In the shadow of a most peculiar clock, when the world was at war the first time around, a man was born under unusual circumstances. True, he lived and experienced and suffered and celebrated like the rest of us do, but for Benjamin Button, the protagonist of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s short story and David Fincher’s feature adaptation, the passage of time was quite different. Over the course of eight decades in The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, we get to see that passage through a unique perspective. Through a return to some good, old-fashioned Hollywood filmmaking, we are also treated to a true, cinematic vision – big in scope, bold in scale, courageously unpretentious in what it has to say and meticulous in its dazzling craft. As played by Brad Pitt in an Academy Award-nominated performance, though, the film’s hero is a humble presence, in juxtaposition to the big-boldness around him.
For Fincher, this was something of a stylistic departure. Sure, his previous film, 2007’s equally meticulous but more quotidian true-crime mystery Zodiac, was unusually reserved for the man behind 1995’s Se7en and 1999’s Fight Club. This material, though, would theoretically have been a better fit for someone with an eye for an idiosyncratic world, flecked with the supernatural, such as Tim Burton or Gary Ross, the latter of whose Pleasantville in 1998 may, in fact, have been why he was studio Paramount Pictures’ original choice for director before something shifted in pre-production. This is a sprawling view of history and societal change told through the eyes of an odd protagonist, meanwhile, so it made a bit more sense that Forrest Gump screenwriter Eric Roth was the man behind the pen.
However this crossroads of talent came to be, the film that came out of it ranks highly among its director’s accomplishments – a significant feat, considering what came before and just after this in his filmography. The story quite literally follows Benjamin from his birth in 1918, shunted from a place of privilege to the slums of New Orleans, to his death in a nursing home in 1997, and now we get to why the man’s perspective on life, gained through the nature of his birth, is so different: Benjamin physically ages backward. His appearance upon birth is that of a frail, old man, stricken with cataracts and arthritis and sagging skin. If that’s how most of us do and will end up after a long time on this mortal coil, to move backward through life means that the nature of Benjamin’s death should be easy to guess. That doesn’t make it any less mysterious.
Back to that clock for a moment: The story technically begins with a parable of sorts, told by the aging Daisy Fuller (Cate Blanchett) to her adult daughter Caroline (Julia Ormond), about a blind clockmaker hired to build a time-telling device in a train station, just as his son left to fight and die in the Great War. In order to memorialize similar young men, he programs the clock’s hands to move backward as it counted the time. The idea, to this man Mr. Gasteau (Elias Koteas), was that, maybe, the backward movement would bring back the dead and the dying and reverse the forward motion of the international conflict that had brought it all on. There is no explanation for Benjamin’s condition, as this is a work of fanciful fiction which needn’t explain anything. Still, it becomes haunting to think of Benjamin as the universe’s practical subject of the clockmaker’s experiment.
The concept of time is interwoven throughout Benjamin’s story, which jumps forward by a decade every once in a while, to find the old man, then the younger fella and finally the small boy in some place in history. Abandoned by his birth father (Jason Flemyng) on the doorstep of Queenie (Taraji P. Henson, who was also Oscar-nominated), a caretaker, and Mr. Weathers (Mahershala Ali), a cook, who take him in with only love and affection in their hearts, Benjamin enjoys a religious upbringing, rooted in a deep-South, Pentecostal faith to which Queenie eventually gives all the credit for her adopted son’s good fortune. He meets Daisy (played by Elle Fanning and Madisen Beaty at two points in childhood), who seems to be more fascinated by his features (brought to life via digital effects that are still pretty seamless) than pitying or being frightened of them.
These are rich, superbly detailed characters, and the movie especially takes care to consider Daisy, both in the romantic equation and all on her own. Eventually growing into womanhood and played by a truly great Blanchett, Daisy becomes a dancer, loses contact with Benjamin for a decade or two, and, after reuniting with them, realizes that the childhood flirtations were the initial ingredients of her most important relationship. Her life is also marred by tragedy, after a car accident crushes her leg. More about how the randomness of time and space dictates our world and everything in it gets a glimpse here, as Benjamin, in diary entries he posthumously narrates and which are being read in the framing device by Caroline, opines about all the little things that needed to happen in order to place Daisy in the path of a car. It’s a virtuoso sequence of directing and film editing (by Kirk Baxter and Angus Wall).
Even a romantic interlude for Benjamin – with Elizabeth Abbott (Tilda Swinton), first lady to a chief minister on a trade mission in northwest Russia – is lovely, though it is only an interlude, because of the richness of the storytelling here. She once aspired to be the first woman to swim across the English Channel, but inclement weather intervened. A moment sort of reunites Benjamin with his old girlfriend later in the form of a news broadcast, and we smile at what’s being reported because we’ve already developed a genuine affection for her. Terror crops up, even, at the prospect of war on the horizon, when Benjamin’s tugboat is commissioned by the United States during the Second Great War. Jared Harris plays the gregarious ship’s captain, whose love of the arts collides painfully with the reality of combat. Enough cannot be said, meanwhile, about the eventual impact of a running gag about a man whom lightning struck seven times.
The movie has the scale of true, epic fiction, something that a later contemporary Fitzgerald adaptation (2013’s The Great Gatsby) misunderstood for pure spectacle. There is something spectacular here, and it has been brought to life by the film’s design and effects team (with costumes by Jacqueline West, production designed by Donald Graham Burt, and photography directed by Claudio Miranda), as well as the lovely piano score by Alexandre Desplat. This is a movie thoroughly about its central character, though, as a man’s sense of the world around him grows in the opposite direction of his own physical growth. The Curious Case of Benjamin Button is still bold filmmaking from a great cinematic auteur.
The post Oeuvre: Fincher: The Curious Case of Benjamin Button appeared first on Spectrum Culture.