Movie review: ‘The Curious Case of Benjamin Button’

By Zack McGhee | Thursday, December 25, 2008, 03:57 AM

I am a big fan of David Fincher, the director of The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. His early work in commercials and music videos transformed those industries. Since he started making movies, he has made — by my count, anyway — at least three solid masterpieces: Se7en, The Game and Fight Club. On top of that, I could easily crank out three-or-four-paragraphs worth of high praise for each of his other features (Zodiac, Panic Room, and even the much-maligned Alien³).

Now here is Benjamin Button, which is a very curious case indeed when you compare it to those films, which are all dark, edgy, and exceptional. Though sprawling (it’s nearly three hours), Benjamin Button is light, dull, and conventional. The crippling tension of Se7en had audiences digging into the fabric on the arms of their theater seats. Fight Club inspired socially alienated imitators to start up real underground gangs and actually beat the hell out of each other. Benjamin Button is so uninspiring, it barely moved my bowels. It showcases a level of mediocrity that only the Academy could love.

For no particular reason, Benjamin Button begins on the day Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans, and straightaway this is an indication of how offensively lazy it will be. We meet Daisy (Cate Blanchett, aged with makeup), an old woman on her deathbed. Her daughter, Caroline (Julia Ormond), is at her side. Daisy tells Caroline a story about a clockmaker who lost his son in war, and who made a famous clock that ticked backwards, hoping that one day it would undo his son’s death. Then Daisy asks Caroline to read a diary — the diary of a man named Benjamin Button (Brad Pitt), who was born an old man, and aged backwards his whole life.

His mother dead from childbirth, then abandoned by his father, Benjamin is adopted by Queenie (the always luminous Taraji P. Henson), who runs a nursing home. As he begins life, Benjamin has many afflictions, but eventually it becomes obvious that he is slowly aging backward. As he grows up, he meets the young Daisy, and as they grow older, they fall in love — drifting in and out of each others’ lives for many years. In the meantime, Benjamin goes to sea, joins the army, and has a few other adventures; Daisy trains to be a ballerina.

It is not unpleasant to watch, but what’s troubling about Benjamin Button is how polished it is. It is exactly the movie you expect it to be. In fact, if you were to set out to make a movie given this exact premise, it is exactly the movie you would think to make. It’s predictable without being memorable — a fantasy that aspires to realism, and the result is cold and distant, without feeling or whimsy. Benjamin has his trials, but it feels like the movie is just hitting all the expected notes. It has nothing significant to say about time, age, or the way we live our lives, though it certainly seems to think it does.

Benjamin Button has already drawn countless comparisons to Forrest Gump, because they share a screenwriter, and use special effects in a similar way, to tell a similar story. The comparison is earned, though it borders on an insult to Gump. Though certainly not the Best Picture of 1994, Robert Zemeckis’ movie is funny, heartfelt, and features some excellent performances. It revisits key historical moments with charm and a hint of wit, and although it inspired nostalgia and sentimentality in many audiences, its main character was not susceptible to either. Wistfully bland, Benjamin Button is a non-event.

As big a fan as I am of Fincher, it’s not really fair, of course, to criticize The Curious Case of Benjamin Button for being different from his previous work. Often it’s the best filmmakers who branch out to different genres, and Fincher is certainly one of our best filmmakers; I’d rank him alongside genre-hopping greats like Kubrick, Hawks, and Spielberg. So let me assure you that, while I draw these contrasts, it is only the relative greatness of those other movies that makes this disappointment so crushing. Had Benjamin Button been made by a lesser filmmaker, I would have written it off as merely second-rate Oscar bait. Instead, it will forever stand as the first tragic misstep in an otherwise flawless filmmaking career.

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