Film Review--The Curious Case of Benjamin Button

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
Directed by David Fincher
Written by Eric Roth, Robin Swicord
based on a short story by F. Scott Fitzgerald
Starring Brad Pitt, Julia Ormond, Cate Blanchett, Tilda Swinton, Jason Flemyng, Taraji P. Henson, Mahershalalhashbaz Ali, Peter Donald Badalamenti II, Tom Everett, Robert Towers, Jared Harris, Elle Fanning, Rampai Mohadi

Few films leave a strong, emotionally-laden impression once we are removed from their immediacy as cinematic experiences. Fewer still disrupt the flow of our blood or irritate our waking consciousness with slight perversions we cannot shake. This film manages to haunt the imagination with ideas that are exceedingly unsettling and will remain so. Everything dies and there isn’t a thing we can do to stop it. Time won’t stop for us no matter how boisterous our protestations and no matter how grand our efforts to make our mark. For the central character in this film, time poses a wholly novel set of problems as he has been brought into the world to age precisely in the opposite way from everyone else. It’s an intriguing conceit and the film offers a profoundly melancholy study of loss, loneliness tempered as they are by fleeting moments of the rarest joy.

The film uses a framing technique in which the story proper is contained. In this instance elderly Daisy (Blanchett) is dying in a New Orleans hospital with Hurricane Katrina bearing down). She asks her daughter Caroline (Ormond) to read from a journal written by Benjamin Button (Pitt). We are then brought into the story and witness Benjamin’s sad birth on the day celebrating the Allies’ final victory during WWI in which his mother dies during delivery. His father Thomas (Flemying) panics when he sees the baby because the poor thing has been born with disorder that gives him the physiognomy of an eighty year old man. He takes the baby to a nursing home and leaves him on the steps with $18. The child is discovered by two caretakers named Queenie (Henson) and Tizzy (Ali) who argue briefly before Queenie decides to bring the boy inside and raise him herself.

So straight away we have an interesting case of rambunctious, mildly manic child trapped in the body of a decrepit and decaying old man. He sees the world as all innocents do yet is forced by some cruel trick of nature to remain encased in a physicality that affords him nary a dream of movement or an application of limbs and delight to playtime in the typical sense. He is raised as Queenie’s own in a home where his friends fall faster than flies. He becomes acquainted with the immediacy of death while also apprehending the fact that each death merely makes room for another’s civil story to be told. Benjamin gains strength while all around his codified world others with whom he shares a passing resemblance are succumbing to their various ailments. Then he meets Daisy (Fanning) and a deep bond is forged.

Benjamin starts out a little baby boy trapped in the flesh of a helpless old man. His joints are stiff, he cannot walk, he can barely keep himself together. As his internal clock advances his actual age, his physical age reverses and so he gradually becomes younger in body but older in spirit. He throws off the shackles of the wheelchair and soon is running. Meanwhile his actual age puts him in a perfect position to welcome Daisy who sees him clearly whereas others merely see a tottering old man who is quite strange in a way they cannot fully articulate. Daisy becomes a touchstone and as Benjamin moves out of the nursing home and begins his life he maintains contact with Daisy through a number of postcards from the many ports he has visited through his job

The film employs a combination of live actors and CGI to walk the viewer through the various stages of Benjamin’s early life. Three actors play him through the early stages of his development and each of them bring a definitive sense of Self to their portrayals. All through, they capture Benjamin’s essentially innocent outlook and this perspective is never abandoned as the film progresses. In this film Benjamin is more than a mere character to whom certain events bash their ugly heads against. He is an embodiment of the joy that life is haunted by. He is a testament to thoughts that ravish the sense of duration and permanence and twist themselves into knots in our stomach as we make the vain attempts to get on with our lives. This film is not altogether bleak although it is incredibly sad from start to finish. If anything it’s simply realistic and offers a clear vision of life’s impermanence. It’s sad because it’s too grim a reminder of one’s own mortality and that remains the most difficult of all obstacles we must eventually face.

Benjamin becomes a tug boat man working for Captain Mike (Harris), a hard drinking, hard loving, artist trapped in the body of a tug boat captain. Benjamin befriends Elizabeth Abbott (Swinton), the wife of an English Spy who is staying at the same hotel as the tug boat crew. They embark upon a brief, elegant affair where they meet every evening in the lobby and stay up nearly to dawn talking, making love, etc. Elizabeth puts restrictions on their relationship by informing Benjamin that he cannot make eye contact with her during the day and that they must never say “I Love You.” Benjamin imagines himself to be in love with Elizabeth and is temporarily heartbroken when she leaves him with a note that simply says “It’s nice to have met you.” Then the Japanese attack Pearl Harbor and the little tug boat is called out for war. Benjamin witnesses what he describes as deaths that just don’t seem natural as he is used to seeing death snatch those who have reached the fair end of their allotted time.

Daisy (Blanchett) haunts Benjamin throughout the film. He cannot forget the first moment when he laid eyes on her and the film certainly plays out like a tortured love affair between the two. Their paths cross over the course of the film but difficulties related to maturity levels and age always get in the way. Eventually they meet and realize they are near enough the same age to pursue a romantic relationship and the film slows down considerably as they become more intimate. Much hinges on the quiet authority of their relationship. It’s handled with delicacy and a strained urgency which brings them together as if by fate. The film spends considerable time setting up and developing this relationship and once it is consummated it becomes something of an act of resistance against the cruel order that governs hearts.

Time plays its role in the film as a great number of clocks are featured throughout. At the beginning a blind man spends several years constructing a clock for the city square. When he reveals it townsfolk are aghast because it runs backward. The creator says that this is so perhaps the boys who have gone off to war will return whole. Clocks are everywhere reminding the viewer that time will not cease to afflict mankind straight through to that inglorious end to which we all must submit. Benjamin Button is forced to endure life with a strange new formation of memories that challenges the perfect order of things. His march to the grave is not tempered with experience or maturity. Indeed, all of the memories and skills he has obtained in a life are stripped from him slowly and he can do nothing to bring them back into his realm of expertise. The world slips from him in a different, exceedingly tragic way, and he slowly devolves eternally backward into a chasm no less open for his reversed process of gaining oblivion.

There is a tremendous sadness to this film that does not abate. The film asks questions about whether or not it would be better to go out as an oblivious baby or an oblivious old man. Either way is fraught with complications that deny the accused’s right to retain a stranglehold on the remnants of their existence. Rarely has a film explored with such precision the very natures of life as it is lived and death as it is thrust upon all things that have been, against their will, brought under the coursing tyranny of life. Ingmar Bergman’s “Wild Strawberries” is perhaps the best example of a film that covers these hard, cold facts with clarity and unassuming objectivity. This film succeeds in not sentimentalizing these concerns but rather it merely states them for what they are.

This is not a romantic glorification of death as it stands. Instead, we are provided with a simple truth that cannot be disputed. It’s exacting, necessary and blindly loyal to very hard facts. That doesn’t make each death less significant or heartbreaking–indeed each death in this film takes on a pertinence that is the engine that drives the film. We are introduced to it’s permanence straight away as Benjamin experiences the passings of numerous residents toiling obscurely in the home. He meets a woman who teaches him piano. She has no visitors, never leaves, but she becomes the closest he has come to a friend until she too succumbs to the inevitable. There is so much death in this film that it shapes the very structure of the film and necessitates a certain distance between the viewer and those who must fall headlong into the grave. Otherwise, this film would be impossible to watch. There is simply too much loss in the film and each loss carries with it a tremendous weight. Death in the home is indeed quite natural and almost genteel. However there are other types of death that are cruel and unjust and make no sense whatsoever.

This is a film that clings to the ever pressing intensities of life. It celebrates action and movement and solace. Life in reverse is a releasing, a perpetual affectation that is not burdened by the hostilities that afflict those who must undergo the natural aging process. The body ceases to remind the man of his earlier failings and internal disagreements. Instead, the body casts off all doubts and pushes toward the effervescence and indeed oblivion of youth. The age of promise comes at the end when there is nothing to be done. Enthusiasm for life, just waking up and exploring the day, is met with a world-weariness that is more profoundly despairing that the curse of gnarled, angry flesh.

The performances in this film are all remarkable in their precision. Cate Blanchett possesses a decisive spirit throughout this film. She has never been filmed so exquisitely. Every aspect of her tremendous beauty both physically and as a kind soul are exploited in such a refined, dramatic way. This is a role that is hardly apparent in films today. It seems to capture the essence of the actor and projects that essence outward creating a character that is much more than merely a seminal aspect of a film. Brad Pitt is just fearless in this film. He creates a character of such sublime sympathy that one almost feels that the two hour and forty five minute running time isn’t nearly enough. Pitt captures the deep melancholy and infinite grace of Benjamin through a most understated performance. It has everything to do with his eyes and how open and reflective they are throughout the film. His innocence throughout is encouraging as life appears to his character as a purely fascinating challenge filled with genuinely thrilling and amazing moments. Life is in this sense merely a series of things that happen to us. Our entire existence is thus predicated on our experiences and our reaction to those experiences. Tilda Swinton is deliciously frail and frustrated in this film; her pain is so deliciously apparent on her face at all times. Her character embodies a regalness, a classy elegance that Swinton plays up to the hilt. Hers is a return to classic Hollywood glamour so drenched as it is with ennui and alcohol. Taraji P. Henson is perfectly cast as Benjamin’s mother. There is an infectious quality to Queenie that is carried straight through the film. She’s a bit brash, but clearly consumed with a love that radiates. Jason Flemyng captures a certain amount of loneliness and longing with his character. Thomas Button is a cold figure of infinite regret. He cannot but despair at the sight of Benjamin knowing how cruel he was to just get rid of him like he was a used can of motor oil.

Overall, this film both celebrates life and offers a clear, evenhanded depiction of the niceties of death as it remains eternally true. The final result is not grief but a desire to continue struggling for the joy that we seek for our troubles. We are haunted more by the future than what we have either accomplished or failed to do in the past. The future scares us into revolt and we long to return to those halcyon days when nothing mattered and life was a true adventure. But we are forced to slip further away from those memories that have sustained us and come to define our lives. Without memory we are rudderless and our very identity becomes suspect. We don’t get too much of Benjamin’s internal agony but just enough through Brad Pitt and the other fine actors who play Benjamin at various stages to understand something of the pathos in such an existence. There is certainly an anguish in this character and it’s a testament to the brilliant work of Brad Pitt and the rest of the cast that the film becomes truly memorable and lasting.