BRAD NAILS BUTTON
Pitt stars in Fincher’s intriguing, if flawed, adaptation of a Fitzgerald tale
By Andy Klein
How crazy ... or bold ... or foolhardy ... do you have to be to make a big, expensive movie out of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s least adaptable short story?
Director David Fincher (Se7en, Zodiac) has boldly gone where others have feared to tread with the nearly three-hour The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, solving some of its built-in problems, finessing us past others, and failing to deal with more than a few.
Fitzgerald was a great prose stylist, which may be why he hasn’t been particularly well served by screen adaptations. No matter how memorable the story, the dialogue, and the characters, there’s no compensating for the absence of his actual words/sentences/paragraphs.
In that regard, his identically titled 1922 tale is a relatively good choice for a film ... because it’s one of his worst. Taking off from an uncharacteristically surreal idea, Fitzgerald chronicles the life of a man who, at birth, is, in all respects other than time on earth, a 70-year-old. Physically and mentally he grows younger and younger with time, meeting his father in age, and then his son, and finally his grandson. Eventually he regresses (progresses?) to infancy.
It doesn’t take much thought to see what insane problems this gimmicky hook presents on screen. It’s a classic case of a story that’s almost impossible to treat visually or at least photographically; it’s easier to picture it as an animated short. In prose, Fitzgerald could pull off scenes that don’t translate to anything in the real world. For starters, in the hospital nursery, Benjamin’s father is presented with an adult-sized, bearded, wizened son, who can speak perfect English, yet has no personal memories or experiences. We barely hear about Mrs. Button – the extraordinary woman who has apparently carried this giant to term without anyone noticing and has survived his delivery.
On the page, it’s one thing. Fitzgerald can get away with such illogic in a manner that Fincher can’t. Actually, Lars von Trier did get away with it in The Kingdom, where a woman manages to give birth to a fully grown Udo Kier, but the effect was (not surprisingly) one of sheer horror. Fitzgerald, on the other hand, takes a satirical, cartoonish tone. His characters don’t regard Benjamin’s existence as a medical anomaly or a spiritual miracle, but as a lamentable breach of taste; they are not so much amazed as affronted.
Fincher – working from a screenplay by Eric Roth (The Insider, Munich) – wisely changes the details. In the film, baby Benjamin (Brad Pitt, thanks to a lot of makeup and computer tricks, as well as a whole series of body doubles) has the appearance and the worn-out organs of a very old man – or the Eraserhead baby – but is still like an infant in size and language skills. In essence, he grows and learns like the rest of us; he just looks wrong.
Ironically, in this version, the mother doesn’t survive a presumably less traumatic delivery than her prose counterpart. The father (Jason Flemyng), a New Orleans businessman, is so appalled and embarrassed by this “monster” that he abandons it on the steps of an old folks home, where the foundling is raised by one of the employees, Queenie (Taraji P. Henson), a black woman who is already used to dealing with incontinent white people, albeit in a different age bracket.
As he grows taller and stronger in the normal way, Benjamin also gradually looks younger and younger. As a white-haired pre-adolescent, he falls madly in love with a little girl named Daisy (Elle Fanning, later to morph into Madisen Beaty and finally Cate Blanchett). Her parents are none too happy about this attentiveness from someone who appears to be a 70-year-old midget (whom Daisy intuitively recognizes as a child).
Benjamin eventually goes to sea, learns about passion from an ambassador’s wife (Tilda Swinton) in Murmansk, survives World War II, and returns home to court Daisy, now a modern dancer with an insufferable personality.
We learn about all this in a framing device: Daisy – Blanchett made up to look about 105, even though her character would be roughly 82 – is on her deathbed, as Hurricane Katrina threatens the hospital. She presents her daughter Caroline (Julia Ormond) with Benjamin’s so-called “diary” and asks her to read it aloud. (Everything about its perspective, tone, and tense suggest that it’s not a diary, but rather a memoir Benjamin put together late in life.)
Screenwriter Roth is best known for Forrest Gump, and it’s tempting to think of the new film as a second lump of Gump. (Maybe it should have been called Pmug Tserrof.) It has the same leisurely pace, the same narrative structure, the same use of voiceover, and the same broad canvas, bumping around from New Orleans to Russia to Paris to New York. I was half expecting Benjamin to tell us that “life’s like a box of pralines”; Roth doesn’t get that specific, but he still fills the script with what can only be called “shallow profundities.”
More troubling, however, is that, like Forrest, Benjamin is remarkably passive for a protagonist: For most of the film, he is someone to whom things happen. He has much of Gump’s beatific blankness. That may make sense, given the bizarre position he finds himself in, but it still leaves the audience no one to identify with. Late in the story, the POV switches to Daisy, who is, unfortunately, an irritating and pretty awful person.
Fitzgerald’s story wasn’t about much; Fincher and Roth focus on the nature of the passage of time, which is reasonable but not always well thought out. About two-thirds through, there’s a flashy sequence about the tyrannical clockwork timing of fate, which is presented as though it were relevant to the film’s themes. (It’s almost identical to a trick construction in Run Lola Run, where it was much better executed.)
Benjamin’s situation is so counterintuitive that the audience may reasonably have difficulty keeping the rules straight. But it’s hard to believe that Benjamin and Daisy would completely misunderstand them – as becomes clear in a scene where they discuss their ages converging – leading one to suspect that the filmmakers themselves couldn’t quite keep track. (I won’t bore you with the details, since I may be the only one who cares about the mathematical accuracy of a fantasy film.)
Pitt is the film’s calm center, and he brings more nuance than one might think possible to a character living an unimaginable life. Blanchett is perfect as always, despite the thanklessness of the role.
Rex Reed has called Benjamin Button “one of the greatest films ever made” – a sweeping judgment that he’s qualified to make by vice of having starred in one of the worst films ever made (Myra Breckenridge). I can’t come close to embracing his hyperbole, but, for all the negatives outlined above, I still think the film is worthwhile. Fincher is always interesting, and he gets points simply for attempting such a ferkakte story. Despite its length and expansive pace, it’s never dull. And, despite the dubiousness of its stabs at being “meaningful,” it still leaves you with more than most mega-productions.
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. Directed by David Fincher. Screenplay by Eric Roth; screen story by Eric Roth and Robin Swicord; based on the short story by F. Scott Fitzgerald. With Brad Pitt, Cate Blanchett, Taraji P. Henson, Julia Ormond, Jason Flemyng, Tilda Swinton, and Jared Harris. Opens Thursday citywide.
Published: 12/23/2008
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