The Curious Case of Benjamin Button

[rating:3]
Director: David Fincher
Starring: Brad Pitt, Cate Blanchett

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button is a hard film to review. On the one hand, it’s gorgeously shot, with a sprawling scope, fantastic actors working with amazing aging effects, and a love story tinged with wonder and wistfulness. On the other hand, two hours and 45 minutes later, what the hell was it about?

So the premise, drawn from a story by F. Scott Fitzgerald, is that of a man born baby-sized but old, who as he grows becomes stronger, younger and, in this film, more supernaturally handsome. He stumbles through a strange and wondrous life filled with brothels, booze, sailing the world, and True Love.

The film strives for a deeper meaning, to show us, through the eyes of this miraculous Brad Pitt character, a truth hidden from the mundane lot of us. Whereas Forrest Gump had the thing about chocolates, this film has a number of greeting-card lines that get repeated more than once, for our benefit. Among them: “You never know what’s coming for you,” “We are defined by opportunities, even the ones we miss,” and “You can be as mad as a mad dog at the way things went, you can curse the fates, but when it comes to the end, you have to let go.” That last one will make a crappy bumper sticker.

And that’s the thing: The film seems to want to produce a bumper sticker, a feel-good message about life. Why else create such a fanciful, impossible tale and lard it with all this blather about fate and destiny, but to tell us something? It is beautifully made and very well-acted, but in the end, it doesn’t say anything, or arguably says things that aren’t nearly as wondrous and encouraging as the filmmakers might hope.

(Thus endeth the fairly spoilerless portion. Generalized spoilers ahead. Continue at your own risk.)

So, at first, Benjamin’s backward-aging thing opens his life to marvels—he grows up the ward of an old age home, and sees life from a different angle. At the age of 10, he looks like a man of 70, and so certain doors (to houses of uncertain repute) are opened to him that otherwise would not be, and he encounters the grubbier side of life with refreshing naivete and wonder. He meets Cate Blanchett when she’s a young girl and he’s an old man, and by the time they’re closing in on a mutual late-30s thing, they’ve fallen in love. Love endures crazy things, you know?

(We will now take a brief pause to sigh heavily over the staggering acting talent and stellar beauty of Cate Blanchett.)

But then, Pitt argues (not entirely convincingly, to this viewer) that he and Blanchett cannot make a family together because, for all they can tell, Pitt is gonna eventually regress to a baby, and the worst thing that could happen to his wife would be that she end up taking care of an 80-year-old with cognitive problems and poor bladder control. So then the “curious case” becomes something of a curse that strips Pitt’s life of its greatest meaning—it’s at this point that we stop following his story so closely, because his adventures as he ages down into his 20s and below no longer matter to us. They are insignificant after the growth curve that led to him and Blanchett coming together. And in the very end, what does the film say about the curious life Brad Pitt’s character has led? Not a damned thing. We can try to draw some conclusions about Cate, but not about Pitt.

The film ends with a touching statement about how love endures, and I guess we could say that “you never know what’s coming for you,” (except that Pitt really did; he’s aging downward and so should be able to do the math and know exactly what’s ahead, and when) and that even if you lose it all in the end, it’s all worthwhile. You gotta do what you gotta do, and then you let go. Which, again, looks like giving up from some angles, but there you have it.

Thus, we have a beautiful, sweeping movie that lets you down because when the lights come up, you’re expecting to feel moved, and enlightened, and you’re just not. Now me, I would’ve thought that the guy who wrote Forrest Gump and the man who directed Seven would be the perfect combination to make a powerful, enduring film about the complexities of life and love, fate and destiny. Turns out, not.

Tags: brad pitt, david fincher, drama