David Fincher (2008)
One thing I will remember is the nice aptness, given the story of the film, of clicking on the wrong box when I made the online booking: we ended up with a ticket for an under-15 rather than a senior citizen (same price). Based on a short story by F Scott Fitzgerald, this is a long film – 166 minutes. Curious is the word for the experience of sitting through it; although there are some irritations, it lacks the energy to make you really annoyed. It has a predominantly lulling rhythm and a slightly melancholy tone – what’s most striking about the picture is how innocuous and uninteresting it is. I was surprised by this: partly because the story – the body of a newborn baby exhibits geriatric characteristics and, as the child grows up, he grows younger – sounds like a real hook (however cheesy an idea it may also turn out to be); partly because David Fincher’s track record didn’t lead one to expect something drearily benign.
I’d wondered if Fincher might be chiefly interested in the technical possibilities of the material and I still suspect this is where his heart lies. The make-up and miniaturisation of Brad Pitt as the aged infant Benjamin Button are brilliant but the core story proves not to offer Fincher much scope for virtuosic effects – most of these are at best peripheral and at worst irrelevant. An old man in the nursing home where Benjamin is raised keeps recalling the seven times (although I didn’t count him past five) he’s been struck by lightning – an underwhelming comic idea that’s somewhat enlivened by the scratchy ancient monochrome inserts that Fincher uses to illustrate the lightning strikes. Benjamin goes to sea and the ship he’s on becomes part of the allied war effort after Pearl Harbor; the ship’s torpedoing by a German U-boat is spectacular – although meaninglessly so. In one of his occasional attacks of just-fancy-that philosophising, Benjamin reflects on the way that the course of a life is dictated by relentless coincidence; he illustrates the thesis at work in the chain of events that led to the Paris traffic accident that ended the ballet career of Daisy, the love of Benjamin’s life. The director has great fun constructing the visual links in the chain and this kind of showing off is enjoyable enough to watch – except that Fincher then overdoes things by immediately running edited highlights of the sequence in rewind.
Fincher and his screenwriter Eric Roth never seem to find a coherent or satisfying narrative style. The opening sequences are visually inventive but the setting up of the story is awkward. Daisy, as an old woman, is dying – her daughter Caroline at her bedside – in a New Orleans hospital in 2005. Daisy tells Caroline about a blind horologer who worked for years on a great clock for New Orleans train station; its public unveiling, in the presence of Theodore Roosevelt, revealed that the clock moved backwards – an expression of the grief-stricken clockmaker’s longing for time to go into reverse: his only son had died in the Great War. Then Daisy asks Caroline to get from her bag a diary, which contains postcards written by Benjamin Button, whose narration takes over at this point. Benjamin was born in New Orleans on Armistice Day in 1918. His mother died giving birth to him. It’s never clear how the story of the blind clockmaker (he obviously sounds like a relative of a ‘blind watchmaker’ but this doesn’t seem to have any resonance in the context) affects the trajectory of Benjamin’s life uniquely. He doesn’t appear to be born at the moment the clock starts to move backwards and we hear no more about the clockmaker. (I also found the dialogue difficult to make out in these early stages – only partly the result of high-volume popcorn eating next door to me and certainly not because the actors were speaking and overlapping naturalistically.)
In the first 20 years or so of Benjamin’s life, the people around him have absolutely no substance as characters. This goes for the old people in the nursing home, the nurse who adopts Benjamin, the man who marries her, the black congregation at a driving-out-of-demons service, the drink-sodden tattoo artist who captains the tugboat Benjamin goes to work on, the father who abandons him on the night of his birth but then comes back into his life. The effect of this is very peculiar (and, if it’s intentional, incomprehensible): all the people on the screen, except Benjamin, have an android quality – it’s as if they’ve been processed from old storybooks or films and reanimated before completion of the crucial last stage of rendering them human.
Around the point that Benjamin and Daisy ‘meet in the middle’ (although it doesn’t quite feel that way – because Brad Pitt’s intrinsic boyishness makes him seem younger than Cate Blanchett before his time), the style of Benjamin Button has drifted into laborious and (as it were) realistic human drama. When Daisy is pregnant, they have a conversation about the possibility of Benjamin transmitting his extraordinary genetic make-up to the unborn child. The scene is played as if this were a story about a father with a straightforward medical condition: it makes you expect a scene between the couple and their family doctor. The film is certainly distinctive at this stage – both ludicrous and tedious. And we keep returning to the mother and daughter in the New Orleans hospital, waiting for death – and Hurricane Katrina, which eventually arrives: the use of the catastrophe as a mere visual flourish to sign off with is an aberration – tasteless and insensitive. Benjamin may be a one-off but, as usual with this kind of narrative device, predictable revelations arrive (in their own good time): he turns out to be not only the one man that Daisy really loved but also the daughter’s father. As the dying Daisy, Cate Blanchett lies immobile, her face encased in super-geriatric make-up: even allowing that the aging process in this picture is like it is in no other, it’s hard to see why Daisy, who seems to have been born in the early 1920s, looks, eight decades later, at least 120 (she’s like a female version of the Dustin Hoffman character in Little Big Man).
It’s understandable that the filmmakers want to cite F Scott Fitzgerald as their source but, since he died in 1940, he really can’t be responsible for too much of what’s in the film (‘suggested by’ rather than ‘based on’ might be a truer description of the debt to Fitzgerald). Eric Roth should take the lion’s share of the blame. A basic problem with the film may be that Roth and Fincher seem to have very different – and for the purposes of adapting the Fitzgerald story incompatible – temperaments. I’m only guessing but I suspect that Fincher was drawn principally to the fantastical potential of the tale but that he found a writer with no feel for the fabulous but with a flair for more prosaic fakery. Benjamin has a propensity for imparting homiletic, analgesic tripe: ‘It’s strange: people you don’t remember can be the ones who leave the biggest impression on you’ (this of a woman about whom he seems to remember everything but her name); ‘It’s never too late (or, in my case, too early)’. This is such stuff as Academy Awards have sometimes been made on: Eric Roth won an Oscar for Forrest Gump.
In the early stages, Brad Pitt is effective. He gets the infantile qualities you sometimes catch in the cussed, crafty expressions of very old people – and, because these occur at the start of a life, they have a real charge. As he gets younger and becomes more like his normal screen self, the performance begins to pay diminishing returns. Benjamin seems wanly regretful, indefinite. I don’t think this is because Pitt is a bad actor (seeing Leonardo DiCaprio in Revolutionary Road only a few days before Benjamin Button makes Pitt look like Marlon Brando). Part of the difficulty for Pitt may be that he’s so evidently committed to the project that he becomes oppressed by the responsibility of this being (or seeming) a major serious role for him. But the main problem is in the script: Benjamin is a very gentle creature, a passive observer of his life. If Fincher and Roth are using these qualities in him to make a general statement about the human condition its meaning eluded me – and I couldn’t see why Benjamin’s unique physiology caused him to have no will of his own.
The artificiality of the material – and Fincher’s failure to find a way for the actors to fuse this with emotional truth – affects Cate Blanchett too. She’s utterly accomplished, aging from a very young to an elderly woman (I’m deliberately omitting her deathbed persona) but she seems weightless, impersonal. As Benjamin’s adoptive mother, Taraji P Henson is energetic but shallow. The one really satisfying performance in the whole film comes from Tilda Swinton as the wife of a British diplomat with whom Benjamin has an affair in Russia (when he’s staying there during his career as a tugboat sailor – before he goes to war). Swinton’s high-style eccentricity is manna from heaven at this stage of the proceedings (about an hour in); it’s not just that her verve makes her more theatrically lively – she seems more humanly real too. (She also has the advantage of encountering Benjamin at only one stage of his life so that she doesn’t have to react to his surprising physical development.)
The only other actor who makes a strong impression is Spencer Daniels, the boy who plays the elderly Benjamin (ie when he looks about 12), who is taken into a children’s home, when he’s beginning to lose his mind. It’s striking that it’s only at the beginning and end of his life that Benjamin registers strongly but Daniels has an emotional openness and urgency that’s rare in this film – and of course the idea of a child with dementia is peculiarly upsetting. (No one in the children’s home remarks upon the boy’s physical regression to infancy as Benjamin’s final years pass: has Daisy let them all in on the secret?) The cast also includes Jared Harris (as the tugboat captain), Mahershalalhashbaz Ali (as Benjamin’s adoptive father), Jason Flemyng (as his biological father), Julia Ormond (as Daisy’s daughter), Elle Fanning and Madisen Beaty (as younger versions of Daisy), Elias Koteas (as the clockmaker).
David Denby’s note on the film in the New Yorker suggested that the Fitzgerald short story was in essence a piece of social comedy. Fincher and Roth obviously wanted to do something different with the material: it’s not clear what but I wish it could have been more entertaining. There was one moment – when Benjamin and Daisy are grooving (effortfully) in their apartment with the Beatles on their television screen – when it briefly occurred to me that Benjamin Button might have been better (and had some kind of satirical point) if the hero had been presented as a character more akin to Woody Allen’s Zelig, so that he was always in the right place at the right time: that’s to say at the right age to derive the maximum pain or pleasure from a key event or fashion of the twentieth century. As it is, the film is so opaque it might as well be operating at the level of Jonathan Ross’s joke at the BAFTAs: ‘It’s every man’s nightmare: as you get older, Brad Pitt gets younger’.
15 February 2009