Camden Movies: The Curious Case of Benjamin Button | Brad Pitt

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The Review - AT THE MOVIES with DAN CARRIER
Published: 5 February 2009

Brad Pitt as Benjamin Button and Cate Blanchett as Daisy

Mortality and a life lived backwards

THE CURIOUS CASE OF BENJAMIN BUTTON
Directed by David Finchler
Certificate 15

F SCOTT Fitzgerald was inspired to write the tale this film is based on after hearing a quote from Mark Twain that life would be much happier if we were “...born aged 80 and gradually grew to be 18”.
In turn, director David Fincher has drawn inspiration from these two great chroniclers of American life to create a film that uses crucial moments of 20th-century history as the backdrop for a very personal story.
Brad Pitt plays – with the help of clever computer graphics and make-up – Benjamin Button, a fellow born with the body of a 90-year-old. We watch as he becomes younger and younger, while the love of his life Daisy (Cate Blanchett) gets older and older.
From the First World War to Hurricane Katrina breaching the New Orleans levees, Button’s backward life is marked by the endless march of time. And time is a crucial factor: at the beginning, we meet a grieving clockmaker whose son has been killed in the Great War. He is commissioned to make a timepiece for the central station in New Orleans. Torn apart by his loss, he designs a clock whose hands move backwards. He tells assembled dignitaries as it is unveiled that he wishes to turn back time so we can have back all those we have lost.
There are moments when this film is beautiful, poetic; at others it is sloppy drivel. At nearly three hours, Fincher has plenty of time to ladle on the schlock which may prompt you to throw something screenwards. Later, your patience is rewarded.
Fincher carves the story into bite-sized chunks. One chapter stands out: Button is a sailor, working from the Russian port of Murmansk in the dying days of the 1930s. While living in a once-grand hotel, he has an affair with the wife of an English diplomat, played by Tilda Swinton. It is well observed and gives the sepia- tinged photography a suitably melancholic story.
With a screen play by Eric Roth (Forrest Gump) the parallels are obvious. Both have as a central figure a man who stands apart from the society he lives in. And Roth uses the trick of having Benjamin narrate much of the story, which leads to lots of homilies in the “life is like a box of chocolates” vein. Hidden behind the sugary sweetness, the concept of our mortality is the central pillar that holds this elongated story up, and leads to a satisfactory conclusion.

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