To borrow a line from Lou Lumenick: The Curious Case of Benjamin Button is this year’s Forrest Gump. This is not really arguable. In addition to sharing a screenwriter (Eric Roth), Robert Zemeckis’ 1994 Best Picture winner and David Fincher’s 2008 Best Picture front-runner (at least, as of this writing) both put groundbreaking special effects to the service of sprawling stories, spanning many decades and weaving a breadcrumb trail through modern American history, in which a man holds a torch for a woman who can’t reciprocate his love until her dreams of autonomy are spectacularly dashed. For me, the Gump comparison is a pejorative, a shorthand way to say, “This film will likely make a lot of money and win a lot of awards, and yet is so phony and cloying and gimmicky that its success will some day be seen by some as a tragedy.” But to others, the second coming of Gump would be a blessing. An Oscars-bait blockbuster? As Lumenick put it, apparently before seeing the film, “Paramount would be thrilled, and possibly the Academy would be as well.”
Watching Benjamin Button, occasionally I actively loathed it, but mostly I just felt genuinely disappointed that it seemed so lacking in genuine feeling. I’m a realist — I understand that the masses will probably go the other way on this one, and I won’t begrudge them that. But as a critic, it is my job to clearly state, for the record, what ignited that loathing and disappointment. This is something I did not do the last time I wrote about the film, and now that the film has screened for a larger portion of the press, I’d like to rectify that mistake. I’ve tried below to lay this out in as plain language as I can muster, so as to hopefully avoid any misunderstandings. After this writing, I promise –– I’m going to try very hard not to waste my energy trashing the inevitable prom king. There are so many movies that are so much more worthy of my attention, and frankly, I’m tired of fighting for my right to disagree.
So: Spoilers ahead!
First things first: this is a film in which the following things happen:
- Two new lovers recline a sailboat somewhere in the Florida keys, where they are coincidentally treated to the sight of a NASA spacecraft taking off.
- An old woman lays dying in a New Orleans hospital, the very day that, coincidentally, Hurricane Katrina rages outside.
- A man and the son he gave up at birth coincidentally exit the same whorehouse at the same time, paving the way for the father to establish a relationship with his abandoned boy for the first time.
- There is a ten minute-ish Introduction to Chaos Theory sequence, presumably so that we, as viewers, are equipped to rationalize the film’s dependence on incidental coincidence.
But before any of that, there’s a prologue. Shot in the palette of the Zapruder film with scratches and fuzzy grain to match, this tells us that at some point during World War I, a French-born, New Orleans-based clockmaker was commissioned to make a piece for the train station, and he deliberately made a clock that ticked backwards, “so that the boys we lost in the war might come home again.” An initially befuddled crowd is thus turned awestruck and appreciative, to which the clockmaker barks in a heavily accented monotone: “I hope you enjoy my clock.”
Cut to 1918, the last day of that war, and the birth of a baby “with all the infirmities not of a newborn but of a man well into his 80s, on the way to the grave”. When the mother dies in childbirth, the freaked-out father snatches the baby out of its cradle and runs it over to the back porch of an old age home, where it’s tripped over by the proprietor, Queenie. Because Queenie is a magical negro, she ignores her boyfriend’s non-interventionist admonitions and takes the baby in, raising it as her own kin.
“You never know what’s coming for you,” Queenie intones portentously when this opportunity arises. It’s a line that’ll be repeated throughout the film a number of times, and in the context of the film’s big fake Southern accents and big fake period detail, it plays like a whimsical, pie-eyed rewrite of the thesis statement of last year’s Best Picture winner; “You can’t stop what’s coming.”
What’s coming, of course, is that this aged baby will, thanks to the magic of a performance capture process developed for this purpose, slowly grow into a flawless specimen of man in the form of Brad Pitt. With few exceptions, the technology that puts Brad Pitt’s head on the body of other actors for the first quarter of the film (to describe the process with more finesse would be to give the philosophy behind it too much credit) achieves its intended result: it fools the eye, it almost looks real enough to drown out the inner knowledge that it is not real at all. But it’s hard not to question whether or not this lavish effects process is really necessary, if it’s anything more than a show-offy gimmick. In the last section of the film, when Benjamin ages backward from drinking age to infancy, he’s played by child actors who bear a resemblence to Pitt but aren’t asked to digitally wear his face. Fincher obviously thought pure casting was sufficient for his final act, so why wasn’t it good enough for his first?
Even if one were able to completely get over the gimmickry that makes that verisimilitude possible, there’s still something that feels off about this first section of the film, in the way the characters often seem to interact with Benjamin as if playing to the back row of a theater instead of to a person, smaller than them and right there in close quarters. This sense of a disconnect dissipates as the character ages and becomes more recognizably embodied by Pitt, but Fincher never goes long without finding an excuse to let an effect fill the frame and distract from what’s going on between people. In one of the first scenes where Benjamin is actually connecting to someone on an intimate level, he does so amidst a fog of almost comicly painterly CGI snow. A few scenes later, a hummingbird (which, it’s implied, carries the spirit of Button’s counterpart to Forrest Gump’s Ltnt. Dan) buzzes over a scene of World War 2 carnage, swooping across the screen like Tinkerbell. When this hummingbird popped up again, very near the end of the film, I half expected it to be wearing a tiny little Brad Pitt visage.
Though the use of certain of these effects may be unprecedented, there is precedent to the genre of the romantic effects epic, and while I’m not the biggest fan of Titanic, or Peter Jackson’s King Kong, those films succeed on a level where Button fails: their spectacular effects serve to support the romance at the core of the story, while Button’s effects only get in the way. The inner evolution of the characters seems incidental to Fincher. Increasingly as the film wears on, it seems as though the crux of each scene is the juxtaposition of a slightly younger Brad Pitt with a slightly older Cate Blanchett, and Fincher seems to move from one juxtaposition to next as quickly as possible as if he’s convinced that if he just hits every point on his predetermined timeline, the relationship itself will happen organically. It doesn’t.
And this isn’t full the fault of the effects. There’s no doubt that Fincher is in love with his imagery (this is the only explanation I can come up with for that chaos theory sequence, which plays as nothing but a flaunting of Fincher’s contractual right to final cut), but he doesn’t seem to trust it. Eric Roth’s script tells us over and over again, in very literal language and often via narration, that this is a film about loneliness and difference. Every feeling and every story detail is telegraphed in advance, underlined throughout and commented on after the fact.
Button is the opposite of Pitt’s last Oscar hopeful in that respect: The Assassination of Jesse James was a film in which every frame seemed to invite contemplation. Benjamin Button is a film in which every cut seems designed to block thought. Maybe the earlier film’s failure says it all about the philosophy behind Button’s construction: for audiences and Oscar voters, thinking is bad. Spoon-fed artifice is good.
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