Curious Indeed

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button is a stunning technical achievement in filmmaking. In some ways it is a valentine to the grand pleasures of movie making, but director David Fincher has put his computers to use on a haunting, emotionally resonant, and deeply satisfying story full of heart and soul and loss and love. It’s a movie star movie—a sweeping, epic, Hollywood romance—and one of my favorite films of the year.

Brad Pitt’s Benjamin Button is a keen but lonesome observer of the world—an outsider forever swimming against the tide. As he grows older and wiser, his body grows younger and more virile; as he watches those around him move forward, he is forever moving backward, and Pitt underplays the character with grace and humor. His Button is no idiot savant but a man who recognizes the absurdity and futility of his existence even as he exercises his desire to fully participate. As A. O. Scott has written, Pitt “seems more interested in the nuances of reticence than in the dynamics of expression.” Such an approach makes the character more accessible, and, amid all the make-up and special effects, Pitt conveys a great deal of intelligence, humor and sadness through his eyes as well as the laconic, voice-over narration nicely delivered with a Southern drawl and a comically askew world perspective. Still, while Pitt is central to the narrative, he is surrounded by a hearty collection of wonderfully strong female characters. Julia Ormond, Phyllis Somerville, Taraji P. Henson, Tilda Swinton, and the irresistibly remarkable Cate Blanchett as Daisy, Benjamin’s one true love; all of these fine actors deliver fully-dimensional, wholly embraceable characters.

Like its central character, Button is an artfully subtle film, and unlike Forest Gump, to which it has been unfairly compared, Fincher and screenwriter Eric Roth do not lather on the kind of syrupy sentiment which Gump relied upon nor do they heavily underline scenes full of historical significance and knowing. As Lisa Schwarzbaum writes: “Fincher’s inate astringency—his hardness—becomes exactly the kind of tonic needed to balance the sweet/tart proportions of so audacious a cinematic project.” And while the film does cover about eighty-five years or so, it does not devolve into a kind of greatest hits of the 20th century. World War II plays a small, poignant role and Hurricane Katrina functions as a somewhat awkward, wrap-around narrative device, but, for the most part, the film is intimately involved in the lives of its two main characters—a man and a woman who struggle to make freely willed humane choices in the absence of clear, unambiguous moral guidance. More a film about dying and living than living and dying, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button is a heartbreaker—a three-hanky tour de force. It is a story about loss and the melancholy poetry of impermanence. For each character there are lost opportunities, lost loves, lost fathers, lost mothers, and, in the end, lost youth. Indeed, there is nothing more difficult to watch than a little boy wrestling with the ill-effects of approaching senility . . . except, perhaps, the elderly woman holding his hand.

More significantly, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button underscores the spectators’ losses as well. Late in the film, when Pitt enters the scene looking as if he just walked off the set of Thelma and Louise, it is hard not to gasp. Where did those eighteen years go? Who were we then who are now nearly two decades closer to facing our own mortality? Fincher’s gifts as a director, not to mention the hardware and software which provide contemporary filmmakers full license to play, forces these sticky, existential questions to the surface. I’m still working through my emotional responses to this haunting, heartfelt film.