The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (08)
directed by David Fincher
****
an artistic triumph
There's a quiet elegance to this film. So quiet that you might miss it ... the meticulous artistry that went into each frame, each set, each light filter.
You see, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button stretches from the last day of the Great War until the day Hurricane Katrina struck. Set in Pitt's new hometown of New Orleans, each era gets its own beautifully-realized look & feel, its own cinematography, sets and costumes. Its own immediate, time-bound familiarity. Artistically, I doubt "period" film has ever been done better.
an engrossing tale
What you will notice, inevitably, are the actors. It's because they're beautiful people, to be sure (Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett, with a bit of Julia Ormond on the side). It's also because the film is committed to giving each one so much screen time. Like screenwriter Eric Roth's earlier film success Forrest Gump, in Benjamin Button, the story is the characters. By now you know the plot, based on a short story by F. Scott Fitzgerald: a man is born old, and as he grows, he grows younger. Which makes things complicated for the woman he falls in love with.
Maybe I'm forgetting something, but I can't remember another work of art since Tristram Shandy that followed one character from birth to death. It's a long arc, yes (& one that had a few lesser critics whining). But who says every film needs to follow the same pattern, hit the same total running time and the same old buttons? Even though its episodic script could have been tighter, I didn't mind the length of the film one bit. In fact, most viewers were probably saddened by the reality that, sooner or later, we were going to have to let these people go, leave their world and return to our own.
a bodily vision
Yes, I did say people. Benjamin Button spends a lot of time and care to ensure its characters become people. We know them and what makes them tick, what they're curious about and what they might do in any given situation.
To help us along even further, we're given the supernatural gift of seeing these people across their entire lives. We've never seen Brad Pitt or Cate Blanchett this old — or this young. It's not just makeup. It's not clever matching of lookalike actors. It's not even motion capture, at least not in the style of Gollum or The Polar Express. A cutting-edge CGI program mapped thousands of points on each actor's face, and adjusted them for age in one direction or the other. The results are startling. After a short while, it becomes more convincing that these people really exist, rather than argue them away with CGI.
It's not just the effects that are obsessed with bodies. The script itself tracks death like a bloodhound. Benjamin's mother dies in childbirth. He's raised in an old folks' home, where his friends (seemingly his own age) are short-lived. And by the time he realizes it, we know too, that once his body reaches childhood, he's at his end. In that sense, the whole film is a slow slide toward death.
It's not morbid, really. The film is more subtle than I just was. But it is materialistic. As Blanchett's elderly Daisy says at one point, she's curious to see what comes after death. That's the only point in the film where life outside this body is given any time or thought. Love, true love in the film, is in this body — so it makes sense that sexuality becomes a significant marker for Benjamin's relationship with Daisy, and why its unstated loss (given her increasing age and his seeming youth) seems as heartbreaking to them as their inevitable separation. This story finds its weight in ignoring life after death.
an imperfect masterpiece
On the whole, I found myself a little disappointed. I hadn't realized Roth was going to make this script as episodic as the stone-skipping Forrest Gump had been. In a film this long, that sort of vignette approach is cheating, and doesn't help anything.
In addition, some of the loveliest moments from the trailer stayed no longer in the film than they did in that preview — the startlingly up-close ocean view of the actors as a space shuttle rockets away from earth, and that profoundly poignant kiss from an elderly Daisy to the small child we know is Benjamin.
On almost every level, David Fincher's latest outing raises the bar for technical filmmaking to a new level. Cinematography, seamlessly customized to almost every era of the 20th century. CGI that's so good, it strengthens the story rather than distracting from it. War scenes that, despite their brevity, rival almost anything yet on celluloid for realistic intensity. Acting that marries sensitive character study with the agility demanded by age-driven scenes. And a plotline so powerful that it had audience members in tears almost all the way through.
Where Benjamin Button comes up short is entirely in the realm of script. Roth's take on the story is haunted by the same throwaway clichés that set the rhythm (and low IQ) of Forrest Gump. As a result, some scenes lose their power to the creeping force of sentimentalism. It's not at all a wash, though. Despite its flaws, the film is a provocative masterpiece, well worth your time, money and thoughts for weeks afterward.
Yeah, I thought the script was kinda bloodless in this film. It's too bad nobody saw Fincher's previous, superior work "Zodiac." I love watching Fincher's films, though: when he talks, I listen. He's a master of the frame, too.
Posted by: John Chiafos | 25 May 2009 at 11:47 PM
Definitly a different movie, but a good one. I watched it on http://gottv.blogspot.com and loved it!
Posted by: Taylor | 29 January 2009 at 08:18 PM