The Epic Bore of Benjamin Button ...

Rating: 4/10 (6 February 2012)

My eyes have beheld TV episodes with much richer plots concentrated in less than sixty minutes of thrills or hilarity, sometimes dramas, sometimes comedies, always entertainments. But when they had to endure David Fincher's "The Curious Case if Benjamin Button" in the movie theater, I wished my popcorn box was a remote control so I could have the power to change the channel. Like Benjamin Button, I was doomed, forced to watch a fantasy biopic drama whose genre-bending atmosphere succeeded in elevating boredom to epic proportions.
"Benjamin Button" is the kind of films whose publicity relies on respectable arguments that turn out to be fallacious when you grasp the true content of the film. The film features Brad Pitt, who proved to make a great tandem with Fincher in the second half of the 90's. It starts with a creative concept, adapted from a short farce written by F. Scott Fitzgerald: a man whose life goes in reverse, born as an old person and getting younger as time goes by, talk about a 'wowing' concept, promising if it wasn't so scary. And the film is very long and is made like the kind of epic dramas that satisfy the tastes of the Academy members. But after watching "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button" (damn, even the title is long), I found something distastefully pretentious not while watching the film, but after finishing it, as a second thought that never left me.
I consciously use the word 'pretentious' because of the following dilemma: I wonder if the film overestimates our patience or underestimates our intelligence. Granted it has some qualities: the acting does justice to the believability of the story, with a honorable mention to the members of the nursing home where Button grew up, Brad Pitt takes his role seriously and does his best trying to convey the illusoriness of a life whose direction is in total opposition with all the other persons. And there is no doubt that the cinematography, photography, editing and directing, although not transcending, correctly serve their purpose to improve the awards nominations' statistics. But even the most appetizing plates can have an insipid taste, "Button" looks, sounds and feels great but it lacks something vital when it comes to movie making: writing. Eric Roth, who won the Oscar for "Forrest Gump", wrote the screenplay. When I learned that, another dilemma started teasing my mind: is it accidental or logical that the script here didn't work?
I vote for logical. As original as the plot is, it needed a less ambitious format, yet Fincher stretches it for three endless hours starting the story from a deathbed flashback set right before the Hurricane Erika events, just to put the story in a chronological map and trace a clever parallel between Benjamin Button's life and history. It worked for "Forrest Gump", because he was a fitting character for that kind of narrative while Button's condition is a story in itself and can never distract from whatever happens in his life. Roth tried to rewrite the typical picaresque story like "Forrest Gump", I could also have mentioned "Barry Lyndon" or "Little Big Man" but in the case of Button, it quite simply doesn't work. I don't know if it could have worked anyway, maybe the film was victim of its own concept, after all: how can we possibly sense the profound effect the course of events has on us when our very conscience evolves from a sort of precocious wisdom to amnesia. Or maybe this is the key of Button's torment but since when does a handicap build empathy or cement a heroic status?
The script tries to exploit Button's unique condition by framing it in a romance with a little girl who grew up to become the love of his life, Cate Blanchett as Daisy, an ambitious dancer, but Daisy is not Jenny, there was something quite unlikable in the way her ambition flirted with a sort of bitchy cockiness. Anyway, she never did it to me, although she inspired a very cleverly written sequence that seemed to belong to another film, if only half of "Button" shared this quality. But no, the rest of the film was a bunch of redundancies enrobed with boring existential torments stretched like a chewing gum until it loses its taste. While it could have been adapted in an entertaining way, the film is just an assemblage of many little episodes deprived from emotions and scream for Oscar nominations  did I use the word 'pretentious'?
I couldn't escape from the uncomfortable feeling that "Benjamin Button" was just a wannabe Forrest Gump, that recycled many plot clichés that would have been unnoticed if the movie found the time to be entertaining, instead of filling it with pointless gimmicks and situations that don't go anywhere, damn even the encounter with the father who abandoned him left me cold, when I expected an emotional Himalaya, I got a hill. No seriously, "Benjamin Button" could have been subtitled "How to Make Best Picture nominees for Dummies", in terms of casting, of story, of writing, of cinematography, of editing, everything is handled with a remarkable marketed precision, but at the end, all you have is an empty creation whose emotional core again required less than one hour and half to grab the interest, "Memento" or "Groundhog Day", movies based on similar concepts, had the common decency to be short.
And the film features probably the most badly written concluding lines in recent history, with the whole "Some people do this and some people do that" when it finished with the sight of Blanchett dancing and the monologue ended with " and some people just dance." I was like "give me a break", if that is the punch line of the whole thing, it means that just because we watched characters talking and acting during three hours, Fincher took our empathy for granted, and that also is pretentious.