Not So Much an Emotional Experience As It Is a Tremendously Impressive Technical Achievement

Rating: 6/10 (19 January 2009)

Following the procedural but audacious Zodiac, this film shows Fincher on his own reverse-evolutionary course. The story opens with a man who has suffered the loss of a loved one, putting his talent to creative and profound use in a way that wishes for those who we've lost to return. And then we see the concept of his work put into practice, and though there are miraculous aspects, elements and moments in the unique subject's life, it has the same well of tragedy, heartbreak and loneliness, just different kinds, making them harder. And we see that no matter who one is, life is defined by its tragedies.
In spite of this, I never shed a single tear, never felt my heart sink. David Fincher's questionable epic, really his first non-thriller, to me, is not so much an emotional experience as it is a tremendously impressive technical achievement. There is not a single frame that could have been better shot or edited. Atmospherically, it is a masterpiece. In the creativity of envisioning the character of Benjamin Button throughout all of the stages of his life, it is a masterpiece. But that is essentially the aim of the film, rather than having you leave it with one of many life-affirming cathartic experience under your belt.
It deliberately spreads its scope wider than necessary. We begin by seeing the elderly Daisy, a barely recognizable Cate Blanchett, on her deathbed with her daughter in a New Orleans hospital as Katrina approaches. Daisy then narrates perhaps the most incredible sequence of the entire film, of a blind clockmaker played by Elias Koteas, who was contracted to construct a clock to hang in the New Orleans train station. Subsequent to the news of his son's death in The Great War, he sustained an even deeper occupation with his clock, which he deliberately conceived to run in reverse, perhaps to artistically honor the grief of mourning parents of soldiers, or with the dream that it actually would bring back those who died in the war.
Back to Daisy. She asks Caroline to read aloud from a diary containing photographs and postcards written by Benjamin Button. Caroline begins to read as the story transitions to Benjamin's point of view. For a film with such a transcendental concept, and one with such import, this narrative format is quite stale. If only it could've simply told the story without the stretched scale and let us be Caroline, let us react the way she does, rather than detaching us to watch Caroline dramatize the emotional worth for us. Brad Pitt, in the virtually monolithic title role, goes through many changes but at a few of them looks very much like himself and at some points even younger. I don't know what my Kinsey rating is, but he simply is one arrestingly beautiful man.
At any rate, we go into a movie or a book with the supposition that it will tell a story in sequential time. We understand and discern flashbacks and flash-forwards, even when the signals are very subtle. If a story moves in reverse, its scenes indicate a chronological progression seen backwards. Even if a scene recurs, it has its place in chronology. If time is splintered into diverging avenues, it is about how the characters try to have power over their existence. Even 21 Grams, The Time Machine, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, et. Al. require the inescapable command of time.
There was another film in 2008 that isn't nominated for Best Picture or anything secondary or tertiary in importance, or listed among the favorites of the year at all, and it's an admirably extreme contemplation of the procedure of existing and getting older. But people en masse need time for it to grow on them. Charlie Kaufman's Synecdoche, New York will be beheld and treasured in time.