Smash masterpiece

Rating: 9/10 (30 December 2008)

At nearly three hours, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button can be a little difficult to get through, considering there are hardly any explosions and not a hobbit in sight. It’s the kind of movie you have to prepare yourself for mentally, to sort of gird yourself against the slow - and I mean slow - scenes as the norm, not the exception. But if you are willing to invest the time and to commit to the film as a whole, the experience is enriching, beautiful, touching, and fascinating, in large part because of two stellar lead performances, by Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett.Based on an F. Scott Fitzgerald short story, the movie concerns the life of the title character, who was born with what’s judiciously called in the movie a reverse-aging disease; that is, he’s born with the physical characteristics of an old man, and as time passes he looks younger and younger. You can just imagine the wacky shenanigans that commence! But this isn’t a comedy. It’s a deeply affecting, layered movie about not only the aging process itself - who among us hasn’t fantasized about being younger than we are now - but also the effect we have on the people around us, even peripherally. It’s also about loss and hope and death and unfettered romance. So yeah, it’s kind of a chick flick.
Oh, but what a chick flick! I have to say that even though this is the longest non-action movie I’ve ever seen, it’s very compelling. Director David Fincher - who worked with Pitt on Seven and Fight Club - had a dilemma right from the get-go: How do you tell a story when everyone knows how it ends? Sure, this isn’t based on a true-life event or anything, but the basic premise tells you everything: Man is born old, dies as a baby. So you know he eventually dies. How does the director get from A to B without seeing his audience doze off? By operating within the framework of the quirky premise itself. Everything you or I experiences in life, we experience as a linear process: A, then B, then C, and so on. Benjamin Button goes from Z to Y to X, and so on, but there are greater implications - and complications - than simply doing everything in reverse. For one thing, Benjamin has the unique problem of watching people he loves grow old and die while he gets younger. For another, he has to deal with people believing he’s an infirm old man when he’s a naive preteen.
At the heart of the story, though, is the loves of Benjamin, particularly a troika of women: his adoptive mother Queenie, played by Taraji P. Henson; Elizabeth, the wife of a high-ranking Briton in Russia, played by the elegant Tilda Swinton; and Daisy, the granddaughter of one of the women residing in the old-folks home where Benjamin was raised, played by Elle Fanning as a girl and Blanchett as a grownup. Benjamin experiences all of his love in a way that none of us ever has or ever could. He looks experienced, but he’s not, and easing into adulthood as the rest of us might isn’t quite on the menu. It’d be baffling enough to do things sort of out of order, but since Benjamin has no frame of reference, he’s not sure what’s right and what’s not so right.
There are many people out there who solemnly swear that Brad Pitt just plain stinks as an actor, that he basically plays the same grinning doofus in every movie. I don’t think this has been the case for a long time, perhaps back as far as Thelma and Louise, as Pitt’s taken on more and more tough, detailed roles. Don’t believe me? Check out Babel, for which he should have been nominated for an Oscar. Or Seven Years in Tibet, or Fight Club, or the Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford. The man isn’t just a pretty boy, and I think it’s sort of prejudicial to label him as such when he’s clearly better than that.
Cate Blanchett, by positive comparison, completely nails the role of Daisy. Blanchett is an attractive woman, but she’s never been called the sexiest woman alive, or some such nonsense. Her exuberance, her dedication to her craft, and her willingness to play unglamorous roles make her arguably the greatest actress of her generation. She’s exquisitely wonderful here, playing a complex character who ages somewhat gracefully but always, always believably. Her anguish at seeing her true love look better and better while she (she feels) looks worse and worse is compounded by her dread at knowing what lies at the end of the path, for while she’ll probably die just as millions others before her have, at a ripe old age, the man who makes her heart soar will perish under the most unfamiliar of circumstances, possibly not even knowing of the grand life he’s led.
The movie is told within a framework of Blanchett’s now-aged character on her death bed, during a hurricane, while her adult daughter reads from her diary - well, really, from Benjamin’s diary, ensconced inside Daisy’s. The daughter is played by Julia Ormond, who I mistook for Lolita Davidovich. I haven’t seen Ormond in anything since I think Sabrina, and she looks fantastic; the scenes between her and Blanchett were heart-rending; Fincher used silence - and the approaching storm as background - with precision to greatest effect.
As for me, although the movie is long and necessarily lags in spots - there’s only one action scene, but it’s a doozy (if a tad unbelievable, even for this movie) - it’s ultimately very satisfying, delivering on its premise in creative, bold, and mesmerizing fashion. It’s not going to be for everyone, I would think, but it’s beautifully told and very well acted.