{"id":1380,"date":"2009-01-09T02:25:54","date_gmt":"2009-01-09T07:25:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/chadossman.com\/blog\/?p=1380"},"modified":"2022-10-18T15:33:03","modified_gmt":"2022-10-18T19:33:03","slug":"curious-case-of-benjamin-button","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/chadossman.com\/blog\/curious-case-of-benjamin-button\/","title":{"rendered":"Brad Pitt Lives Life in Reverse in David Fincher’s The Curious Case of Benjamin Button"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

This blogger is slowly cooling on former favorite David Fincher. His underrated first feature Alien3<\/sup><\/em> is highly compromised, but easily the next most thematically interesting entry in the Alien<\/em> franchise (after, of course, Ridley Scott’s rich original). Se7en<\/em> is one of the most gut-wrenchingly disturbing movies ever made, notable for having virtually no violence appear onscreen, despite its reputation. Fight Club<\/em> is perhaps the<\/em> movie of the nineties, an eccentric blast of countercultural fury.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But almost everything that followed seemed a disappointment. The Game<\/em> was wildly implausible, without the pop and sizzle that carried the similarly over-the-top Fight Club<\/em>. Panic Room<\/em> was an empty exercise in style, seemingly conceived solely for Fincher to experiment with new digital techniques that would allow him to create impossibly continuous camera moves through the walls and floors of a city brownstone (and possibly also as another vehicle for star Jodie Foster’s persona as a single parent to be reckoned with). Zodiac<\/em> was highly praised both as a tight procedural thriller and as a tour-de-force of still more bleeding-edge digital special effects (so good that most viewers wouldn’t suspect that many sequences were not traditionally shot in-camera), but it did absolutely nothing for me. I’m wondering if I missed some key aspect of it that would open it up to me – and that perhaps I should reappraise it now that a director’s cut is available on DVD.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Brad
You’re only as old as you feel<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

The advance marketing for The Curious Case of Benjamin Button<\/em> excited me at first, but I was apprehensive when I learned the screenplay (loosely based on a 1921 short story by F. Scott Fitzgerald) was by Eric Roth, the writer of Forrest Gump<\/em>. Indeed, it did turn out to be constructed in a similar vein and tone, even mimicking some of the corniest devices of Gump: the famous digital feather twirling in the wind has been replaced by an unlikely reappearing hummingbird; Forrest’s mother’s aphorism “life is like a box of chocolates; you never know what you’re going to get” has its analog in the less memorable “you never know what’s coming for you”; even Forrest Gump’s parade of cameos by famous or infamous Americans is here continued with an appearance by Teddy Roosevelt. Against my will, this cutesiness did succeed in drawing me in for most of its running time. I was engrossed for much of it, but its leisurely three-hour running time honestly strained my patience by about the two-hour mark.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Fincher and Roth relate the decades-long story via the framing device of Benjamin’s (Brad Pitt) one true love Daisy (Cate Blanchett) on her deathbed, introducing her adult daughter Caroline (Julia Ormond) to her biological father through a dramatic reading of his diary, with gaps filled in from her own memory. A soon-to-be infamous hurricane brews outside the Louisiana hospital room, shortly to erase much of Benjamin and Daisy’s milieu. The multiple layers of storytelling result is no less than three speaking voices to narrate the tale in voiceover. One framing device too far?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Cate
Cate Blanchett is a beautiful woman, and will be at any age, but it’s eerie to see her appear to be in her twenties.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

The central conceit of the story is a fantastically unfortunate disease that afflicts one Benjamin Button. His body is born aged and decrepit, and ages backwards while his mind matures normally. As he aptly puts it when still a boy, he was “born old.” Taking this story as anything other than a parable or fairy tale would be to miss the point, but the photorealistic special effects place the movie firmly in believable reality. So this viewer’s mind (when not distracted by the high-tech visuals) pondered the logistics.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Some of the rules don’t seem to hold up: as a chronological adolescent, he manifests the typical sexual desires and self-centeredness. But his aged body strangely has the physical fitness and stamina\/potency to act them out (we see him preening in front of a mirror, seemingly only aged from the neck up). Also, presumably, Benjamin can be assured to die when his body regresses to infancy. So, given his physical state at birth, is his death date pre-ordained? If he had been born with an infantilized body of a 20-year old, could he have been assured of only having two decades to live? Is he impervious to harm? There is onscreen evidence to support this theory: he somehow manages to survive being stepped on as a newborn, and later, is one of the few survivors of a German submarine attack on an outclassed tugboat during World War II.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Benjamin is adopted by Queenie (Taraji P. Henson), an unfortunately stereotypical African American character, and spends his youth and old age (and vice versa!) at the nursing home she manages. There, he meets his one true love Daisy, the niece of one of the tenants. Benjamin’s curious condition prevents him from having any kind of normal friendship or relationship with her, so he leaves home to find his way in the world.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

He has his first serious relationship with Elizabeth Abbott (Tilda Swinton), an older woman who thinks she’s younger than him (later, we learn that meeting him helped her change her life). Eventually, Benjamin and Daisy do meet at roughly the same physical age and consummate their mutual love. When Daisy quite rightly asks Benjamin if he will still love her when she’s old and wrinkly, he jokingly turns it around and asks if she will still love him when he has acne.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But what first amuses eventually comes back around to become one of the most painfully emotional sequences in the whole movie: Benjamin does after all regress into senility (or perhaps even Alzheimer’s, before it was identified), trapped in the body of a pimply teenager. As always, the point is that the bell curve of a human life can be seen as a mirror image of itself: here, the impetuousness, aggression, and mood swings of senility are equated with the tumult of adolescence. Likewise, extreme youth and old age both are characterized as the ultimate states of dependence and vulnerability.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Tilda
Tilda Swinton as Benjamin’s first lover, an older woman whom he allows to believe is younger<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

The special effects that allow an aged version of Pitt’s face to be superimposed over another, diminutive actor are light years in advance of the still-creepy digital rotoscoping animation style used in Robert Zemeckis’ The Polar Express<\/em> and Beowulf<\/em> (although the latter is an excellent film in spite of the ineffective effects). But no matter how eerily fluid and seamless the effects, I could not shake the feeling that I was watching something largely actualized by animators equipped with a giant computer server farm. These obviously cutting edge techniques are more comprehensible to me than whatever the makeup and\/or CG wizards did to make 44-year-old Pitt and the 39-year-old Blanchett appear to be in their smooth-skinned and limber-limbed early 20s. Also, it must be said that an artificially aged Pitt in his hypothetical 50s and 60s is a dead ringer for Robert Redford.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There must be something in the bottled water filmmakers have been drinking recently, for I’ve noticed a decided trend towards movies about aging recently. Sarah Polley’s Away From Her<\/em><\/a> and Tamara Jenkin’s The Savages<\/em><\/a> both look at the senility that often comes at the end of life, and how it may affect the lives of those still living, for better or for worse. But another pair of movies dealt with mortality and the fear of unfinished business through the lens of fantasy: Francis Ford Coppola’s Youth Without Youth<\/em><\/a> and Charlie Kaufman’s Synecdoche, New York<\/em><\/a>. All of these movies tap into most people’s fear of aging: not only of losing physical health and thus independence, but also of the reliability of one’s own mind.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This blogger is slowly cooling on former favorite David Fincher. His underrated first feature Alien3 is highly compromised, but easily the next most thematically interesting entry in the Alien franchise (after, of course, Ridley Scott’s rich original). Se7en is one of the most gut-wrenchingly disturbing movies ever made, notable for having virtually no violence appear […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":4705,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[22,2],"tags":[140,142,207,121,46,144,42,143,141],"class_list":["post-1380","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-2-stars","category-movies","tag-brad-pitt","tag-cate-blanchett","tag-criterion-collection","tag-david-fincher","tag-drama","tag-eric-roth","tag-fantasy","tag-special-effects","tag-tilda-swinton"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/chadossman.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2009\/01\/curious-case-of-benjamin-button-feature.jpg","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pa9lhB-mg","jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":5683,"url":"https:\/\/chadossman.com\/blog\/brad-pitt-works-out-his-daddy-issues-in-space-in-ad-astra\/","url_meta":{"origin":1380,"position":0},"title":"Brad Pitt works out his daddy issues in space, in Ad Astra","author":"Chad Ossman","date":"February 21, 2020","format":false,"excerpt":"Maybe this isn't fair, but I couldn't help but associate Ad Astra with Joker. If Joker is a shallow remix of Taxi Driver and King of Comedy, Ad Astra is a bland smoothie of Solaris and Apocalypse Now, with a cavalcade of stars you may remember from Space Cowboys and\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "2 Stars"","block_context":{"text":"2 Stars","link":"https:\/\/chadossman.com\/blog\/category\/ratings\/2-stars\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"Brad Pitt in Ad Astra","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/chadossman.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/09\/ad-astra.jpg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1","width":350,"height":200,"srcset":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/chadossman.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/09\/ad-astra.jpg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1 1x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/chadossman.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/09\/ad-astra.jpg?resize=525%2C300&ssl=1 1.5x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/chadossman.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/09\/ad-astra.jpg?resize=700%2C400&ssl=1 2x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/chadossman.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/09\/ad-astra.jpg?resize=1050%2C600&ssl=1 3x"},"classes":[]},{"id":1222,"url":"https:\/\/chadossman.com\/blog\/burn-after-reading\/","url_meta":{"origin":1380,"position":1},"title":"The Coen Brothers confound expectations, as usual, with Burn After Reading","author":"Chad Ossman","date":"October 12, 2008","format":false,"excerpt":"Although every Coen Brothers film is unmistakably theirs alone (can the Auteur Theory apply to more than one person at once?), Joel and Ethan have a reputation for rarely making the films audiences want or expect from them at any given time. Clooney and McDormand give this movie two thumbs\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "3 Stars"","block_context":{"text":"3 Stars","link":"https:\/\/chadossman.com\/blog\/category\/ratings\/3-stars\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/chadossman.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2008\/10\/burn-after-reading-feature.jpg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1","width":350,"height":200,"srcset":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/chadossman.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2008\/10\/burn-after-reading-feature.jpg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1 1x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/chadossman.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2008\/10\/burn-after-reading-feature.jpg?resize=525%2C300&ssl=1 1.5x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/chadossman.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2008\/10\/burn-after-reading-feature.jpg?resize=700%2C400&ssl=1 2x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/chadossman.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2008\/10\/burn-after-reading-feature.jpg?resize=1050%2C600&ssl=1 3x"},"classes":[]},{"id":6097,"url":"https:\/\/chadossman.com\/blog\/every-day-is-exactly-the-same-for-james-mcavoy-in-wanted\/","url_meta":{"origin":1380,"position":2},"title":"Every Day is Exactly the Same for James McAvoy in Wanted","author":"Chad Ossman","date":"December 19, 2008","format":false,"excerpt":"The Nine Inch Nails song \"Every Day is Exactly the Same\" is so thematically perfect for the early part of Timur Bekmambetov's Wanted, that it seems to have been composed especially. But Wanted is weighed down by an overly extensive backstory that goes back thousands of years, and an approach\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "2 Stars"","block_context":{"text":"2 Stars","link":"https:\/\/chadossman.com\/blog\/category\/ratings\/2-stars\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"Angelina Jolie in Wanted","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/chadossman.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/09\/wanted-angelina-jolie.jpg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1","width":350,"height":200,"srcset":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/chadossman.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/09\/wanted-angelina-jolie.jpg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1 1x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/chadossman.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/09\/wanted-angelina-jolie.jpg?resize=525%2C300&ssl=1 1.5x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/chadossman.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/09\/wanted-angelina-jolie.jpg?resize=700%2C400&ssl=1 2x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/chadossman.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/09\/wanted-angelina-jolie.jpg?resize=1050%2C600&ssl=1 3x"},"classes":[]},{"id":728,"url":"https:\/\/chadossman.com\/blog\/the-assassination-of-jesse-james-by-the-coward-robert-ford\/","url_meta":{"origin":1380,"position":3},"title":"Roger Deakins is the true star of The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford","author":"Chad Ossman","date":"March 28, 2008","format":false,"excerpt":"Had I seen The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford earlier, I might have included it among my Most Disappointing Films of 2007. Certainly not because it's \"bad,\" for could I make a better movie myself? Could I make a movie at all? And who appointed me\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "3 Stars"","block_context":{"text":"3 Stars","link":"https:\/\/chadossman.com\/blog\/category\/ratings\/3-stars\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/chadossman.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2008\/03\/assassination-of-jesse-james-1.jpg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1","width":350,"height":200,"srcset":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/chadossman.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2008\/03\/assassination-of-jesse-james-1.jpg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1 1x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/chadossman.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2008\/03\/assassination-of-jesse-james-1.jpg?resize=525%2C300&ssl=1 1.5x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/chadossman.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2008\/03\/assassination-of-jesse-james-1.jpg?resize=700%2C400&ssl=1 2x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/chadossman.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2008\/03\/assassination-of-jesse-james-1.jpg?resize=1050%2C600&ssl=1 3x"},"classes":[]},{"id":5763,"url":"https:\/\/chadossman.com\/blog\/ridley-scott-and-cormac-mccarthy-make-an-odd-couple-in-the-counselor\/","url_meta":{"origin":1380,"position":4},"title":"Ridley Scott and Cormac McCarthy make an odd couple in The Counselor","author":"Chad Ossman","date":"October 25, 2013","format":false,"excerpt":"Cormac McCarthy and Ridley Scott were bound to be an odd couple in any case. All the richly composed and poetic dialogue in the world doesn't disguise the fact The Counselor is basically a grimy, scuzzy, sleazy, feel-bad potboiler. 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It certainly wasn't helped by the routine serial killer plot possibly meant to capitalize on the success of David Fincher's Se7en (from the same studio, New Line Cinema). 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