The Curious Case of Benjamin Button is about a man who ages backward, his infantile body wrought with arthritis and wrinkled skin, who during the course of his life observes the physical degradation of everyone he knows. This mars against his inverse growth into youth, instilling in him an asynchronous naiveté at first – he loses his virginity, in his seventy-something body, at a brothel – and later a troubled responsibility: he can’t be both a father and playmate to a child. But more particularly, this film is about seeing Brad Pitt grow younger and handsomer until he becomes so young and handsome that it’s a marvel equivalent to the Apollo rocket, for example, launching toward the moon in the background of one particularly picturesque composition. This is largely the point, though; the film is very much a visual spectacle—the emotional core is tied to Benjamin’s visual discrepancy at any point in his life except the very middle: at 15/seventy-something he works on a tugboat in a body that looks like it can barely handle a walking cane, and in his sixties/late teens, he looks disarmingly boyish to one of his past loves. As visually splendid as the film is – and there are many moments in which the sensational concept fosters true tenderness – it’s blatantly derivative of Forest Gump. Really, it’s almost an identical film, which I imagine is an endorsement to most who’ll see this.
by Rumsey Taylor | Source: Warner Bros. 35mm print
18 Dec 2008 12:32 PM | Comments (2)
One word. Just one word.
Phbbbbbt.
I’m not sure why the existence of this film annoys me so much…. probably the Forrest Gump replica thing pretty much nails it.
Like its central character, BUTTON is a 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 astringencyÑhis hardnessÑbecomes 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 charactersÑa 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 heartbreakerÑa 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.
Megan
2 January 2009
3:39 PM