relationship, into full-blown romance as the two come closer and closer in the appearance of their ages. Nothing lasts forever, though, and we can see where this path inevitably leads.
It's not an inherently flawed premise, but it is in Roth's saccharine-stained hands. Those unfortunate enough to still be unable to wipe Forrest Gump from their memory will recognize the beats of that movie immediately here. The episodic construction with an Event of Great Significance to mark each one; the use of nostalgia as a rickety crutch; one insipid leitmotif that springs up multiple times as a metaphor so bludgeoningly obvious you'll have a headache from the hammer used to deliver it. In the case of Gump, it was that recurring feather; here it's a hummingbird used in identical fashion. But it's more frustrating in this case, because as with so much of the film, it's easy to see how it could have been so much better.
And there is a great deal to recommend in Benjamin Button. The special effects are a wonder, allowing Brad Pitt to perform nearly his entire character, regardless of age. Late in the film, when he strolls through the door at the age of 19 or 20, you'll think he came to the set that day straight from a time machine. And Pitt's performance is also one of the rare bits of the detached nature of Fitzgerald's piece to make it to the screen. That same detachment seeps into much of his portrayal, a sense of loneliness inherent to any man who is never quite what or who people think he is when they first see him. Benjamin is most comfortable, most in his element, when his age and his appearance are roughly matched, and adrift (for a significant portion of the film, literally) when they aren't. Pitt reflects these shifts subtly and skillfully in one of his more nuanced appearances.
And there are times when Fincher breaks through all the forced sentimentality. It seems fairly obvious that he's paying some penance here for making a masterpiece of a film that lost buckets of money. His punishment for making Zodiac such a brilliantly dense film is apparently to make this superficially emotional color-by-numbers, but he simply can't help himself from straying outside the lines sometimes. In one of the film's most inspired sequences, Benjamin is a young man in the appearance of late middle age, working on a tugboat for hire (captained by the noteworthy, and furiously manic Jared Harris) when he encounters the sad-eyed wife of a British spy in a Russian hotel. The somewhat desperate affair they carry out during the hotel's quietest hours is the film's finest sequence, two people finding solace in each other while lost in a confusing world. But there's no sign that their lives become any less dark or confusing when they're forced to part. Tilda Swinton's performance here as the wife is the best of the film.
Unfortunately this interlude, like their affair, must end, and we're returned from Fincher's world to Roth's. And we haven't yet even mentioned the worst offense committed by the writer: a framing device lifted straight out of Titanic, as an elderly Daisy has her own daughter (Julia Ormond) read Benjamin's story to her from his diaries as she offers her own comments on these days long past. These scenes take place as she lies in her hospital death bed, in New Orleans, in the hours leading up to Hurricane Katrina striking the city. It's a hackneyed device designed to ratchet up the sense of tragedy in Benjamin and Daisy's story by associating it with the storm, which is not only ineffective, but comes off as crass and calculated. It's no wonder, then, that Fincher and the poor ghost of F. Scott end up the ones with mud on their faces.
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button opens widely on Christmas Day, including the Regal Gallery Place Cinemas and the Georgetown 14.