Please Stop the Magic
by Chris Knipp

David Fincher's reputation soared last year after the release of his impressive Zodiac, but The Curious Case of Benjamin Button takes him back down a peg. It even makes you wonder if Zodiac's obsessive intensity was really self-aware or just a mindless offshoot of blind ambition. The new movie develops an elaborate conceit based on a Scott Fitzgerald story about a man who ages in reverse. But whatever ironies about human mortality (and vanity) one might be led to ponder are muffled because Forest Gump writer Eric Roth is satisfied with producing a superficial historical tour bristling with platitudes. The big budget production is impressive in the special effects and makeup categories, but Fincher falls into the Hollywood trap of going for a gimmick rather than an idea, technique rather than art. Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett diligently go through their paces as the lovers who meet in the middle (when both are roughly the same age) during a decades-long romance otherwise frustrated, both before and after, by Benjamin's oddity. But with three narrative voices pushing the relentless arc of devolution, most of the time the stars are only pawns in a conceptual game.

Unlike several E.L. Doctorow protagonists, not to mention Forrest Gump himself, this picaresque hero marches through history without getting into contact with major figures or great events. In fact, he doesn't do anything particularly interesting. His button manufacturer dad (Jason Flemyng) thinks him a monster, and after his wife dies in childbirth on the last day of WWI, he drops the wrinkled, sclerotic infant on the doorstep of an old people's home, an appropriate enough home base for him, for the next decade or so anyway. He's adopted by the home's presiding spirit, Queenie (Taraji P. Henson). Queenie is a born again Christian and one of the movie's best scenes is a tent revival meeting where a black healer succeeds in getting the little shrunken Benjamin to hobble across the floor, then drops dead himself. (It's a colorful moment, but it doesn't build into anything.)

Later Benjamin is spied by young Daisy (who will grow up into Cate Blanchett), who takes to him even as a gnarly little old man on crutches. Mr. Button senior hovers in the background and assists in Benjamin's first sex and first drink when he's aged back young enough to enjoy such things. Eventually he's sufficiently robust to go to sea and is at that long enough to be involved in WWII--but as a survivor, not a hero.

The frame tale is a hospital scene where a very cosmetically aged Blanchett lies dying in New Orleans on the verge of hurricane Katrina while her daughter Caroline (Julia Ormond) reads to her from Benjamin's diary. It really turns out that it's the expiring Daisy who has brushed with greatness. She was a dancer in her youth, the only American ever invited to perform with the Bolshoi Ballet, and Balanchine himself noted her perfect line. When a now more Brad Pitt-like Brad Pitt with a youthful face under wavy gray hair comes back from his long years at sea and looks up Daisy in New York, her conversation and friends are hip, but Benjamin, who tells somebody he's been "nowhere, except harbors," still seems a rube. His Louisiana drawl constantly suggests that he's slow on the uptake. In a brief affair with an edgy Brit diplomat's wife (Tilda Swinton) in Russia, he says virtually nothing. Roth and Fincher are pushing the empty vessel thing a bit too hard. Or is this maybe Andy Warhol in disguise?

Pitt can be mad fun, as he was in his brief but memorable turns in Thelma and Louise, True Romance, and Snatch, and his recent buffoonery in the Coens' Burn After Reading. Or he can be bland and cloying, as in Meet Joe Black, Seven Years in Tibet, or here. The Botox and cosmetic surgery fanciers' novelty of this movie is to wait for the moment when Brad finally reaches his own age, the forties, and then is cosmetically de-aged back to a gorgeous, sexy Thelma and Louise charmer. But instead of having the con-man edge he had in Ridley Scott's movie, this time under his boyishly pretty makeup sheen he's just a dumb-looking adolescent. It's the movie's biggest disappointment, given that it only delivers in the visuals and effects categories, not as mature drama.

For all its production values, this is just a workmanlike progression through the decades, and it quite lacks the hallucinatory beauty of Tarsem Singh's The Fall, the one cinematic visual triumph of the past year. We've seen Blanchett in lots of prosthetics already before now. This time she even gets a prosthetic body, since somebody else does her ballet dancing for her. As for Pitt, he gets his head mounted on the top of a gnarly little man in a wheelchair.

Ultimately, Benjamin Button doesn't excite in any category. As a picaresque tale it's a washout because its protagonist's adventures are so mundane. In the realm of thought it never gets above the level of saws like "nothing lasts" and the reminder that aging, in either direction, can be scary--especially if sped up. Even in special effects and visuals it ultimately fails because its characters aren't interesting enough to care about. Oh yes: the prosthetics, CGI alterations and makeup are great. But the screenplay is a dud and the musical background reduces every scene to an even greater level of simpering sweetness than it has already.

©2009 Chris Knipp
CineScene