Film Review: The Curious Case of Benjamin Button

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button is a film that is the third cousin twice removed from the short story by F. Scott Fitzgerald. This is to say the film rifled the basic premise of Fitzgerald’s story—that a man ages backwards—but has nothing further akin with the literary version.

What the film has going for it is the cinematography and the acting. The film is absolutely gorgeous to look at. The lighting is perfect, the colors deep and meaningful and the images beautiful. Also Brad Pitt’s performance is astounding; it’s understated and perfect for the part. He does so much with a single facial expression, more than most actors could do with the proverbial 1,000 words. What amazed me was that he could express in purely cinematic ways a child’s curiosity in the body of an eighty-year man. That’s no small feat. He is truly one of the greatest actors of our time. Also Cate Blanchett’s performance is phenomenal. She develops her character with great depth and sympathy.

Throughout the film I found myself lost in the cinematography and the acting, and I really enjoyed it.

However, when the film was over I had two immediate negative reactions mingled in my general feelings of warmth and pleasure. One was that there was too much voiceover narration, which is common of many films based on literature, however this film didn’t lift much of Fitzgerald’s prose because it didn’t match the differences in the tone or the plot of the film.

The other immediate problem I had was the lack of connection between the film’s framing narrative (the person reading the story about Benjamin Button) and the “actual” story (the story of Benjamin Button). There was an obvious connection between them, but thematically the connection wasn’t intuitive, and furthermore the framing narrative seemed more of a contrivance rather than something that helped develop the other story.

Upon further consideration of my second problem, the film fell apart for me.

I started asking numerous questions (which I’ll refrain from posting here in respect to anyone who wants to see the film) which I was afraid a second viewing of the film couldn’t answer. The basic problem of the film was, I decided, that as a fantasy it’s okay that it’s implausible (anyone wanting to see any film enters into a willing suspension of disbelief) but to be successful in the fantasy genre the film has to establish the rules of the fantasy land and abide by them. This film unfortunately never established the rules, and in the end had no clue what they were. After the emotion subsided I realized I too had no clue what they were, and this was a big problem. It’s certainly okay for a film to lack a certain correspondence to reality (people don’t age backward), that’s not the sort of plausibility I’m talking about, but rather it is important that a film express a logical internal coherence, and there were too many flaws in this film’s internal logic.

The film wanted one foot in fairy tale and one foot in reality. I thought the foot in fairy tale landed solidly, and the cinematography emphasized the fairy tale aspect of the film consistently and marvelously throughout. But the foot that tried to ground the film in reality stumbled miserably, and I thought ultimately lead to the failure of the film.

The film is directed by David Fincher (Se7en, Fight Club and Zodiac), so I expected the film to be a bit darker. However, it was penned by the writer of Forrest Gump, and I felt it was a little too schizophrenic in that it looked like a dark film visually, but was plotted like a “feel good” film.

My advice is to see the film in the theatre if 1) the premise interests you 2) if you don’t care to analyze film too much 3) if you love cinematography, good acting by Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett, or getting lost in a story. But if you’re looking for one of the best films of the year or something whose plot holds together well, don’t look here. Also it’s probably not worth seeing on DVD unless you have an HD TV and Blue Ray player, because the strength of the film is the visuals and is best suited for the big screen. I’ve heard buzz that this film may get a nomination for best film of 2008. I sure hope this isn’t one of the 5 best films of the year because it wouldn’t have even been in the top 25 of last year.