Right on the ‘Button’: Brad Pitt’s film pushes cinema to new age
Wednesday, December 24, 2008 by Enjoy_Lonely
Is David Fincher’s groundbreaking, visually breathtaking “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” a “Forrest Gump” for our times? I hope not, given what a mixed blessing “Forrest Gump” was. The real question is: How do you make a 160-minute meditation on mortality out of a 24-page short story?
Based on a charming, Jazz Age-era fairy tale by F. Scott Fitzgerald (“The Great Gatsby”) that is adapted by screenwriter Eric Roth (“Forrest Gump”), “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” tells the story of a man who is born “old” in New Orleans at the end of World War I and “ages” backward, observing the world over the decades as it whirls in the opposite direction.
At various points in this often lyrical, beautifully shot tale, “Benjamin Button” recalls “The Picture of Dorian Gray,” “The Incredible Shrinking Man” and a “Twilight Zone” episode with a dash of Kurt Vonnegut’s sci-fi whimsy.
After his wealthy father (Jason Flemyng) abandons him, Benjamin (44-year-old Brad Pitt) is adopted by Queenie (Taraji P. Henson, evoking Hattie McDaniel and Butterfly McQueen), a loving earth mother who runs, aptly enough, an old-age home.
There Button mysteriously “youth-enizes,” gaining strength and vigor as those around him grow old and shrivel. As a “child,” Benjamin meets red-headed girl-dancer Daisy. The film is the story of their time-bedeviled love affair.
“Benjamin Button” is certainly a fable for our age-obsessed time. It begins with silent-movie visuals and is framed by scenes in which an aged Daisy (Cate Blanchett) lays dying in a New Orleans hospital bed, while her daughter (Julia Ormond) reads Benjamin’s diary aloud as Hurricane Katrina approaches.
The film is weightily metaphorical (a train station clock that runs backward figures in the story, as do several hummingbirds). But unlike “Forrest Gump,” which was brought to vivid life by Tom Hanks, “Button” lacks the breath of life.
Where Forrest Gump was garrulous and extroverted, spreading his “stupid-is-as-stupid-does” sunshine, Pitt’s Button is recessive and withdrawn, a shadow passing among shadows.
While getting Benjamin a job on a tugboat crew is a good idea because it introduces us to a skipper played by Jared Harris, it’s very reminiscent of a certain shrimp fishery.
Eventually, the film’s premise begins to take on water. The only time “Button” got to me was when we see a startlingly youthful Benjamin aboard a 1950s-vintage Triumph motorcycle, a born-again James Dean, a baby boomer revenant in the flesh and stunning symbol of our generation’s dwindling life expectancy.
The film’s real breakthrough is technological. Using digital and other screen wizardry, Fincher made it possible for Pitt to play a character from withered old age to adolescence. It’s nothing less than the discovery of the cinema’s Fountain of Youth. This “Button” changes everything.
(“The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” contains war violence and sexual situations.)
Rated PG-13. At AMC Loews Boston Common, Regal Fenway Stadium and suburban theaters.
