This Dork Reporter is slowly cool­ing on for­mer favorite David Fincher. His under­rated first fea­ture Alien3 is highly com­pro­mised, but eas­ily the next most the­mat­i­cally inter­est­ing entry in the Alien fran­chise (after, of course, Rid­ley Scott’s rich orig­i­nal). Se7en is one of the most gut-wrenchingly dis­turb­ing movies ever made, notable for hav­ing vir­tu­ally no vio­lence appear onscreen, despite its rep­u­ta­tion. Fight Club is per­haps the movie of the nineties, an eccen­tric blast of coun­ter­cul­tural fury. But almost every­thing that fol­lowed seemed a dis­ap­point­ment. The Game was wildly implau­si­ble with­out the pop and siz­zle that car­ried the sim­i­larly over-the-top Fight Club. Panic Room was an empty exer­cise in style, seem­ingly con­ceived solely for Fincher to exper­i­ment with new dig­i­tal tech­niques that would allow him to cre­ate impos­si­bly con­tin­u­ous cam­era moves through the walls and floors of a city brown­stone (and pos­si­bly also as another vehi­cle for star Jodie Foster’s per­sona as a sin­gle par­ent to be reck­oned with). Zodiac was highly praised both as a tight pro­ce­dural thriller and as a tour-de-force of still more bleeding-edge dig­i­tal spe­cial effects (so good that most view­ers wouldn’t sus­pect that many sequences were not tra­di­tion­ally shot in cam­era), but it did absolutely noth­ing for me. I’m won­der­ing if I missed some key aspect of it that would open it up to me — and that per­haps I should reap­praise it now that a director’s cut is avail­able on DVD.

You’re only as old as you feel

The advance mar­ket­ing for The Curi­ous Case of Ben­jamin But­ton excited me at first, but I was appre­hen­sive when I learned the screen­play (loosely based on a 1921 short story by F. Scott Fitzger­ald) was by Eric Roth, the writer of For­rest Gump. Indeed, it did turn out to be con­structed in a sim­i­lar vein and tone, even mim­ic­k­ing some of the corni­est devices of Gump: the famous dig­i­tal feather twirling in the wind has been replaced by an unlikely reap­pear­ing hum­ming­bird; Forrest’s mother’s apho­rism “life is like a box of choco­lates; you never know what you’re going to get” has its ana­log in the less mem­o­rable “you never know what’s com­ing for you”; even For­rest Gump’s parade of cameos by famous or infa­mous Amer­i­cans is here con­tin­ued with an appear­ance by Teddy Roo­sevelt. Against my will, this cutesi­ness did suc­ceed in draw­ing me in for most of its run­ning time. I was engrossed for much of it, but its leisurely three-hour run­ning time hon­estly strained my patience by about the two-hour mark.

Fincher and Roth relate the decades-long story via the fram­ing device of Benjamin’s (Brad Pitt) one true love Daisy (Cate Blanchett) on her deathbed, intro­duc­ing her adult daugh­ter Car­o­line (Julia Ormond) to her bio­log­i­cal father through a dra­matic read­ing of his diary, with gaps filled in from her own mem­ory. A soon-to-be infa­mous hur­ri­cane brews out­side the Louisiana hos­pi­tal room, shortly to erase much of Ben­jamin and Daisy’s milieu. The mul­ti­ple lay­ers of sto­ry­telling result is no less than three speak­ing voices to nar­rate the tale in voiceover. One fram­ing device too far?

Cate Blanchett is a beau­ti­ful woman, but it’s eerie to see her appear to be in her 20s

The cen­tral con­ceit of the story is a fan­tas­ti­cally unfor­tu­nate dis­ease that afflicts one Ben­jamin But­ton. His body is born aged and decrepit, and ages back­wards while his mind matures nor­mally. As he aptly puts it when still a boy, he was “born old.” Tak­ing this story as any­thing other than a para­ble or fairy tale would be to miss the point, but the pho­to­re­al­is­tic spe­cial effects place the movie firmly in believ­able real­ity. So this viewer’s mind (when not dis­tracted by the high-tech visu­als) wan­dered into logis­tics. Some of the rules don’t seem to hold up: as a chrono­log­i­cal ado­les­cent, he man­i­fests the typ­i­cal sex­ual desires and self-centeredness. But his aged body strangely has the phys­i­cal fit­ness and stamina/potency to act them out (we see him preen­ing in front of a mir­ror, seem­ingly only aged from the neck up). Also, pre­sum­ably, Ben­jamin can be assured to die when his body regresses to infancy. So, given his phys­i­cal state at birth, is his death date pre-ordained? If he had been born with an infan­tilized body of a 20-year old, could he have been assured of only hav­ing two decades to live? Is he imper­vi­ous to harm? Indeed, he some­how man­ages to sur­vive being stepped on as a new­born, and later, is one of the few sur­vivors of a Ger­man sub­ma­rine attack on an out­classed tug­boat dur­ing World War II.

Ben­jamin is adopted by Quee­nie (Taraji P. Hen­son), an unfor­tu­nately stereo­typ­i­cal African Amer­i­can char­ac­ter, and spends his youth and old age (and vice versa!) at the nurs­ing home she man­ages. There, he meets his one true love Daisy, the niece of one of the ten­ants. Benjamin’s curi­ous con­di­tion pre­vents him from hav­ing any kind of nor­mal friend­ship or rela­tion­ship with her, so he leaves home to find his way in the world. He has his first seri­ous rela­tion­ship with Eliz­a­beth Abbott (Tilda Swin­ton), an older woman who thinks she’s younger than him (later, we learn that meet­ing him helped her change her life). Even­tu­ally, Ben­jamin and Daisy do meet at roughly the same phys­i­cal age and con­sum­mate their mutual love. When Daisy quite rightly asks Ben­jamin if he will still love her when she’s old and wrinkly, he jok­ingly turns it around and asks if she will still love him when he has acne. But what first amuses even­tu­ally comes back around to become one of the most painfully emo­tional sequences in the whole movie: Ben­jamin does after all regress into senil­ity (or per­haps even Alzheimer’s, before it was iden­ti­fied), trapped in the body of a pim­ply teenager. As always, the point is that the bell curve of a human life can be seen as a mir­ror image of itself: here, the impetu­ous­ness, aggres­sion, and mood swings of senil­ity are equated with the tumult of ado­les­cence. Like­wise, extreme youth and old age both are char­ac­ter­ized as the ulti­mate states of depen­dence and vulnerability.

Tilda Swin­ton as Benjamin’s first lover, an older woman whom he allows to believe is younger

The spe­cial effects that allow an aged ver­sion of Pitt’s face to be super­im­posed over another, diminu­tive actor are light years in advance of the still-creepy dig­i­tal roto­scop­ing ani­ma­tion style used in Robert Zemeckis’ The Polar Express and Beowulf (although the lat­ter is an excel­lent film in spite of the inef­fec­tive effects). But no mat­ter how eerily fluid and seam­less the effects, I could not shake the feel­ing that I was watch­ing some­thing largely actu­al­ized by ani­ma­tors equipped with a giant com­puter server farm. These obvi­ously cut­ting edge tech­niques are more com­pre­hen­si­ble to me than what­ever the makeup and/or CG wiz­ards did to make 44-year-old Pitt and the 39 Blanchett appear to be in their smooth-skinned and limber-limbed 20s. Also, it must be said that an arti­fi­cially aged Pitt in his hypo­thet­i­cal 50s and 60s is a dead ringer for Robert Redford.

There must be some­thing in the bot­tled water film­mak­ers have been drink­ing recently, for I’ve noticed a decided trend towards movies about aging recently. Sarah Polley’s Away From Her (read The Dork Report review) and Tamara Jenkin’s The Sav­ages (read The Dork Report review) both look at the senil­ity than often comes at the end of life, and how it may affect the lives of those still liv­ing, for bet­ter or for worse. But another pair of movies dealt with mor­tal­ity and the fear of unfin­ished busi­ness through the lens of fan­tasy: Fran­cis Ford Coppola’s Youth With­out Youth (read The Dork Report review) and Char­lie Kaufman’s Synec­doche, New York (read The Dork Report review). All of these movies tap into most people’s fear of aging: not only of los­ing phys­i­cal health and thus inde­pen­dence, but also of the reli­a­bil­ity of one’s own mind.

Offi­cial movie site: www.benjaminbutton.com

Buy the Cri­te­rion Col­lec­tion Blu-ray or DVD from Ama­zon and kick back a few pen­nies to The Dork Report.

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