Benjamin Button

I spent all of yesterday with Rachel, I won't go too in depth about everything we did, but it was a good time. We watched an old favorite of hers, When Harry Met Sally. I thought it was a very good film, very classic and timeless. Anyway, today we saw in theaters The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. On the list of things I think I could do really well if I were only slightly different, besides a defense attorney, an architect, etc., is a movie reviewer. So indulge me for a moment.

Walking in I didn't know what to expect. I saw absolutely no press about it beforehand, no trailers, no commercials, I only knew the basic premise (a man born old and aging backwards, growing younger while everyone else grows older) and thought it might be something I'd enjoy. It was of course a very excellent film. The performances were strong, the cinematography was breath-taking, however I have one basic complaint which keeps it from being a favorite of mine, probably of anybody's.

In this film, the vast range of human emotions, motivations, and experiences possible with a story like this are all buried underneath the technicalities of it all. The entire length of the first act of the film we're being asked to emotionally connect with a CGI puppet. Don't get me wrong, there are certain scenes where he might as well be a real person, the technology is so picture-perfect. Unfortunately, it wasn't nearly so consistent as it would have to have been. Regardless, instead of pondering the plight of this child whose been so prematurely deprived of his youth, I was comparing him to Gollum (his croaky frog voice didn't help this at all). Computer graphics will never substitute for a real actor, despite what modern Hollywood might like us to think. At least, not in this context. In a fantasy world like Harry Potter, I can believe that blue house-elf with the giant eyes is really warning Harry about the fate of the magical world. In a completely CGI film like Wall-E, I can believe that adorable tiny robot is saving the planet. In the super-realistic, nostalgic world of the late nineteenth century, a computer avatar sticks out like a freaking whopper of a sore thumb.

I breathed a heavy sigh of relief when many scenes later I squinted at our hero and was satisfied that he is now finally being portrayed by a real person. That's when I discovered, to my dismay, that this person was Brad Pitt. Great. Now instead of comparing Benjamin Button to Gollam, I was comparing him to every other role I've seen Brad Pitt play (a danger with any film that uses actors we're all too familiar with). And throughout the rest of the film, I simply couldn't stop myself from obsessively doing the math in regards to his age (okay, he started at eighty, he's now twenty-five, so he should look sixty-five...), again and again as he gradually grew younger/older. I found out later Rachel had the exact same problem. The make-up is very good, and Pitt's acting for the different ages is spot-on, but given the basic premise of the film this fact-checking proved extremely distracting.

You see the flaw? You could have a really heart-felt, engaging story, but all the technicalities both in premise and in execution hide it all beneath the surface. That's what keeps this from being a truly great film. The director and actors all obviously tried so very hard to make ends meet, to make this story make sense, so that the humanity of the story, what makes it so special, ended up getting pulled through the wringer in the process.

It is a runway show of extremely gifted film making, it is not a heart-felt story.

I enjoyed the beauty of the film, I enjoyed the expertise employed, but ultimately it is very forgettable, which is sad, since it could have been so good.

Now, I say all that, but of course there were some human elements to the movie, it had some very good moments, and I did enjoy it quite a bit. This is just an overall impression.

A lot of reviews mention the source from whence it came, F. Scott Fitzgerald's original short story, but only briefly, at least from what I read. What's funny is, I think that's the answer right there. If they hadn't diverged so drastically from their source, instead of another Forrest Gump (the similarities are indeed endless) we could have had something much more important. Fitzgerald's story has many different aspects to it, it starts out a cartoonish farce, but develops into an extremely sad portrayal of an oddly relatable character. Fitzgerald's Benjamin Button, despite his very unusual circumstances, has all the same human flaws and characteristics related to aging that we see in ourselves. I believe Fitzgerald was trying to get us to look at our lives in another way, to see how we give things up and treat the ones we love so foolishly, and only want what we want and are never content where we are.

The movie lost track of this interpretation entirely somewhere along the way. What you see on screen is simply the story of a man with an unfortunate, incurable disease that isolates him from the rest of the world merely because of the way he looks. If he was born say, a leper, or a dwarf, his life would largely have been the same. When he looks old he is otherwise a normal toddler, with a normal toddler's experiences and mind. When he looks young he has the wisdom and experience of an old man. When you really think about it, how much should it actually matter how he looks? If he and everybody else in the movie weren't so wrapped up in his appearance, he could have had a completely normal, mundane life. The concept of the film is still a good one, it is still a very good story to be told (as this theme of the separation between mind and body is an interesting one), but it's not at all the same story as the one F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote.

In the original short story, Benjamin Button was born an old man, literally an old man, a cigar-smoking, encyclopedia-reading old man. As he grows older, or should I say younger, he gets married to a woman who is much younger than he is, and for all intents and purposes she is married to an older man. Then he is younger still, and she grows older, and he finds he wants to go to parties and dance with other young women, even though he's forty. His wife acts her age, on the other hand, and he loses interest in her. He continues growing younger, and decides to go off to college, something he couldn't do earlier when he was older. He starts off a freshman and champion of the university's football team, but as he continues to grow younger by his senior year he is much too small to play, and on top of that his studies seem to be too advanced for him, as his mind is also growing younger. After graduating he moves in with his son, who wants nothing to do with him, and wants his own father to call him "uncle", to save face in front of visitors. Benjamin vainly tries re-joining the military, but of course can't for now he is a small child, and eventually becomes only concerned with the walls of his crib, and his walks in the park, until he can't remember anything at all, and it all fades into darkness.

When we're young we're continually longing to be older, when we're old we're continually longing to be younger. When Benjamin Button is older he in fact quite happy, but as he grows younger, he becomes more and more unhappy as he longs for his age again. He is in effect getting what every elderly person would give everything for, the chance to be young and beautiful, but it ends up costing him everything.

It's a much colder, biting story. Very critical and almost a little hopeless. But it would have made for a much better film, though Hollywood does love it's drippy love stories such as the one it's turned this into. Though it may make less logical sense, like how on earth Benjamin's mother delivered a 5'8" man complete with beard, it makes for a more unique and meaningful story, most importantly one devoid of CGI puppets and make-up more advanced than the stuff adorning Orson Wells in Citizen Kane.

Anyway, looking forward to another week off. Lots to do though, busy busy busy. I'll be sure to keep in touch.

-Dr. M