At the end of The Curious Case of Benjamin Button the group I saw the film with sat and watched the credits, mostly in silence. Occasionally, somebody would murmur something about “life and death” or “all the different kinds of love”. As we walked out of the theatre and into a nearby restaurant, the tone was sedate, even somber. The movie had profoundly worked on all of us, and we were caught inside of its mysteries, the mysteries that all humans share, such as that we were all born, and that we will all die.
The movie runs two hours and forty seven minuets, has many special effects, features two huge stars, and cost millions upon millions of dollars, but somehow David Fincher has crafted one of the most profound films funded by a major studio in years. In many ways, Benjamin Button can be compared to the works of Bergman and Tarkovsky in its grappling with some basic, metaphysical questions, but the movie also has a profoundly touching quality to it that has never been found on this level in works of either of those filmmakers, or, in fact, in Fincher’s previous works. It’s sort of like Bergman’s intelligence and ideas without his detachment. Imagine The Seventh Seal as a tragic love story.
And the love story in this film is tragic, but not in the typical Doctor Zhivago type way. What threatens the lovers in this film is not war or plot contrivance, but what threatens almost all lovers- that one will die before the other. There is not much that can be done about that problem, but I had never thought about the implications of it until I saw this movie.
You probably know the gimmick- Benjamin Button (Brad Pitt) is born old and grows young. He falls in love with Daisy (Cate Blanchett) who is born normally, and will grow old. The movie is based on a frankly mediocre short story by one of the greatest writers of the last century, F. Scott Fitzgerald, who used the premise mostly as the setup for a comedy of manners. Fincher and screenwriters Eric Roth and Robin Swicord take the premise seriously and make us wonder what life would really be like to someone in Benjamin’s situation. What it be like to be a child and have everyone think you are an adult, or a look like a young man but really be in your 60’s? Born on Armistice Day, 1918, Benjamin experiences over seventy years of American history, with some amazing production design from Donald Graham Burt, which is in turn brilliantly shot by Fincher and cinematographer Claudio Miranda. Each time period “feels right”, as if we are really back there, watching the events happening.
The end of this picture reminded me of another great movie about life and death-Robert Bresson’s Au Hazard Balthezar, which follows a donkey from birth to death, and experiences mostly suffering in between. Benjamin and Daisy are a bit more lucky, but both must face the inevitable progress of time, although it means something different to each of them. I also began to wonder if childhood and extreme old age are really not that dissimilar, as both feature mental problems and a heavy reliance on others. Maybe we return to childhood just before we die, and fade into nothing, or perhaps, as the last seconds of this film suggest, there is something else out there might make a clock tick backwards for all of us.