Cast: Brad Pitt, Cate Blanchett, Tilda Swinton

Director: David Fincher

Screenplay: Eric Roth

Running time: 2 hrs 47 mins

Genre: Drama



CRITIQUE:

Of David Fincher’s new magnum opus’s nearly three-hour running time, there is a moment when The Curious Case of Benjamin Button studies a ‘what-if’ theory, a deconstruction of a series of events where the most miniature details have a significant ramification of a whole outcome. Devastating that may be to a character, this is perhaps where the film unpeels its core – an ebullient, if not philosophically befuddling, meditation on the passing of time and the clockwork of destiny. To note also that this scene is set in Paris, it is worthy of a Jean-
Pierre Jeunet.


And what a gorgeous picture this is. The murky, earthy visual palette of Fincher in his previous works Se7en, Fight Club and Zodiac has been replaced with an elegant dark beauty, golden-hued in its flashbacks sequences, chronicling the titular characters growing-down, and cold and greyish in Daisy’s deathbed whilst a hurricane Katrina rages outside. From a director whose common filmic diet is the gloomy side of humanity, he nevertheless paints his picture with elements of death, devastation and the cruel vistas of fate. Yet he tells this in such a poetic visual eloquence; the reverse playback of soldiers in an explosive battlefield, Benjamin’s encounter of a hummingbird, Daisy’s ballet dance in the shadows and a constant narrating of an ageing character’s thunder-strike episodes in an antique ocular fashion. These enigmatically captivating moments are laid within an equally, enigmatically flawed film.


That central enigma is Benjamin Button, a man who ages backwards, born as a shrivelled, wrinkled old creature and grows into his youthful adolescence, where Brad Pitt looks startlingly young, way younger than one would recall him in Legends of the Fall. If that doesn’t make sense, so was the origin material, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s short story which was also ridden with logic impasse. Resembling little from its paper source, many details were tweaked for cinematic purposes for a lengthy film that spans decades. Fincher does not rush towards Button’s dazzling arrival of his ‘perfect’ age, as Cate Blanchett’s Daisy puts it. Instead he carefully glides this tale through Button’s wizened life in the care home where death is as natural as a dying plant, and through his shipman’s affair with an English aristocrat’s wife (an excellent Tilda Swinton), dawn rendezvous in a hotel kitchen where love is swift and unspoken. It all crosses epochs, the two World Wars, and even the contemporary disaster of Katrina in the New Orleans, it sustains an epic proportion of its own.


Both leads, Pitt and Blanchett, are impressive in their roles, both traversing through different stages of life and age, assisted with flawless CGI and prosthetics. Their performances shine through this dark tale. Pitt is a reserved, sympathetic figure who has conceded to his oddity. And there’s something extremely sad to his Benjamin, a solitary human who grows younger while watching everyone around the world die. It takes a lot of subtlety for an actor as underrated as Pitt, and he gives it here. He is, without a doubt, one of Hollywood’s best working actors. Unsurprisingly for Blanchett, she delivers her Daisy with panache, a woman impelled to realise that time is the bitter adversary of love. And for a film that has constraints in logic, sometimes it’s rather better to accept its fantastical premise and let it awash your senses, for there are deeper meanings here worth the immersion.


VERDICT:

This profound reflection on the passing of life works like a mesmerising dream. But although handsome as the film may be, with beautiful performances and a tender storytelling, this epic leaves us philosophically mystified rather than gloriously swept.



RATING: A-