By Damon Griffin
“The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” begins, naturally enough, with death. Daisy (Cate Blanchett) is dying in a New Orleans hospital, her daughter Caroline (Julia Ormond) tending to her in those final hours. Then, Daisy asks her daughter to open a box – one that hasn’t been opened in ages – and to read aloud from a mysterious diary inside. The diary, as it turns out, was written by the man known as Benjamin Button (Brad Pitt), and details his life – starting with the admission that he was “born under unusual circumstances.”
Before the diary is opened, another story begins to unravel, as told by Daisy, about a clockmaker whose son went to fight in World War I and never returned. This sequence, which frames the rest of the story, is one of the more mesmerizing parts of the film; a muddy battlefield scene runs backward – soldiers flying up from the ground and bullets blasting out of their bodies – as Blanchett speaks in the impeccably hoarse, creaky voice of a dying woman.
We soon discover that Daisy was a childhood friend of Benjamin’s, later becoming much more. From here, most of the film is narrated in Pitt’s monotonous draw. But Blanchett’s voice is always pined for. She has a way with accents – not just in affecting a style of speech, but in making a sort of tonal poetry. Thus it is her voice, as the dying Daisy, that carries all her scenes, and the styles of speech she affects throughout Daisy’s life – from an idealistic college graduate to a kindly old woman – that make her performance the strongest in the film.
The story continues, following the course of Benjamin’s life, exactly as it was lived: backward.
As a newborn baby with the face and body of an elderly man, he is abandoned by his father on the doorstep of Queenie (Taraji P. Henson), presumably the kindest person in New Orleans. Benjamin learns how to walk when he is seven, and from there embarks on a journey that literally takes him around the world before he returns home to Queenie – and Daisy – as a virile younger man. Daisy is no longer the child he once knew – in terms of age, they meet in the proverbial middle – and though their relationship is initially awkward and painful, it eventually becomes romantic.
Benjamin is at all times the emotional opposite of his physical self. When he is an “old man,” he is naive and spends time with people less than half his age; when he is a “young man,” he finds himself wiser in certain ways Daisy is not, and able to foresee future consequences of their relationship she cannot.
The film is directed by David Fincher, who made two earlier films with Pitt: Fight Club and Se7en. While Fincher appears to have an affinity for Pitt, he has no affinity for a decently constructed story. Screenwriter Eric Roth doesn’t cover for him in this respect, either. It is here, in the simple matter of storytelling – in which they resort to treating the audience like passive children – where Fincher and Roth run into problems.
One major moment toward the end of the film is intended as a climactic revelation, but is, instead, ludicrously predictable. Roth is unabashedly ready to go to cruel and inappropriate lengths to squeeze our emotions out. Hurricane Katrina is set as the backdrop for Daisy’s death, for example, either used as a device to make the story relevant, or as a grander metaphor for mortality. Regardless, it has no real place. And while the film is certainly not boring – even clocking in at over two hours – Fincher works too hard to emphasize how fatal and inevitable certain plot twists are.
But ultimately, the film fails because of Pitt’s performance. Benjamin is gravely solemn at all stages of life, and who can blame him: He has a greater sense of mortality than anybody else. But can’t Pitt show that Benjamin has fun sometimes, rather than expressing it via monologues spoken over scenes in the film? Pitt does not truly act the part, but simply verbalizes the nuances of Benjamin’s inner workings. It would have done good for Pitt to physically interpret Button’s emotions – the complex and crucial sensation of being a teenager inside an old man’s body, for instance. Instead, Pitt creates a boring, saintly caricature where there is much potential, and is eclipsed by Blanchett’s nuanced supporting performance.
