The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (2008)

PG-13, but that is really pushing the limit.  There were two f-bombs that I counted.  Like movies of this type (which I'll be pointing out later), there's also a woven sexuality running all the way through the film.  Fincher has never shied away from uncomfortable visuals as well, which Benjamin Button has a few.  It's never overt or over the top, but it honestly is pushing the PG-13 limits sometimes.

DIRECTOR:  David Fincher

I was really hoping that I had watched this one in the last ten years so I wouldn't have to write about it.  It's such a healthy attitude, talking about how much I don't want to write at all times.  It's just that The Curious Case of Benjamin Button is so...basic.  That's such a dismissive thing to say for a movie that probably changed a lot of people's lives.  It was a big deal in 2008, but I don't know if time has looked well on this movie.  Now, the dismissive answer would be to chalk it up to the uncanny valley special effects that seemed so revolutionary at the time.  But really, this is a movie that we've all seen almost too many times.

Just so I'm not beating around the bush, you've seen this movie even if you haven't seen this specific movie. It's both Forrest Gump and Big Fish.  That's also dismissive...but is it really?  It's  a certain subgenre that almost, as if by design, uses a lot of the same plot elements by design.  The English teacher part of me is yelling that "Flashback" is not a subgenre.  But in the case of this, we're dealing with the story of men who have been considered ultimately unimportant by society revealing their own almost-beyond-belief greatness through anecdotes.  The only thing that makes The Curious Case of Benjamin Button slightly different from those other movies is that the story is technically told with the involvement of the female lead. Now, I call shannigans on that a little bit too, mainly because the story is just a read aloud version of a man's diary.  You have a few moments when Daisy (is she named such because F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote the short story that this film is loosely built upon?) contributes what she was doing in some of these sequences?

Honestly, this movie is made in the last twenty minutes.  That has always been the takeaway for me.  If you asked me in 2008 my thoughts about this movie, I would say it was one of the greatest movies ever.  But a lot of that comes from my absolute adoration of the last twenty minutes of this movie.  Don't get me wrong.  The last twenty minutes really work because the first two-hours-and twenty minutes set up a character that is mostly likable and sympathetic. But the last twenty minutes actually kind of hits on a gold mine.  Ultimately, this movie is meant to be a commentary on how we view aging.  Okay, that's cool. But there's a chunk of the movie where the aging element really just feels like it is a conceit that isn't really doing any heavy lifting.  Now, it's a little unfair to throw that stone.  Benjamin entire middle age is fairly normal.  That's an idea behind the high concept.  But we kind of forget for a while that the aging really matters.  Basically, the concept works in extremis.  When Benjamin is born, the aging thing is fundamental to the story.  When Benjamin is about to die, the aging thing is important.  But that leaves a lot of time when this is just the story of a guy.

And just the story of a guy is interesting and terrible at the same time. Let me put this in context.  Big Fish, Forrest Gump, and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button share one other element in common.  The other thing that they have in common is the fact that they all have justifications for why the male protagonist is an absentee father.  With Forrest Gump, he kind of gets a pass.  He didn't know that he was an absentee father, which makes it a little bit more sympathetic.  But Big Fish and Benjamin Button share in its DNA (pun intended) excuses for why someone can't be around.  Now, I'll go as far as to say that Benjamin Button almost lets Benjamin off the hook for his absentee parenthood.  It's only Cate Blanchett's delivery of a key line that puts a little bit of the onus on Benjamin. She says, "I wasn't strong enough to raise both of you."  But Blanchett gives a little bit of a bite to that line.  Thank God for that because that part genuinely upsets me more than it should.

Because it is told from Benjamin's perspective, we get this narrative that Benjamin is incapable of raising his daughter.  Daisy is adamant that she would rather have Benjamin in her life than outside.  The end comes across as this narrative that Benjamin made a noble sacrifice to take care of Caroline.  But Benjamin comes back looking like an older teenager and meets the teenage Caroline.  We get all of these flashes of Benjamin in India and he still looks an appropriate age to take care of another human being.  It's not like he's feeble.  One of the key ideas behind Benjamin Button when it comes to aging is that there are a lot of parallels between the very young and the very old.  Ultimately, it's difficult to raise a kid regardless of one's age.  It just looks different.  I don't know if Fincher really sells this idea as well as he could.  The movie feels like Benjamin did the right thing when that entire notion is ultimately absurd.  The movie never really condemns Benjamin's cowardice when it comes to his role as a father and I absolutely hate this element of the story.

This is annoying that I'm pointing this out, but I kind of hate the fact that the diary as a form of storytelling doesn't really work for the whole movie.  Benjamin Button is some kind of psychic prophet or something in this movie.  I know.  This is all so stupid to complain about, but I'm going to do it.  There's a really nifty sequence --admittedly about a concept that many people have done before --arguing that one little change would have saved Daisy's dancing career.  Benjamin reports on all of the things that had to align perfectly for Daisy to be in the way of a car heading down a road that would ultimately hit her.  Okay, it's a fun, if not overused, concept.  But this is a movie that is fundamentally a first-person limited perspective. Benjamin can only report on the things that he sees.  All of the sudden, Benjamin can see the gears of the universe.  That's kind of how the whole opening sequence worked.  Benjamin has this knowledge of a clock that existed before he was born, including all the details.  He saw the war from a million miles away.  It's all artistic, but it's also cake-and-eating-it-too.

Finally, these movies also have something else in common.  All of these narratives have a sexually aggressive woman and the helplessness of a man at her wiles.  Why do we have to make Daisy so predatory on Benjamin?  I actually kind of know the answer. These characters need to be kept apart until a certain part in the movie.  By having these character flaws, the story can be stalled until the right moment, meaning that there was some kind of grand destiny that put these two togethers.  It's just a trope that I don't like.  It always makes the male character so noble and the female character seem unthinking about other people's feelings.  It's just a lot.

There's nothing really wrong with The Curious Case of Benjamin Button except for the point that it is basic.  It's a decent movie that I'm just losing elements upon a rewatch.  It seemed like it was so grandiose at one point in time.   But this watch, I honestly got a little bored.