The Curious Case of Benjamin Button

In terms of ambition and risk, David Fincher’s grand and peculiar 166 minute movie dwarfs everything else around right now. It’s garnered 13 Academy Award nominations and broken the $100 million mark at the North American box office, but none of that makes it any less odd.

F. Scott Fitzgerald’s slim novella presents enormous difficulties to the filmmaker. It is the story of a man born into a wizened and infirm body who gets younger as he ages. At ten he has the physique of a diminutive septuagenarian. At twenty, he looks like a 50-year-old. And so on, all the way to infancy and death.

Between them, Fincher, the make up and digital effects teams, Brad Pitt and all the Benjamins (Robert Towers, Tom Everett, Spencer Daniels and Chandler Canterbury) stitch together a character who is completely believable from first to last – or last to first, if you prefer.

Pitt has never been better – this performance is probably the finest advertisement for CGI enhancement that any actor could wish for. Most unsettling is when Benjamin reaches his fifties, in age, and the face on screen is the young Brad we remember from Thelma and Louise. Maybe the synthespians of the future will never get old.

Benjamin’s adoptive mother, a practically-minded African-American woman named Queenie (Taraji P Henson), accepts the boy’s unusual condition with the forbearance of someone accustomed to life’s vicissitudes. In a clever invention from screenwriter Eric Roth (The Good Shepherd and Forrest Gump) Queenie runs a caring home for the elderly, so master Benjamin fits in reasonably well, though one old lady is disconcerted by his fondness for her granddaughter Daisy.

Fitzgerald’s story is a pregnant philosophical conceit, like a Twilight Zone episode set among Baltimore’s nineteenth century gentry. Roth expands it into a rich twentieth century picaresque, ranging far and wide as Benjamin tastes romance in Russia with the wife of an English diplomat (a beguiling Tilda Swinton), comes off second best in an encounter with a German U-boat, and pursues the love of his life first to New York and then to Paris.

If Daisy (Cate Blanchett) is a nod in the direction of another beloved Fitzgerald character, Button is more akin to a slightly savvier Gump than to Gatsby. He's a passive, reactive character, turned around by time’s arrow and his outrageous fortune. Unlike Gatsby he gets the girl – and then renounces her.

The movie bides its sweet time, not all of it well spent. A framing device with Daisy on her deathbed, Hurricane Katrina brewing in the background, is cumbersome and not always as clear as it might be. A vignette with Elias Koteas as a clockmaker (Monsieur Gateau) who loses his son in WWI and manufactures a station clock to turn back time is beautifully told, but it’s gilding the lily. Likewise an infuriatingly computer-generated hummingbird that pops up twice, a self-consciously poetic touch that feels heavy-handed and false.

Despite these flaws, and others, the film’s bittersweet reverse angle on the aging process is inescapably moving. There is something beautiful about the trajectory which sees Benjamin and Daisy’s life-long love affair blooming briefly in middle-age, at the point the scales come into balance, though Fitzgerald’s dry account of the relationship gradually falling apart is probably more honest. All the same, we’re left with a terrible sense of loneliness and loss as time inevitably takes its toll.

David Fincher is famous for dark thrillers like Seven, Zodiac and Fight Club, but this bizarre and graceful love story is as morbid in its way. Everybody dies. Even that ornately decorated New Orleans architecture is doomed to crumble. When all is said and done, it takes an artist to make time stand still.

Tom Charity
tom.charity@lovefilm.com