Review: The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (2/5)

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
(David Fincher)
Brad Pitt, Cate Blanchett, Tilda Swinton, Elias Koteas, Julia Ormond, Taraji P Henson
Running time: 169 minutes (12A)

What a curious case this Benjamin Button is. The new film from David Fincher tells the story of a boy who is born an old man. He cheats expectations of an early demise to lead a charmed life. He hobbles on bad legs, falls over, but learns to walk properly.
As he ages backwards, he befriends a young girl, grows up, and begins his great life adventures, while all the while he writes letters to the girl he never forgets. He comes home, they meet as adults, part, reunite and fall in love. Life throws him curve balls but he cultivates a can-do attitude where... eeeeerrh... hold on. Haven’t we seen this before? Let’s see: Benjamin Button is written by one Eric Roth and he wrote... Forrest Gump! Box of chocolates anyone? At the cinema, you just never know what you’re gonna get.
Fincher takes F Scott Fitzgerald’s minor story and turns it into a minor film. Despite its epic 169 minutes and its swollen 13 Oscar nominations, Benjamin Button is trapped wind: time will give a polite burp and Button will be forgotten. I’ve no doubt the picture’s surface is a technical achievement but underneath, there’s little but shallow schmaltz: a trite riff on the swiftness of time and some Gumpian wisdom about time management. Life’s short, it says. Gee whizz.
Benjamin is born in New Orleans, 1918. He’s blinded with cataracts, arthritic and shrivelled like dried fruit. His mother dies; his disgusted father dumps the swaddled old man-child at the steps of an old folks’ home where big-hearted black woman Queenie (Taraji P Henson) takes him in. (I tried with a po-face not to think of The Jerk).
These early scenes are full of wonder, for the growing Benjamin is a digital dream: we watch a four-foot tall boy bent with the wretchedness of an 85-year-old’s body and rheumy eyes that belong to Brad Pitt. He transmits something that can’t be faked – a mixture of senility and childish naivety that says lots about the puerility of old age. Those scenes have such charm, you almost forget how the film blunders Fitzgerald’s conceit: where Benjamin was born a full-bodied, cognizant old man, here he is born a child with old-age physical afflictions. As he ages, he does so mentally, but only his body gets younger. Unnaturally, the man-child grows back into a child.
It’s a rare opportunity for Pitt to shed the vanity. And you sense how hard he’s working. But as he gets younger, and his body straightens, he starts to look like himself and that blandness takes over. In his 60s, he’s a sprouting-haired Stephen Pinker who sweeps Elizabeth (Tilda Swinton), a bored diplomat’s wife into an affair. In his 50s, he has that silver-fox newsreader look. Though his now grown-up childhood sweetheart Daisy (Cate Blanchett) isn’t attracted to him until he looks like the Pitt we all know. “My god, look at you. You’re perfect,” she purrs. “Sleep with me.” It is, perhaps, the only true emotion in the film, the approximation of star lustre that will draw droves to this trite film.
In the battle between the greatest actress of her generation and the greatest cheekbones of his, Blanchett is untouched. Benjamin and Daisy enjoy blissful middle years, but age is yanking them apart. Eric Roth wants to give reverse aging its own tragedy (as if anybody thought it was a swell idea in the first place). And Benjamin gives up Daisy and their child because he knows he could not be a dad.
Blanchett’s retired dancer moves on screen with lissom grace, but you can’t stop watching her face as it deepens into age, burdened with memory and pain. Benjamin, who might be growing physically younger, should still be advancing mentally. But Pitt plays him as if he is not been touched by life. The trauma of being born old has left him with no obvious pathologies. Life doesn’t dent him with cynicism or melancholy. When his mother dies, he doesn’t grieve. When he gives up his daughter, he goes off backpacking. He’s either a zen master or an idiot. (So much of the charm of Forrest Gump, or that other man-child film Big, lay in Tom Hanks’ ability to reconnect us with a lost innocence. But Pitt’s blank face reminds us only of what we’re not feeling).
When Benjamin’s heart is first broken by Elizabeth, Benjamin doesn’t even have time to hurt. Fincher throws him straight into maritime WWII where bullets zip the nighttime screen like lightning fireflies. Momentarily, you feel a surge in the film pulse, and the beat is in those bullets. Fincher, it seems, doesn’t have time to tease out emotion. He bathes his films in gorgeous light, here the same ochre-and-olive-dipped gloom as his previous film Zodiac. There, the heroes spent the film trying to wrench serial killer obsessions out of the shadows. But here, you wonder what all the moody gloom is for: Benjamin’s world is a place of conventional emotions.
There is a telling sequence where an old man at the old folks home tells Benjamin he was struck in life by lightning seven times. We watch him being smoke-zapped in a comic flashback in the style of hand-cranked early cinema. It’s cute but wedged in. And we see the joke another six times. Fincher flashes his technical savvy like peacock feathers. He struts his way through the film dazzling us with a shallow beauty. But he has never learned how to pull a real emotional lever. His is effect over feeling, false sentiment instead of truth. Bite into Fincher’s chocolates and the centre lies hollow.