A Life Lived Backward

Cast: Brad Pitt, Cate Blanchett, Julia Ormond, Taraji P. Henson, Jason Flemyng, Tilda Swinton, Jared Harris
Director: David Fincher
Screenplay: Eric Roth, based on the short story by F. Scott Fitzgerald

With director David Fincher, one can certainly expect forays into darkness heretofore unexplored. After all, for the last decade, he has either been frightening us with such films as Zodiac and Se7en, or battering us to a pulp with Fight Club and Panic Room. With this his latest project, however, Fincher curiously excises his usual anarchic undertones in an adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald's short-story of the same name. Simply put- it is not a film one would have expected, or could have predicted, from the director. Telling the tall tale of an infant who is born as an old man and lives his life in reverse, becoming younger with each passing year until he achieves real infancy at the end of his life, the film is picaresque and affecting, though sometimes too laboured. The film begins with the elderly Daisy on her deathbed with her daughter Caroline in a New Orleans hospital as Hurricane Katrina approaches. Daisy tells the story of a clockmaker named Gateau, who was commissioned to create a clock to hang in the New Orleans train station. After receiving news of his son's death on the battlefield, he continued work on his clock, which he intentionally designed to run backward, in the hope that it would bring back those who died in the war including his son. The film flashes back to the present-day where Daisy asks Caroline to read aloud from a diary containing photographs and postcards written by a Benjamin Button. So begins his story. Born on November 11, 1918, just as the citizens of New Orleans are celebrating the end of the Great War, he has the appearance and physical limitations of a man who is 86 years old. Shortly after giving birth, his mother dies, and the father, Thomas Button, takes the baby, abandoning him on the porch of a nursing home. Queenie and Tizzy, an African-American couple working at the nursing home, find the baby. Unable to conceive, Queenie decides to take him in as her own, against Tizzy's wishes after which she names him Benjamin. Over the course of the story, Benjamin begins to physically grow younger. In 1930, while still appearing to be in his seventies, he meets a young Daisy, whose grandmother lives in the nursing home. A few years later, he leaves to work on a tugboat on the docks of New Orleans, eventually leaving New Orleans with the tugboat crew for a long-term work engagement. Benjamin gets caught up in World War II where he gets enlisted by the United States Navy. During a battle, the tugboat rams and sinks a German U-boat in the Atlantic Ocean. After returning to New Orleans, Benjamin again meets with his father, unknowingly. Benjamin then learns that Daisy has become a successful dancer in New York City, and having visited her there for a recital, finds that she has fallen in love with a fellow dancer. Heartbroken, Benjamin leaves, eventually returning to New Orleans in 1962 where the two again meet up and fall in love. Playing the role of the protaganist in a story of this nature seems a formidable undertaking. After all, how does one play the part of a character who ages backwards? Suffice it to say, Brad Pitt does a satisfactory job. He is a capable actor, as evidenced in such roles as Babel, the above-mentioned Fight Club, and 12 Monkeys. But looking sullen and stone-faced for much of the first-half of the film, it's as if he reserved to let his make-up do his acting for him. His portrayal is solid but lacks the extra element necessary to catapult it into greatness. When Benjamin looks old, Pitt plays him as old, not as a young man trapped in a much older body. And when Benjamin looks young, Pitt plays him with the verve of a young man, not as an "old soul." The subtleties are missing and this may be the single element that could make it difficult for some to accept the premise. Blanchett's performance, then, comes as welcome respite. Injecting the film with grace and poignance, the actress elevates what starts out as a gimmicky story, into a moving rumination on the nature of love. She eventually grows older as he grows younger. Only for one magical moment will these lovers share the same age. The movie’s emotional center of gravity — the character who struggles and changes and feels — is Daisy, played by Ms. Blanchett from impetuous ingénue to near ghost with an almost otherworldly mixture of hauteur and heat. It is testament to Mr. Fincher’s ability as a director to turn an incredible conceit into a plausible love story. The romance between Daisy and Benjamin begins when both are chronologically pre-adolescents and Benjamin is, physically, a codger, but the initial element of pedophilic creepiness in the relationship gives way to other forms of awkwardness. Their love is uniquely perfect and enduring. At the same time, like any other love — like any movie — it is shadowed by disappointment and fated to end. If Benjamin's ruminations, and by extension the film, remind one of the schmaltzy Forest Gump, it's because both screenplays were written by Eric Roth. But whereas Gump was more interested in cheap laughs, and director Robert Zemeckis more interested in impressing with his gaudy, anachronistic style, Benjamin is more interested in its story; indeed, it's in no rush to tell it. Over the course of nearly 3 hours, one has to put up with the title character's sometimes tiresome adventures as an adolescent, as well as with the development of his relationship with Daisy. In fact, the argument can be made that the film's first half is pretty boring. Yes, there are the detailed, breath-taking set-pieces, and Taraji P. Henson's impressive performance as Queenie, but there's also the cliched flash-forward scenes with Daisy in the hospital where Blanchett sounds as annoying as ever. But what was started as detached and showy emerges beautiful and engaging in the end. Praise has to be given too, to Alexandre Desplat and his evocative score, as well as Claudio Miranda's sumptuous cinematography. There's absolutely no denying that The Curious Case of Benjamin Button is a largely uneven film, greater than the sum of its parts. There's also no denying that it is genuinely moving and unforgettable. It is way longer than it needs to be, and sadly, we don't get inside of Benjamin's head as much as we should have, but there's something oddly haunting about the metaphor of a life lived backward. Benjamin's saga is singular yet universal: anyone who has contemplated his own mortality will find it hard not to be moved by Fincher's evocation of the fickleness of fate and the ephemeral sweetness of love. Lyrical, original, misshapen and deeply felt, this is a one flawed beauty of a movie.