the AOX

DH Lawrence once said, “One must learn to love, and go through a good deal of suffering to get to it… and the journey is always towards the other soul.” Fincher’s “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” embodies this idea and attempts to visually articulate it in a feat rarely seen on the screen. The problem is that it doesn’t completely work. We’ve seen this story before about two people in love. However, the new spin imagining a man aging backwards cannot illicit the pathos it demands, because it is completely unrelatable and incomprehensible; but worst of all in the context of this film, unnecessary. This is hardly due to a lack of imagination, but to the absurdness of the postulate. The aging paradigm isn’t much of a game changer to any life lived and isn’t presented in a new way since living backwards in Button’s world isn’t all that different from living forwards. Either way, we all die wearing a diaper. The suffering that Button goes through is realized scantily on the screen by Pitt’s flat performance, and the story of these two lovers when stripped to the core, isn’t all that different from our own stories.

Fincher does the best anyone can do with this script based on F. Scott Fitzgerald’s short story; save for maybe 1980s Spielberg (I kept thinking of “Kick the Can”). But knowing Fincher’s marvelous work, I still don’t see what attracted him to the project or why he bound himself to this script. Supported by the marvelous cinematography of Claudio Miranda and the makeup/special effects team he employed, Fincher’s film is wonderful visually, but the one gimmick it employs is not explored in any depth. While the first sections of the film adequately show a young child in an elder body, this doesn’t come with the payoff of truly exploring a young child with the wisdom of an old man. His twilight years are wasted focusing on the love story we have seen a million times. The final major plot choice made by Button seems selfish and cruel by any calculation because, we the viewers, are deprived seeing the wisdom he has accumulated throughout his life. Ironically, his final choice in regards to his daughter seems more likely from a 16 year old and not a 70 year old.

The love story is not awful, but it is not enthralling either. No dramatic tension is really added by Pitt aging backwards that wouldn’t be there if he were aging normally. In fact, Pitt aging backwards is almost insultingly unnecessary. It cannot even manipulate the viewer (I was looking for anything at this point). She doesn’t fall in love with Button until they are the same age (physically), and the love they share from that point is no different than any other love shared between two people. As a result, the first two hours of the film that built Button’s plight to the relationship was unneeded since the film chose to take this direction and not focus on Button’s experiences as an old man in a child’s body. The script abandons the payoff built by the first half by diverting to a love story. When considering that the two protagonists were raised together and she always liked him, the hurdle of overcoming any adversity is absent and their story is simply reduced to being patient. This is unfortunate for the audience. There is no conflict or tension. She just had to live her life, and eventually Button would be available. Lucky for her, he even travels for a decade (Yes, the tired ‘post card’ plot device is exploited here) allowing her to eventually have her cake and eat it too. The film is not dissimilar from “Forrest Gump” in structure (they share the same screenwriter), but in Gump, there was a clear obstacle to overcome; his mental capability. The tension here isn’t based on any decisions the protagonists can make. They merely have to let time play out.

Once they are the same age, the film proceeds like any other love story. Which is not to say that it is completely uninteresting, but even the obvious end of him descending to an infant isn’t any more compelling than a man growing old. Finally, the pay off that the film has been building towards is rushed at the end with very little scenes of tenderness between the two and his loss of mental faculty. Moreover, there is very little frustration shown on her part. What could have been the more interesting part of the film, showing Button’s death as he is reduced to physical infancy, is reduced to 2 minutes of a 3 hour film. There are no scenes of her crying with despair as she changes his diapers or resentment as she bottle feeds him or looks of regret as he learns to crawl.  These last years are essentially reduced to frivolous montages.

There were numerous routes that Fincher could have presented the story and it is puzzling to me that he took the most obvious path without exploring some of the more beneficial results. If it put the love story on the side, I would have liked to of seen a young Pitt traveling the world and experiencing his adventures with the wisdom that comes from the accumulated experiences of being mentally old. His elder reflections as a seemingly young man would have been far more interesting juxtaposed against those of other twenty-somethings/teens as he interacted with them. If the film had to devolve into a love story as it did, I think it would have been much more effective had it began with their relationship and showed their time together. Maybe after a decade of life shared and her appearance giving way to age, the viewer notices that he isn’t getting any older, and even getting younger.  This film unfortunately lays out all of its cards before the story begins. It shots itself in the foot from the very beginning. The viewer too is not challenged and is reduced to only having the patience of watching it all play out. I personally found The Twilight Zone episode, “A Short Drink from a Certain Fountain” ultimately more fulfilling because it presented tension and conflict where the aging backwards device was a factor, not the platform of the story.

There are little attempts to explain why Button is aging backwards. This is probably a good thing, but Fincher cannot resist clinging to the sentimentality of a blind clockmaker making a clock that turns backwards. This seems simply tagged on for emotional value.

“The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” isn’t without its moments, but the viewer is forced to sit through a tedious hour or more to get to them. There are some touching scenes well executed. This isn’t a story about overcoming anything and there is little tension. Their relationship doesn’t hinge on anything other than patience and the eventual end isn’t any different than…death. Something we all have to face. The conflict is artificial in the sense that it isn’t any different than our own.

2.5/5