Modern Classic: The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (David Fincher, 2008)
Today we go back to David Fincher's seventh feature film, in which Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett experience an unusual and impossible love story.
Imagine being born as an elderly person only to leave this world again as a baby. It happens to Benjamin Button (Brad Pitt). His mother dies in childbirth, his father (Jason Flemyng) takes one look at the child, who looks like a freak of nature and then abandons it in the ‘hood of New Orleans.
There Benjamin, who according to a doctor has all the physical characteristics of an elderly man, is taken in by Queenie (Taraji P. Henson), who works as a caretaker in a retirement home.
The elderly accept him as he is so that Benjamin has the chance to get younger in peace. In the retirement home Benjamin also meets Daisy - first played by several child actresses, then as an adult by Cate Blanchett - with whom he bonds. But because the age difference at this stage is way too big - Benjamin looks like a shrunken dwarf in his seventies, Daisy as a girl of twelve - it’s hard to figure what this friendship could ever lead to.
At the age of 65, Benjamin leaves for sea to work in a tugboat and take part in the Second World War. In a Russian port city he has an affair with a married woman (Tilda Swinton). Meanwhile, Daisy is training to become a ballet dancer and she experiences her own period of 'freedom and happiness'. After the war, Benjamin and Daisy see each other again. But only after Daisy had to cut short her ballet career after an accident and he and she have grown closer and closer in age, can they find a real great love together. Which, however, is tempered by the wistful feeling that there is no point in growing old together. “Will you still love me when I get older and my skin gets wrinkly?” asks Daisy after they have made love. “Will you still love me when i start to get pimples and pee in my bed?”, Benjamin shoots back, in a comical dialogue, which the makes the film's underlying tragedy tangible.
The film is based on a short story by F. Scott Fitzgerald (also the author of the classic ‘The great Gatsby'), about the impossibility of escaping death, even if you go from old age to birth.
David Fincher (Seven, Fight Club, The Social Network), turns it into an ode to life that, in all its imperfection, is still worth living, even if all the important events in a human life happen in reverse order.
Working from a screenplay by Eric Roth (Forrest Gump), Fincher was possibly inspired by the work of fellow filmmakers like Tim Burton (the fanciful fairy tale Big Fish) and especially Steven Spielberg (whose E.T. may have inspired the scenes with 'Benjamin as a baby').
However, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button is just as much Brad Pitt's film. Not only because the actor, with the help of fantastic makeup work, credibly transforms from old to young, but also because Pitt by this time had matured as an actor. That Cate Blanchett is terrific is perhaps a little less amazing – we've come to expect so much from her – but is still worth a separate mention.
The movie is also captivating from start to finish, and at 167 minutes that is no mean feat. The story is not only original but also developed in a credible way. The flashback structure that Fincher employs may not be very original, but that's the only criticism I can think of.
Moreover, the film raises all kinds of questions on the value of life, the loss of loved ones, the finding of a real, true love and the missed opportunities that make up our life just as much as the opportunities we do use.
That sounds heavy and, well, at times the film is too. But The Curious Case of Benjamin Button is overwhelmingly beautiful and moving.
‘Look at you – you're perfect,’ Daisy says to Benjamin at the moment when he has become a man in the bloom of his life - but it could also refer to the movie itself.
Note: The Curious Case of Benjamin Button is available through HBO Max, Google Play and various other streaming options.