The Curious Case Of Benjamin Button - Directed by David Fincher
About three-quarters of the way through The Curious Case Of Benjamin Button, we are presented with perhaps the unlikeliest scene of David Fincher’s career. As Benjamin (Brad Pitt) and Daisy (Cate Blanchett) move into an apartment together, we get the awesome spectacle of A David Fincher Rom-Com Montage, as the lovers do the decorating, set up home and goof around. It’s exactly the kind of thing that is de rigueur for most romantic films, but seems unimaginable from the director of Seven, Fight Club and Zodiac. But, in turning his attention to the F. Scott Fitzgerald short story that previously passed through Steven Spielberg and Spike Jonze, David Fincher, after years of assaulting our senses, has found a palette of completely different tones without jettisoning any of his filmmaking flair or brilliance.
A lot of talk surrounding Button will concern its similarity to Forrest Gump. This is down to its almost blank-slate hero, technical razzle-dazzle, use of a single character to document swathes of American history and the fact that Eric Roth penned both screenplays. But in the off-screen and on-screen story, the film Benjamin Button perhaps most resembles is Titanic. Both represent genre directors stepping out of their comfort zones (for Cameron, time travel and science-fiction, for Fincher, thrillers and serial-killers) into more awards-friendly territory. Both are decades long, monumental love stories narrated by someone in their old age and considering their impending death. And both are exquisitely tailored pieces of filmmaking that put dazzling visual effects in the service of deeply human stories.
But where Button veers sharply from Titanic is in its emotional temperature. Whereas Cameron uses every trick in the book to pull on the audience’s heartstrings, Fincher’s story of a man who grows young never goes for low hanging sentiment. Every one of Fincher’s instincts fights against it. This is also a love story that doesn’t concern itself with notions of fate and destiny, and as if to underline the point Fincher mounts an impeccable, intricately constructed What If? montage, an ode to chaos theory that has important ramifications for a major character and the story as a whole. In Button’s grown-up universe, people do not waft around like feathers: they make their own decisions, choose their own outcomes and live with the sometimes devastating consequences. Even the framing story, as a fading Daisy tells her daughter (Julia Ormond) the story of Benjamin, is told in cold, harsh greys, with the threat of a hurricane raging outside. The Spielberg version would have played this out in golden light and with syrupy strings. Not a bad thing but also not Fincher at all.
But for all its coolness Button never relinquishes the poignancy of its premise — that time is the nemesis of love — and this is the beating heart of the film. As the relationship between Benjamin and Daisy, that starts as a childhood friendship and goes through numerous peaks and rejections, moves forward, everything points towards the sweet spot where the couple’s ages will be more or less in sync. Fincher doesn’t rush getting them together — before that can happen, Benjamin has a heartbreaking affair with the wife of a diplomat, superbly played by Tilda Swinton, conducted mainly in a hotel in the dead of night. And when this finally does happen, it is shot through with the knowledge that their passion can only be fleeting, that their physical forms are heading in completely opposite directions than their growing fondness for one another. It is this feeling that washes over the film: a tangible and sincere sense of melancholy, a lament for the transitory nature of both love and life.
As much as it is about an intimate relationship, Fincher plays it out against a huge canvas. Starting with World War I (a bravura tracking shot depicts a battleground but rewinds the film to see soldiers spring back to life and explosions dwindle back to nothing, again commenting on the unrelenting march of time) and working its way into the 21st century, Button doesn’t whack you over the head with its decade-spanning, refusing to serve up an endless parade of top 40 hits, period fashions and times-they-are-a-changin’ news footage. Instead, Fincher’s images are small and recognizable, the kind of shots you might find in your own family photo albums. Similarly, the film jumps from New Orleans to Russia to India and from big moment to big moment; Only a film as grand as this would serve up an incredible WWII naval set piece between a tugboat and a German submarine and have it be one of the minor happenings in the film’s story.
The fact I’ve got this far and haven’t mentioned the digital and prosthetic de-ageing techniques is testament to how quickly you forget about them — Fincher has bigger emotional, intellectual fish to fry. I believe the effects never feel like a gimmick thanks to Pitt’s gentle, sympathetic performance. Button is a strange central figure. Like Gump, Button is a passive, almost uninteresting character (unlike Gump, he is a sexual being, the film getting laughs from the disjunct between the young man’s hormones and the old man’s body), Pitt’s subtlety resulting in the kind of performance the Academy could overlook.
Fincher’s decision to pull the easy emotional punches probably cost him Oscar glory. But it doesn’t matter, because he made a film for the ages, not just awards season. If you look hard enough there are grace notes in Benjamin Button, from a Tinkerbell-like humming bird flying over a scene of World War II carnage to Benjamin and Daisy frolicking in a sailing boat off Florida Keys, just as a NASA spacecraft lights up the sky behind them, that resonate for true romantics everywhere. Even the coldest, most clinical director alive shows his beating heart once in a while.
