The Curious Case of Benjamin Button

In 1921, the brilliant F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote a short story about an infant actually born as an elderly man. He ages backwards, growing smaller and smaller into an infant until he dies. Fitzgerald’s short story is a farce and there are logical consequences to the ridiculous premise. Fitzgerald’s The Curious Case of Benjamin Button features Benjamin’s birth in 1860 and his advancement through life. He is able to speak at his birth, he must shave his beard and dye his hair, he must play with the neighbourhood boys but he takes more joy in smoking father’s cigars. And so on.

In 2008, director David Fincher takes on Fitzgerald’s Benjamin Button and constructs a story that runs more like a melancholic Forrest Gump with none of the farce or wit of the original tale. Instead, Fincher takes the standard approach and gives us the passage of time in normal Hollywood epic format. With a screenplay by Eric Roth, who not surprisingly actually wrote Gump, Fincher’s take transplants Button in a world that attempts to make more logical sense of the curiosity.

By unfolding the epic playbook, Fincher starts his story framing it in a modern context so as to establish his location and his period. We open with the elderly Daisy (Cate Blanchett in a pile of makeup and effects) in hospital preparing to die. Her daughter, Caroline (Julia Ormond) is at her bedside. The location is New Orleans and Hurricane Katrina is approaching, so we surmise that it is now August of 2005. There appears to be no reason whatsoever for the selection of this time period other than to add further grounding in historical events.

As Daisy lies dying, she asks Caroline to read from a diary and thus begins the tale of Benjamin Button. Caroline reads through the collection of notes, photographs, and postcards from Button (Brad Pitt) and learns of his curious existence. He was born as the people of New Orleans are celebrating the end of the First World War. The size of a baby, young Benjamin has the physical limitations of a man well into his 80s. He is an infant but he has arthritis and a lot of wrinkles, making for one ugly baby.

As Caroline continues to read the diary, we learn about Benjamin’s life as he moves through his existence growing physically younger. Button eventually meets a young Daisy while he is in his seventies and she is about six years old. An instant but awkward connection is born. As Benjamin’s life continues, he goes to work on a tugboat, goes to a brothel, gets drunk, meets his father, has an affair with a married British woman, is caught up in World War II, and reconnects with Daisy years later as she is a young and beautiful ballet dancer. The film carries us through Button’s life until his eventual death as an infant in the elder Daisy’s arms.

While Fitzgerald’s original premise had more potential for natural wit and emotion, Roth’s reworking of it isn’t all bad. There is something to be said for the special effects and makeup that makes Pitt’s continued physical regression interesting and the concept of an infant with arthritis is convincing. However, imagine how much richer the story could have been and how much more linear Fincher’s work could have been with Fitzgerald’s 5’8 Benjamin emerging. Oh, what a brave mother he must have had!

Instead of carrying the story with wit and curiousness, Fincher’s movie plays it strangely straight. This is a subpar epic, running the scope of historical context like Gump before it, and giving us little emotional meat. It works as rumination, like a dawdling and slothful miasma pouring over the viewer and grinding down any signs of life. Fincher’s pacing is lethargic, his cinematography is dreary, and any broad events that could have been projected with some magnificence are plainly left to murky corners.

Pitt, who is up for a Best Actor Oscar, is simply bland and uninteresting. With Frank Langella’s Nixon and Mickey Rourke’s Randy “The Ram” both on the ticket as well, along with Penn, I would be hard-pressed to even consider Pitt’s work in Benjamin Button as in the same league. While Pitt might deserve some attention for enduring the prosthetic hell and discerning some form of body language to facilitate his seniority, there is simply very little acting going on. He is impassive, dry, ordinary, and dull. He does little to create interest in Button’s condition or his life, leaving us with nothing in the most important moments of his character’s life.

Beyond its blandness, The Curious Case for Benjamin Button simply operates in a world without consequences. There is really nothing here, only an odd sense of despair towards the conclusion of the picture that is rapidly and sadly overshadowed by the onrushing waters of Hurricane Katrina. Fincher’s movie is boring, insignificant, and uninteresting. He wastes the source material on an updated and irregular interpretation of Forrest Gump, offering nothing novel or inimitable. The Curious Case for Benjamin Button is, instead, a featureless crate for insipid devices and one-dimensional filmmaking.

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