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January 07, 2009

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button

Finding Beauty in the Absurd

By Jeff_Osborn

It’s the curious case of Hollywood eating itself. Film making, it seems, is as cyclical as everything else. Stripped down, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button is a story of an ugly baby who becomes Brad Pitt. But, after appreciating all of its glorious layers, it becomes clear Button is the product of slumping Hollywood profits coming at a time when audiences are no longer paying for the same garbage they used to.

Directed by David Fincher, Button is absurd and at times cliché. Yet everything about the film is also wonderful. Fincher’s epic love story with a twist is a testament to the marvel that moving pictures can be.

It all starts with a distraught clockmaker who constructs half of his master piece New Orleans’ railway station clock before his son left to serve in World War One, and the other half when he returned in a casket. Teddy Roosevelt was one of a large, astonished crowd at the clock’s unveiling who witnessed backwards running time-piece constructed to undo the casualties of the war.

Presumably, instead of reviving the clockmaker’s son, the reverse-running clock caused a baby, later named Benjamin, to be born with the health ailments of an 80 or 90-year old and age backward from birth.

Benjamin’s tale is wrought with cinematic clichés; his life story is read from a diary by his unknowing daughter to her mother on her deathbed, his father abandons him at birth and later comes back racked with guilt, he learns important life lessons from a kooky cast of characters, and he loves a woman he can never be with.

All of the film’s clichés and absurdities, however, are washed away by Fincher’s playful story-telling and often masterful direction. The actors, the director, and the story all dance seamlessly and harmoniously from one sharp, thoughtful moment to the next.

Button is remarkable for its ability to make the unbelievable believable while making the familiar feel fresh at the same time.

The screenplay, written by Eric Roth and based on a short story by F. Scott Fitzgerald, does not always lend itself easily to translation onto the big screen. I noticed opportunity after opportunity for this latest big-budget, box-office hopeful to be mishandled into the land of squandered prospects. But quite the opposite happened instead.

In one sequence, Benjamin’s true love, Daisey, played with expectedly touching care by Cate Blanchett, dances toward a career ending accident while Benjamin, played expertly by Brad Pitt, narrates. This side story focuses on a recent and common film cliché: The sheer awesomeness of the number of the ways in which everyone is connected through seemingly insignificant details.

While the “look how interwoven we all are” idea has recently been hammered into audiences’ brains over and over by films looking for an easy way to appear smart (Traffic, Crash, Magnolia, and others), I didn’t care. The thought briefly flashed in my mind only to be swept aside by Fincher’s suspenseful, moving, and surprising execution.

I haven’t been this delighted, touched, and awed by a big-studio Hollywood film since Fight Club (which, of course, was not released with the same big-budget, romantic epic hype as that of Button). American film making hasn’t recently shown that it cares. The wonderful nuances and quiet complexities of Button have become a rarity.

From the opening animated studio credits to the oft-told story of a love that cannot last, Button defies Hollywood’s infinite wrap sheet of fumbling and mucking up of great ideas and epitomizes everything I love about film. It was emotional to watch, fun to listen to, and inspiring to experience. Despite being subjected to all of the forces that can, and usually do, ruin the even best film ideas, Button is a creative and original marvel.

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