The Curious Case of Benjamin Button

Before heading out to see David Fincher's The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, I pulled my copy of The Complete Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald off the bookshelf to read the source material. It is about twenty-five pages, and I wondered how it could possibly be turned into a film over two and a half hours long. What I learned was how a simple idea can be turned into something approaching a monstrosity.

The film most comparable to Benjamin Button is Forrest Gump, and I'm sure that's because both were written by Eric Roth, who is one of those guys who collects awards but I find to be a hack. He took Fitzgerald's little story, which was a trifle really, and injected it with Hallmark-card steroids, pumping it into a lumbering romance that tries so hard to be profound that at times it's downright pathetic. He even replaces the white feather of Gump with a hummingbird here.

The title character, he tells us in his diary, was born "under unusual circumstances." The story is set in New Orleans, which appears to be ground zero for magic realism in American films. At birth, he exhibits all the frailties of a very old man, and as he grows older chronologically, the ravages of age reverse. In Fitzgerald's story, Benjamin is born fully-grown, with the ability of speech, an obstetric impossibility but a more amusing idea. The film has Benjamin as a baby with a normal infant intelligence but the body of a little old man. Another departure from the story has Benjamin's father, horrified, immediately abandon him on the steps of an old-age home, where he is taken in by one of the workers, a black woman played by Taraji P. Henson (I kept hearing Steve Martin's opening line from The Jerk--"I was porn a poor black child.")

Benjamin grows up sharing ailments with the old folks he lives with, ever so gaining vigor. When he is about ten he meets Daisy, who will be the love of his life and grow up to played by Cate Blanchett. It is on her deathbed that her daughter, in a bedside vigil, reads Benjamin's diary (to ladle on the melodrama, it's during the impending landfall of Hurricane Katrina). She ages while Benjamin gets younger. He goes off to have adventures on the sea, while she becomes a dancer. Eventually they meet in age and share a blissful period, but he realizes that eventually he will grow "young" and become a baby, and we get a bittersweet ending.

This is the kind of big-event film that impresses people who haven't seen many movies. Frankly I'm shocked that it's won some critic awards. The screenplay chugs along, providing Benjamin with picaresque adventures and colorful people come and go (such as a sea captain played by Jared Harris, an African bushmen, and a British woman with whom he has an affair, well-played by Tilda Swinton). None of them are very sharply drawn, and seem like window-dressing. While Benjamin is on the crew of a tugboat we are briefly introduced to the other crew, but to what purpose I'm not sure, since they don't really figure in the story and aren't around long enough to matter (was it really important that the gunner was a Cherokee Indian?)

Also, the film has literary pretensions that fall flat, such as clunky framing device involving a blind man that builds a clock that runs backwards. There's also a sequence demonstrating how the "butterfly effect" can dictate the events of our lives--but that's hardly new. And early in the film a character recites Shakespeare, but instead of a piece of King Henry VI, Part III (!) why not the Ages of Man speech from As You Like It, which sums up the theme of the film quite nicely?

The acting is all serviceable without being transcendent. So many actors play Benjamin it's hard to know when Brad Pitt starts. I believe his face is CGIed onto the bodies of small boys early on. He's fine, and since Benjamin glides through life passively, he isn't called on to do much other than look beatific. Harris provides life while he is on screen, though I had trouble understanding what he was saying.

The best part of this film was the lush photography by Claudio Miranda that makes excellent use of the different locations, whether it be sunrise on Lake Ponchartrain, a snowy street in Russia, or a Broadway stage. I just wished he had something more substantial to film.