Lex Romero
Posts: 412
Joined: 30/9/2005
From: southampton
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I was so disappointed by this. The concept, the director, the actors - promised so much more than was delivered. Perhaps I was expecting too much.
With the film dealing with such big themes of life, death and love I wanted it to elucidate the kind of thoughs and fears I have about them but am unable to put into words, I hoped it would speak to me on some level, give insight, put words or visuals to these massive ideas. Instead I got nothing but half hearted attempts at depth, cliched 'meaningful' phrases ("it's never too late!") and the kind of thoughts I'd had when I was 16 (everything is affected by everything else! If only one thing was different omgz!) just dumped on film without any attempt to say anything more about them.
There just feels like there's so much more to say here, so many more interesting ideas they could have dealt with. They only touch on them briefly in the film, glance at them but never bother to concentrate on them. Benjamin just feels so passive, he has nothing to say about his situation, and no one seems to have much to say to him about it. I came out of the film thinking "Is that it? Is that all they have to say about life and death and love?" You could throw out the "art is interpretive" and I should try and take what I can from the film, but it gives nothing to read into. Any small moments of depth are never followed up on that I feel like they must have only been their by chance as they're quickly replaced by feeble answers to simple questions.
The "if this hadn't happened, or this" scene goes on for far too long, feels like it's from a different film (hello Amelie), talked to me like I was a 5 year old and is completely pointless and irrelevent when it doesn't bother to mention "If Daisy hadn't been stupid enough to dance into the middle of the road she wouldn't have been run over". It also breaks the internal logic of the film - i thought this was meant to be reading from Button's diary, how did he find out all that information about all those people? Why put in this diary concept if you're only going to have to break it later on? In fact the diary concept seems completely unneeded as the hospital scenes are painfully under developed. It also would have made the later scenes with him becoming a child again far more effective if it had been Benjamin just narrating his life as it went along, rather than the distancing diary entries. The idea of slowly becoming a child again reminds me of Flowers for Algernon when Charlie begins to lose his intelligence. That was heartbreaking. BB could have been heartbreaking here, but because we're constantly distanced from teh characters I feel nothing.
So with all this a friend said "ok maybe you were expecting too much, surely the love story was touching?". No. Not at all. Daisy was insufferable. Selfish and annoying, "oh dancing is so wonderful, I love dancing, and new york, it's amazing blah blah blah" constantly. Some claimed that she redeemed herself in later scenes when she had matured and that's why Benjamin was with her (she needed to mature) but they never show this. All I get is "Benjamin is in love with some annoying girl, she can't be with him till she is mature enough to be with him", but why is he in love with her? What is it? Oh and god I hated the early bit where we had Bejamin saying how beautiful child Daisy was and then Daisy's daughter says "hey mom, did you realise then that he loved you from the first moment he saw you?". Murr, no shit! Yes thank you for explaining the plot to me.
The issue of ageing seems confused as well. He's physically old but mentally young. But then we have the sex scene where apparantly he's physically fit as well. In fact the whole ageing issue is so under developed. There's a good scene where Benjamin goes to visit daisy in NY and they go to a party. He sees Daisy dancing with some younger man and there's an old man stood to the side. Right there, there's something to explore. Yes he looks old but he's young on the inside, but at the same time because he's been raised as an old man he has this odd sense of being old before his time. I wanted more of this explored, how he deals with it and feels, does being in an old body leave his personality old in some way?
Even the directing is lacklustre. There's none of the inventiveness I've come to espect from Fincher, it's pretty boringly shot. The only memorable scenes I can think of is the boat attack, which had this fantastic sense of awe and dread. The CGI/make up effects are obviously fantastic and I can only repeat what others have said about them. But they're wrapped up in a film that offers me nothing other than childish and cheesy sentiment.
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My Film list for 2009:
http://www.empireonline.com/forum/tm.asp?m=2164869&mpage=39
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