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The Curious Case of Benjamin Button falls into two distinct camps: a sense of love and admiration despite its flaws, or a complete and utter sense of hatred and contempt. I don’t understand the latter and fall, very much, into the former. I loved Benjamin Button from the opening shots of the Warner Brothers logo as buttons to the final glimpse of the clock stored away in some shed quickly filling with water. I was teary eyed and stumbled out confused about what I had seen, but knowing that I had seen something quite absorbing. Even, dare I say it, haunting and resonant. From the very beginning to the very end Benjamin Button is all about the ephemeral nature of life, love, time and death.
Benjamin himself might reside in the title, but he is not the main character of interest. Benjamin is doomed to forever be an outsider, a lone wanderer drifting through casually observing but never fully participating. Why do I say this? Because of his extremely odd condition – born an infant, but with all the physical problems of old age, he will age normally in his mental state but will return to an infant form with his mind having suffered the ravages of old age. He was born outside of time, in a sense. Or, at least, how we have come to understand the operation of time. This is his story, but it is refracted and shown to us from several different points of view.
And that is where the astoundingly gifted supporting players come into play. Tilda Swinton, Jared Hess, Taraji P. Henson and Julia Ormond are all fantastic across the board, despite limited screen time. This story mostly belongs to Benjamin and Daisy and where their lives intersect, diverge and run parallel to each others. While it may cover the entirety of Benjamin’s life, this is primarily a fairy tale, an epic fantasy about two people born to be together, but prevented from fully committing because of life’s natural chaos.
And what of that aging premise, which has caused so many to lash out against the movie? You either buy into it going along with the logic involved in the film or you don’t. Does no one have any more room left for a sense of whimsy? Yes, Benjamin Button is obsessed with death from the very start, but there is an enchantment to be had. At least, I felt like there was. (There is a vague reason given for his condition, something about a clock that runs in reverse, but that would require an intimate understanding of the Chaos theory and a leap of faith.)
I have spent a lot of time describing the plot devices and the emotions they gave me and have spoken very little about the stunning visuals. For shame! The movie is beautiful to behold. It’s as special effects heavy as any of the brain dead action movies that populate the summer, but there’s one key difference: this has a brain and something to say. The ideas are messy, complicated and it might not be as effectively communicated as they could have been. But when was the last time a big Hollywood production went this weird?
And those last shots of an aged Daisy bending down to kiss a toddler-sized Benjamin break my heart and bring a tear to my eye every time. That’s pure emotion without the cloy sentimentality of the overrated Forrest Gump, which this resembles in structure but not in tone. Fincher hits too dark and fights against sloppy emotionality quite often. It might not be everyone’s idea of a good time, but I wanted Benjamin Button to pull an upset on the overrated Slumdog Millionaire for Best Picture at last year’s Academy Awards.
