Benjamin Button: World Exclusive

Benjamin Button: World Exclusive

Posted on Friday November 21, 2008, 17:06 by Nev Pierce in Empire States

The first word on David Fincher's latest masterpiece...

You probably shouldn't read this.

You should probably cocoon yourself, avoid speculations or declarations and queue for a ticket on Christmas Day (US) or 22 January (UK), when David Fincher's The Curious Case Of Benjamin Button will be birthed into the wider world.

You should probably show some self-discipline.

But, you know, we don't always do what we should.

Still, if you want a pure experience, go away.

If you want a brief reassurance that your money and time and expectations won't be wasted, know this: The Curious Case Of Benjamin Button is brilliant and beautiful and beguiling and any other adulatory adjective you can chuck at a movie. Now go away.

Still curious?

OK.

Daisy (Cate Blanchett) is dying. Lying in a New Orleans hospital that's being lashed by nature - Hurricane Katrina is squalling outside - she takes shallow breaths and tells her daughter, Caroline (Julia Ormond), of a hand-crafted clock created by Mr Gateaux (Elias Koteas). A timepiece designed to run in reverse, it hangs in a grand train station as a hope that the boys who died in World War One might come back, wounds healed, dreams resuscitated...

It's a curious clock, a curious beginning: the film flecked and faded, its element eaten away by time... until Caroline begins to read from a journal, the Last Will and Testament of Benjamin Button (Brad Pitt), her voice segues into his and a life story unspools, as visually pristine as it is emotionally exhausting.

Benjamin is born "under unusual circumstances", as the New Orleans sky fizzes with fireworks celebrating the end of the Great War and his mother dies bloodied on her bed. The "boy" is geriatric: body worn out, face like a punctured football. His distraught father (Jason Flemyng) abandons him outside a rest home, where he is discovered by the matron, Queenie (Taraji P Henson), and raised with the belief he is on the brink of death. Yet as everyone else wastes away, he grows stronger, younger. He is an old man with the mentality of a child - playing with toy soldiers, making friends with the granddaughter, Daisy, of another resident - and as much as Death is taken for granted, it is not his time yet. Benjamin Button has a lot more living to do...

And that is enough - perhaps far too much - detail for now... Benjamin travels, grows, loves, loses, sees the world first through fresh eyes in a faded body, then through peepers deepened by experience yet a body rejuvenated - skin hydrated, muscles built up, blessed now with youth and beauty and looking, let's face it, a lot like Brad Pitt.

Pitt's is a performance so good it could go unnoticed: subtle and seamless and gloriously free from any actorly pretention, any obsequiousness. It could easily be underappreciated amid the sure-to-come hyperbole (here, for starters) about the picture's digitally-aided aging. And ok, the effects are extraordinary - you see Pitt as a pensioner and then as a young buck, as vital and offensively good looking as he was in Thelma & Louise.

Yet the effect would fall flat were it not founded on his performance - it is his features that express Benjamin in each age: his eyes that show the man's wit and tenderness, soul and sorrow. The picture takes a long time to reach its sweet spot, the moment where Benjamin and Daisy (Cate Blanchett) can be together, but the long build makes the sequence all the more exhilarating - and heart-breaking.

For, yes, The Curious Case Of Benjamin Button may well make your eyes leak. But, you know, so can Lethal Weapon if you've had a bad day... In this regard, Fincher's achievement is not just that the film moves you but that it does so without being cloyingly sentimental.

To credit him is not to diminish Eric Roth's screenplay - which is a triumph of imagination and expansion, giving substance to themes the F Scott Fitzgerald source story only, at best, hinted at, and soul to characters who were ciphers. But with a needy director, even a fine script can become syrupy vomit.

That potential has always been there with this material - for a film that begs for your affections, that is desperate to ingratiate. This is why the director of Se7en and Fight Club was considered, in some quarters, a curious fit. But it is why he is perfect for it. Instead of crassly manipulating your emotions, Fincher exercises his usual scrupulous control, creating a real world for this ridiculous conceit, ensuring the high concept does not dwarf the people.

And while the film can be tagged a romantic fable, it takes in more than that suggests - it has a globe-spanning, epic scope, journeying from Russian to India, through World War Two (in an awesome sea battle); taking on cultural shifts, the growth of a country as well as a man. It has a depth and grace to it you could barely anticipate.

The Curious Case Of Benjamin Button makes you consider the world anew... at least for a moment (but probably for a lot longer). It is about love, yes, and it is about Death: an event as inevitable as the rising of the sun, as the turning of the Earth. To be, perhaps, schmaltzy - in a way the film would never countenance - it says the grave need not triumph over your day today... Grasp the now. Live in each moment. Take a hand and hold it.

"You met me at a very strange time in my life."

Tock-tick tock-tick tock-tick tock-tick tock-tick...

Now go away.