Say Anything Blog

I walked away from the predictable end of Benjamin Button with three nagging sensations: A sore butt from three hours’ sitting, a staunch conviction (read: cognitive dissonance) that those three hours were worth it, and the guilty satisfaction that you get from spending too much time in Self Help at the local Barnes and Noble. By the day’s end, only the sore butt endured.

I toyed with writing this review in reverse, but ultimately decided that two gimmicks do not add up to profundity. So here’s the score straight up:

A child is born. He goes through the typical brattiness of early adolescence and the aimless wanderings and rebellion of late adolescence. Then he gets married and has a kid. Goes through a mid-life crisis; abandons his family; pursues an unsatisfying affair with a younger woman. The world turns with him and he finds himself sucked into war. He comes back older, wiser; has a satisfying affair with an appropriately aged woman. Eventually, wise and grizzled, he retires into obscurity.

This man has led an unremarkable life. Play it in reverse, and you have The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. Somewhat gimmicky, and equally unremarkable, Benjamin Button falls into that category of movies that take all the right turns to keep the plot moving, employ all the usual tropes to wring the obligatory tear, and bust in with the sexy camera candy to keep us from craving something deeper. Let’s call them the Million Dollar Baby Movie.

Such a movie manages to quench the theater goer’s thirst for popcorn-chewing fairytainment without bothering to surprise him with any new style of telling the same old story, or impart anything poignant to take home. This is a genre movie. David Fincher, director of such innovative films as Fight Club and Se7en, seems a waste on something so straight forward as a typical, if reverse order, Kleenex promo.

Kate Blanchet’s performance as Benjamin’s enduring love interest nails the evolving mannerisms of a woman at the pivotal stages of her life. She evokes the immature twenty-year-old, struggling for an idea of self, just as well as she plays the middle-aged woman with her accomplishments behind her, facing the impending fade of youth. Brad Pitt, on the other hand, does nothing more than help suppress the ickiness factor in the film’s early scenes by lending his Pitt-ness to aged decrepitude. Like the film, Pitt accomplishes no more and no less than he is supposed to. Both performances are heavily overshadowed by the cool CGI aging effects – Pitt’s lines are nowhere near as interesting as watching his youth emerge like a butterfly from its cocoon.

Benjamin Button does push an interesting idea: It does not matter how (or in which direction) we live our lives because our fondest memories consist of discrete moments. The hummingbird, which occasionally revisits the plot, signifies how each split-second wing beat is, momentarily, the most important beat of that bird’s life.

Of course this bit of cozy comfort slams into a wall we like to call “consequences.” Alas, outside of fairytales, people’s actions tend to produce reactions; they often affect the lives of other people. But this is not a movie about hard feelings. In Benjamin Button, hesitation and regret last about three seconds apiece. Benjamin forgives his own abandonment as cheaply has he later abandons his beloved: each instance serves as conventional plot advancement rather than seized as a potential for depth. Benjamin Button would have made a more stirring drama had the characters struggled with the price of their decisions rather than smiled through life like oblivious Forrest Gumps.

And that’s where we come full circle, because Benjamin Button’s screen adaptation was penned by none other than Forrest Gump writer, Eric Roth. But while Gump inspired suspension of disbelief by poking fun at itself, Benjamin Button’s magical realism stalls in the mire of its own effort at gravity.

The result? A good but unremarkable film.

3/4 stars

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