Man Child

Brad Pitt ages in reverse in David Fincher's The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. It looks cool, but is that reason enough to care?

by Sam Adams

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Published: Dec 23, 2008

Drawn from a story by F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button is based around the kind of structural conceit that gets Hollywood screenwriters hot under the collar. Rather than progressing through life in the traditional fashion, Benjamin (Brad Pitt) is born a wizened old man and grows progressively younger as he ages. His backward development allows director David Fincher to play with a wide variety of digital effects, pasting Pitt's face onto a shriveled body the size of a child's. And, it gives Pitt an opportunity to flaunt his acting chops, burying his pretty-boy looks beneath makeup and delivering his dialogue in a high-pitched Louisiana drawl.

Unfortunately, Benjamin's aging process isn't the only thing the movie gets backward. Despite all the care lavished on its execution, it never manages to be about anything more than its own gimmickry. Screenwriter Eric Roth tries to fill the hole at the movie's center with vague platitudes that could have been ripped at random from his script for Forrest Gump. But Roth's syrupy nostrums lack substance, and sometimes sense. "We're meant to lose the people we love," goes one of them. "How else would we know how important they were to us?" Lots of ways, actually.

Born in the wake of World War I, Benjamin grows up in New Orleans, raised by a black foster mother (Taraji P. Henson) who takes him in when his horrified father abandons him. "People aren't going to understand how different you are," she tells the young/old boy. "You are a different child."

The nature of his existence makes Benjamin a forcibly solitary type, but he does manage to sustain a relationship with Daisy (Cate Blanchett), whose dying moments frame the film. Although their ages are roughly the same, their bodies are moving in opposite directions, so their time together is fraught and fleeting. The eminently precise Blanchett is in some ways a perfect match for the control-mad Fincher, but she's too controlled an actress to melt the movie's icy heart. The tragedy of their relationship is merely theoretical.

What kills Button is that it never comes fully to terms with its central conceit. Benjamin ages backward. Apart from embodying the canard that we end life as we began it (i.e. helpless and alone), so what? For all the effort put into realizing Benjamin's curious condition, little thought seems to have been given to what it means. Roth's generic pearls could have been inserted at random into any number of inspirational year-end releases, and they'd make just as much, or as little, sense.

Fincher has never been known for his sentimentality; if anything, his movies suffer from a devotion to cut-glass technique at the expense of human vitality. He might have seemed perversely apt for Roth's script, just the man to weed out some of its most soft-headed passages. But instead, Fincher seems defenseless against its gloppiness, unable to distinguish between the tender and the mawkish.

The movie's images are more sophisticated than its story. A nighttime submarine attack that takes place during World War II is breathtaking, the endless black sky ripped by billowing flames and arcing tracer bullets. But it's not enough to burn off the accumulated layers of syrup that swallow so many other scenes. For Fincher, Button's cozy certainty must have been a pleasant reprieve from the obsessive ambiguity of Zodiac, but it's as vapid as the earlier movie was calculating. The moral quagmire of a murder investigation gives way to a swamp of treacle.

(s_adams@citypaper.net)

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button | Directed by David Fincher | A Paramount Pictures release

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