Thursday, January 22, 2009

Benjamin Button: Curiously Bad


I have a love hate relationship with Brad Pitt. On one hand, I think the guy can act. On the other hand, I loathe it when movie stars with talent take on what seem to be movies primarily geared to push our collective buttons and make lots of money. Some actors have such great taste, you can always trust the movies they’re in. William H. Macy, for instance. Or Phillip Seymour Hoffman. But Pitt isn’t trustworthy. And neither is Cate Blanchett (also a good actress), on this front. Which is a long way of saying I was dragging my feet about seeing this movie, and was DELIGHTED when my friend, Nancy Wartik, said she’d not only seen it, but would be happy to spare me the trouble (not to mention the twelve bucks). So here, without further ado, is guest-blogger Nancy Wartik…….


Benjamin Button: Curiously Bad

Often when I go to a movie that's gotten glowing reviews, I wind up disappointed because my expectations were too high. (Wall*e fit that category, for me.) On the other hand, when I have lower hopes for a movie, I'm often pleasantly surprised. I thought my husband might enjoy Iron Man and The Dark Knight, but didn't think I’d get much from either film; I wound up loving them both.

The other night I went with two friends to see The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, even though it wasn't high on my list. I knew it was about a man who aged backwards, from old to young, and I'd seen director David Finch and Brad Pitt discuss it on Charlie Rose, though Brad's main contribution to the conversation seemed to be "uh..." and "ummm..."

Not such a promising omen. But The Class didn't seem to be playing anywhere; I'd promised my husband not to see Revolutionary Road without him; and one of my friends didn't want to see The Wrestler. So I went.

This should be the point at which I write that, in fact, against all expectation, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button turned out to be one of the best movies of this, or any other, year. Unfortunately, that would be completely untrue. It's one of the most mediocre movies of this or any other year.

The movie has its entertaining moments, but on the whole, the acting is flat, the story line disjointed, the settings and characters often gratuitous, and the ultimate "message" unclear. And one of my pet peeves is when movies about time travel or other explorations of the fourth dimension don't follow their own internal logic about how the rules should work. Benjamin Button is a prime offender.

Here's the plot, based loosely on an F. Scott Fitzgerald story: Somehow or other, a clock running backwards in a New Orleans train station in 1918 causes Brad Pitt, aka Benjamin Button, to be born looking like a baby-sized 86 year old man. His mother dies in childbirth and Benjamin, left on the steps of a nursing home, is taken in and grows up there, aging backwards.

When he's five, he has a five-year-old's mind in a child-sized 81-year-old body. When he's 13, he's got an adolescent's mind in a teenage-sized 73-year-old body. And so on, and so forth. (Throw in some theoretically humorous situations involving prostitutes, drink, and a 70-year-old adolescent, along the way.)

What else befalls Benjamin? For some reason, he's befriended by a pygmy living in New Orleans. Eventually the pygmy leaves town. Benjamin goes to work on a tugboat and then sails to Russia, where he stays in a hotel while working on the tugboat during the day. He meets Tilda Swinton, an elegant British spy, who for some reason is staying at a hotel were tugboat day laborers board. At this point, Benjamin should look as if he's in his mid-60s, and yet he's already shed enough makeup to be looking dapperly Brad Pitt-ish and maybe 50 at the most. Brad and Tilda fall in love. They have lots of good sex. Then Pearl Harbor is attacked and they each have to skedaddle. They don't have sex anymore.

Back in New Orleans, Brad/Benjy meets a childhood love, Daisy, who's grown up to be Cate Blanchett, radiating little in the way of warmth or charm in this role. Daisy tries to seduce him, telling him she likes older men (though at this point, Benjamin ought to be in his early 60s while she's 20 or so, which gives the whole scene a creepy feel, or would if Pitt looked the appropriate age). Benjamin and Daisy part. Then they meet again in New York. Then they part again. Then they meet again in Paris. Then... well, you get the idea.

Finally, when their ages are close to meeting in the middle, they both show up in New Orleans and fall in love. They have lots and lots of good sex, despite seeming to have little onscreen chemistry. Daisy accumulates crow's feet while Benjamin loses them. But the sword of Damocles always hangs o'er the relationship because, when two lovers are aging in different directions, at some point one of them is going to wind up facing a charge of statutory rape.

The idea of a life lived backwards and how it intersects with the lives of loved ones isn't without inherent interest; it's easy to see why the movie was tempting to make. The make-up and special effects people have also done great work. But Brad Pitt is actually most convincing in his role as a little old boy-man. As Pitt's layers of make-up grow thinner, he starts to turn back into his movie star self, and that's when the movie starts faltering most seriously.

For instance, in the 1960s scenes, when Pitt should have the same long-haired hippie look everyone else did, he's clean-cut and blindingly handsome in his t-shirt and shades, looking as if he'd just stepped out of the pages of last week's People magazine.

The movie is framed by a deathbed dialogue between the aged Daisy and her daughter (Julia Ormond) who's a bit of a lost soul, though we never find out why, or very much about her at all.

Inexplicably, the movie is also set in a New Orleans hospital at the very moment Katrina's about to strike, meaning nurses periodically pop onscreen to say things like, "Well, they think the storm is probably going to blow right past us," or "Now they're saying we've all got to get out." The device does little but add to the overall choppy, inconsequential feel of the movie.

The closing minutes of the movie must have had some kind of weight because they left one of my friends in tears. Still, she insisted she's the sort who can sob over a Kleenex commercial, and she was right there with the rest of us at the cinematic post-mortem, toting up the movie's various lapses and implausibilities. Watch the movie backward or watch it forward: I found Benjamin Button's tale to be ultimately a time-waster.

-Nancy Wartik

13 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hi, Nancy. Well done review. I still won't go see it. If I couldn't even stand the trailer, how am I gonna cough up $ to endure it? I just hate everything about this movie. And if Brad wins an award for this, I'm moving back to Cuba.

-- Gigi Anders

Anonymous said...

Great review Nancy - I haven't seen it and did not really have much desire to see it. Thanks for confirming that for me!

Paula said...

A trenchant analysis of overblown Hollywood fluff.
--romewriter

Sally Belle said...

Nancy...I am sooooooo sorry your friend didn't want to see The Wrestler! It is far superior to Benjamin Button...so, much more enjoyable and moving.

Elizabeth DeVita-Raeburn said...

ha, my thoughts exactly. if your friend had only caved before you did, you would have had a FAR better evening. i was really resistant to see the wrestler--or rather, rourke's melting face--but was thoroughly won over.

Anonymous said...

"But the sword of Damocles always hangs o'er the relationship because, when two lovers are aging in different directions, at some point one of them is going to wind up facing a charge of statutory rape."

On the other hand, Nancy, if what they say about men's and women's different "primes" is true, the aging in different directions might at least explain Cate 'n' Brad's good sex!

Do you really think Pitt's a good actor, Elizabeth? I think he's more a charismatic guy who can be effective if cast well. As for William H. Macy - if you'd seen him, as I did, in the original stage version of "Oleanna," you might be less willing to trust his judgement re: good projects - !

Elizabeth DeVita-Raeburn said...

wes, you know, i'd be thrilled to write pitt off, because the whole i'm-fabulous hollywood thing annoys me, but...he does (though not consistently) turn up some pretty good performances sometimes. i just watched the assassination of jesse james via netflix and was really impressed. he scared the cr*p out of me as the notoriously volatile jesse james. i saw him awhile back in seven and twelve monkeys and thought he was good. and i thought he was quite good in a river runs through it. my exp hearing him in interviews, though, is the same as nancy's--comes across as dumb as a doorknob, profoundly inarticulate. hard to read the guy. maybe he's just well cast and directed when it all works. i don't know. but like i said, can't totally write him off. and i love cate blanchett, but hate it when she does the crowd pleasing movies. love her in stuff like notes on a scandal, though. re: macy, hmmm. well...i should say that so far he's been a good barometer, movie-wise....i always love his performances. my favorite is prob. in fargo, though...the sight of him trying to escape through that bathroom window. love it.

nancytik said...

revealed here for the first time--the name of the friend who did *not* want to see the wrestler: paula! she's the one to blame for my having to see this sorry movie.

Elizabeth DeVita-Raeburn said...

lolol. bad paula! bad! she may be a brilliant editor, but i'm not so sure about her taste in movies....

mrjumbo said...

Has anyone gone back to look up the original Fitzgerald story? I have not. But it keeps nagging at me that this is an oddity coming from a guy whose popularity came more from his knack for nailing realities of his times, whether Gatsby's pampered enclave or Hollywood's studio machinery or the numbing wall of a breakdown. This story with its Twilight Zone twist sounds (from the outside) more like Poe or Verne or maybe Dahl.

Elizabeth DeVita-Raeburn said...

i have not, but it did occur to me that it was an unlikely sounding fitzgerald story...i've actually read a lot of his short stories and never come across this one. i wonder if this one was one he did for a magazine, or something. hmmm. may have to go look for it.

Unknown said...

I'm the friend said to sob over a Kleenex commercial but I must correct this -- in fact, I cried over an AT&T 'reach out and touch someone' campaign commercial -- MUCH more dramatic than a Kleenex commercial. Otherwise I do agree with this review -- it's discouraging to see such a spotty, cliche-ridden movie is getting so much press at the Academy Awards, relative to the others.

Elizabeth DeVita-Raeburn said...

oh, At&t is MUCH more dramatic than Kleenex. Thanks for clarifying!!!! yeah, it is discouraging, isn't it? that's why i sort of feel like, eh, let them have their industry tainted awards. i'm not going to care. it's funny, when i think about making predictions...i can't decide whether to make them based on who will win, in this crass environment, or who DESERVES to win, which is a totally different ballgame.