THE CURIOUS CASE OF BENJAMIN BUTTON – david fincher – 9.7 / 10

More than simply an investigation of what would happen if youth weren't wasted on the young (though it's certainly that as well), David Fincher's technical marvel of a film attempts to deconstruct what we fear about old age and death and what we celebrate about youth and life. We celebrate the promise of youth while simultaneously lamenting that it can't be properly appreciated until it’s been squandered. And we fear death because we have no idea what it holds in store for us until it’s too late to do anything about it.

It would seem that a person aging backwards would have been given the perfect gift: being at his wisest just when his body is in its prime. But to Fincher's way of thinking the wisdom of old age is only achieved through the long journey our minds and bodies take together. Without the perspective forced upon us by our weakening and ever-changing physiology we might never gain any wisdom at all.

But perhaps what's most impressive about the film is that outside of all that Big Question stuff The Curious Case of Benjamin Button is one hell of an entertaining movie. I could get lost in the craft of the thing for hours, poring over the details of each shot. It's so meticulously constructed, so perfectly filmed and edited, and yet it still maintains a sense of playfulness and life. Too often movies that are so rigorously created have an artificial museum-like quality. They're often interesting and thought provoking but hardly ever intoxicating and invigorating. That Fincher managed to maintain an exuberant sense of humanity throughout the film is a testament to what these amazing new CG film techniques can do when a truly gifted filmmaker is at the helm.

I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that twenty years from now, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button will be looked back on as a landmark film. It's really the first film to so completely incorporate such a large number of computer generated images without any characters having superpowers, casting spells or blowing up buildings. A couple decades from now we'll routinely see actors looking ten years younger on screen than they do in real life. Every film will have at least a few CG sets and backgrounds. And we'll look back at this film as the one where the artistic use of CGI as just another tool in the filmmaker's arsenal (like lighting or costuming) finally came of age.

Aside from being a technical and aesthetic marvel (and really, I can’t say enough about how gorgeous this movie is; I could watch the whole thing in slow motion just to fully absorb the beauty of these images), the film also has an awful lot on its mind. Predominantly concerned with what it means to live a rich full life, the film is steeped in death, which is only fitting since it is at the end of life when these questions most often arise. Indeed, the story of the film is only told because the person telling it, Daisy, is rapidly approaching death herself.

It’s established very early on that water represents transition, from life to death or from one stage of life to another. Before the story proper begins, Daisy (Cate Blanchett, never lovelier) tells her daughter Caroline a story about a clockmaker who built a backwards-moving clock in the vain hope that it would somehow bring his fallen son back to life. The story ends with the speculation that the clockmaker, having finished his life’s work, simply went to sea, presumably to die. From there, water is present at every major moment of Benjamin’s life. He loses his best friend, Captain Mike, when their tugboat is attacked by a German U-boat. Both of his love interests are swimmers (one of the English Channel and the other at the local YMCA). His father finally accepts death while watching the son rise over Lake Pontchartrain. He learns to sail when he’s rejected by Daisy in Paris. And when they finally get together, they spend a few blissful months sailing around the Caribbean. Again and again water as metaphor for transition is repeated until, finally, in the film’s heartbreaking last image, the floodwaters of Hurricane Katrina rush in to an old storage shed and drown the clockmaker’s creation.

Obviously this metaphor harkens back to ancient cultures whose mythologies told of a river that had to be crossed to pass from this life to the next. And we are, of course, all born in water, spending our first nine months of life inside a cocoon of it. But more than that, the idea of water as transition touches on the ephemeral nature of life. Constantly in motion, bodies of water cannot be long contained nor can they be kept in one place for very long before simply evaporating. Water is as slippery and ever changing a thing as life itself. It moves and flows, beautiful one moment and deadly the next. That’s about as rich and dense a metaphor for life as there is and it perfectly suits the character at the center of The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. Events swirl around him like raging floodwaters but he is as serene as the surface of a still lake.

There’s the tendency, I think, to dismiss the film precisely because Benjamin Button (Brad Pitt) is a bit of a cipher. Things happen to and around him but very rarely does he precipitate these actions. Surrounded though he is by men who are ‘mad as a mad dog’ and ‘scream and curse the fates,’ Benjamin is reserved and serene. And while this sort of character is a very nontraditional one upon which to hang a century spanning, globetrotting story, it works for the film precisely because Benjamin is not prone to wild displays of grief, anger or passion. For most people, life is not a succession of blow out fights, wild parties, life and death battles and torrid love affairs. Life is a collection of tiny moments: two lovers deciding to stay out in a rainstorm, a father and son saying a quiet goodbye, lying awake in your bed while the world around you sleeps or watching the sun rise over the water. These are the moments that make up life as most of us know it and it is this sort of life that is celebrated in The Curious Case of Benjamin Button.

Of David Fincher’s many strengths as a filmmaker, his felicity with montage is probably his greatest asset. Given his background in commercials and music videos, it’s perhaps not surprising that mostly wordless montages have been some of the best moments of his previous films (e.g. the library sequence in Se7en, the fight clubs growing more and more popular in Fight Club, the investigation progressing in Zodiac, etc.). So it makes sense that he would eventually make a film that is more or less a collection of montages. There are very few (if any) scenes in Benjamin Button that last more than two minutes. Every scene is pared down to its core, perfectly encapsulating a moment in this character’s life. Often these scenes contain just a line or two and maybe a look exchanged between two characters. They are small moments and yet they still manage to perfectly evoke that part of Benjamin’s life in a way a longer scene couldn’t. It’s as if each phase of the character’s life has been boiled down to its essence. And as these moments accumulate they create a sense of fullness and richness to the story that couldn’t be achieved any other way. There’s the sense, at the end of the film, that the audience really has participated in Benjamin’s life from start to finish with nothing of import left out.

This approach has the added benefit of making the nearly three-hour film feel a whole lot shorter. When no scene lasts more than a couple minutes and every moment is laden with meaning, the film takes on a sense of forward momentum that sits in sharp contrast to what is often an ostensibly slow pace. It’s an odd way of making a three-hour epic, but one that works remarkably well for the film.

One aspect of The Curious Case of Benjamin Button that, on the surface anyway, seems least necessary is the framing story of Daisy and Caroline in the hospital. Obviously this story adds a degree of pathos because the audience knows that Hurricane Katrina is about to swamp the city and destroy countless lives that are not much different from Daisy's and Benjamin’s. But more than that, the framing story is important because it leaves some doubt as to whether or not the story really happened. It’s veracity hinges on the word of an old woman out of her mind on pain meds and close to death (not to mention making random segues into stories about blind clockmakers and their sons). Thinking about it from Caroline’s perspective, it’s as if she’s being given a great story about her life that she can choose to believe or not, a personal myth. While it’s unlikely that Benjamin’s diary is really just an unpublished novel or the rantings of a crazy person, there’s just enough doubt there that the tale of his life is elevated into a modern fairytale. It’s a final gift from Daisy to her daughter who, right before the story proper begins, says that she regrets not having done much with her life. And beyond that, it also forces the audience to buy into the story they're seeing, to invest in it and believe in it in a way they wouldn’t if the film had lacked this framing device.

I could go on and on about this film for many more pages, talking, for instance, about the clever way Fincher and screenwriter Eric Roth substituted ‘Good night’ for ‘I love you’ (first between Benjamin and Elizabeth Abbott (Tilda Swinton) and then between Benjamin and Daisy) so that the phrase resonates more than one we’ve heard a thousand times in a thousand other films. Or I could talk at length about the symbol of the hummingbird used both to evoke the continuum of life and its fragility. And I’ve only touched upon the groundbreaking visual effects work that’s so amazingly well done that it’s all but impossible to tell when we’re seeing the real Brad Pitt and when we’re seeing his head composited onto someone else’s body. Suffice it to say that The Curious Case of Benjamin Button is as deep and rich as life itself, full of small moments of heartbreaking tenderness and big moments of life and death terror. It’s the story of one unextraordinary man’s extraordinary life, with all the joys and sorrows that implies. And like life, you can talk about it forever but you’d still never quite get at what it’s like to experience it.