Fincher goes backwards

Rating: 4/10 (8 February 2009)

A quirk of film spectatorship is how, ever so often, and despite being several stages removed from the alchemic processes of collaboration that power creativity, you just sense that a film isn't going to work. In the case of Benjamin Button, the news that Eric Roth, who penned the interminably folksy Forrest Gump, had written a screenplay which David Fincher would direct, raised an eyebrow in the Frames household. The portents were as black as Carol Thatcher's nightmares. Like Gump, Button would chart the lifetime of a boorish miscreant, or cipher, whose job it was to guide us through several decades of American History. Robert Zemeckis, a technocentric director whose movies had been enhanced by bravura visual effects, directed Gump and although being his blandest film, attained a clutch of Oscars for his trouble. Oscars that his funnier, edgier and more entertaining pictures had never stood a chance of winning.
David Fincher, like Zemeckis, is a director whose grip on the use of effects as a story enhancing tool rather than a sideshow, is so tight that his direction is almost an effect itself. He gave us Fight Club, one of the most astute and thematic rich satires ever made. Seven was a classic thriller. Zodiac a genre shredding police procedural where the devil really was in the detail. Three superb pictures and no industry recognition whatsoever. What to do? Well perhaps, reasoned Fincher, doing 'a Zemeckis', was the way forward. After all, good as he is, the man's got an ego right? This alone must explain why a filmmaker previously attracted to such engaging, edgy material, was motivated to direct Roth's fatuous slab of homespun whimsy - a light touch jaunt through the 20th century as seen through the eyes of a glaze eyed non-entity.
If Forrest Gump succeeded at all, and the debate goes on, it was as a result of it's canny juxtaposing of the dull everyman with extraordinary moments in US History and the characters that populated it. Look, there's Gump shaking hands with President Kennedy! There he is with John Lennon! But Benjamin Button, bless his one dimensional heart, barely makes a mark on history as he inoffensively passes through it. The fact he's aging backwards making him one of the most extraordinary humans to have ever lived, if anything, goes virtually unnoticed, as if it was no more remarkable than an unusual skin disease. The potential of the premise is therefore offensively wasted, to the point where you're not convinced his aging normally would have made much of an impact on his life. Button's plight (he is born computer generated) might have given him a unique perspective on the human condition and what a different movie it could have been had Pitt played someone with the mind of Oscar Wilde - a cutting intelligence and wit brought to bear on his inverted existence and the lives he touched upon the way. But the Gump model only works it's magic if you find profundity in the banal and the chocolate box truisms that have the least demanding members of the audience nodding their heads and wiping a tear from their sentimentally swollen eyes. Thus it's a superficial, curiously still piece of work that hopes you'll graft your own experiences on to Pitt's blank canvas and in doing so, squeeze out the melancholy as you remember your own lost loves, your own disappointments, your own missed opportunities. That's fine if you're in the mood but otherwise you might think Fincher is wasting your time and unlike Pitt, you're not getting any younger.
The only thing that saves Button from complete irrelevance is the technical showmanship on display. As with Fincher's previous efforts, the meticulousness in the framing of each shot married with the highly inventive use of CGI speaks to the intelligence behind the camera. It's also a handsome film, as they say in New Orleans, impressively mounted and richly photographed. But Fincher, who to his credit pulls back from fully fledged Gump levels of sentiment, can do nothing with Roth's mawkish script and consequently Button is easy on the eye but unforgiving on the mind. Has Fincher sold out with it? Well he may finally get his Oscar but as he stands at the podium, golden statuette in hand and grin fixed for the cameras he'd do well to remember Tyler Durden's warning from the long long ago - "The things you own end up owning you".