Narender - Exploration

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button

Directed by: David Fincher

Cast: Brad Pitt, Cate Blanchett

Running Time: 2 hrs 45 mins

Rating: PG-13

Plot: After being born to an affluent New Orleans family and abandoned minutes later due to his disturbing appearance, young Benjamin Button seems anything but — his skin is wrinkly, his hair is white, his bones are arthritic and his eyes are spotted with cataracts. But that doesn’t stop Queenie (Taraji P. Henson), who manages a nursing home, from adopting him as her own. As time passes, Benjamin seems to be getting healthier, stronger and younger with each passing day. It isn’t long before he meets Daisy (Cate Blanchett), then a young girl, who changes his very strange life forever.

As time passes, and Benjamin gets younger, his loved ones get older. Each minute brings them all closer to death—albeit from very different directions—and also, in some very unexpected ways, toward life.

Movie Tralier : -

Who’s It For? Because of its sizable running time, kids are better left at home. But the film’s unique premise gives it extremely broad appeal and makes it a perfect Christmas flick (if a bit heavy).

Expectations:There’s a certain limit on audience expectations when it comes to fantasy plots like this one, but its enough to get people in the door. Then there are surprises aplenty.

Actors:

Brad Pitt as Benjamin Button: Oddly, because of the effects wizardry that goes into making Pitt look both older and younger at each stage of life, it’s tough to tell how much of Benjamin as we see and hear him is actually Pitt an any given time. And yet we feel the dry, minimalist quality of Pitt’s technique at every step. His isn’t a terribly memorable performance, but his character is interesting enough (and yet somehow simple enough) to work well with its actor’s admittedly limited skill set.

Cate Blanchett as Daisy: Hers’ is without question the strongest performance in the film, especially in the frame story. We see her change constantly and realistically Online, and we’re able to effectively see Benjamin through her prism. Blanchett once again proves she’s not only a great complement to Pitt (the two also starred together in the 2006 film Babel) she also reasserts herself as one of her generation’s finest.

Talking: The film is crammed with lush characters, and it’s the dialogue that helps animate them. Eric Roth has woven a rich story around Benjamin’s life, much of it resting on the often fragile relationships between characters. These relationships continually complicate and intensify, and the payoff at the end makes the ride worthwhile.

Sights: Though the film doesn’t feel effects-heavy, there’s no question that it is. Besides making the main characters look both older and younger at the appropriate points, CGI is used to help fill in the backdrops of many of the scenes and add to the action, like when Benjamin’s fishing boat encounters a German U-Boat, and combat ensures. This, though, is how digital effects should be employed—to help tell the story, not single-handedly make the story.

Sounds: Beautifully scored and flawlessly mixed, Benjamin Button is a round technical achievement. The soundtrack, not unlike Pitt’s performance, is underplayed purposefully so when it is punched up, the audience takes notice.

PLOT SPOILERS

Best Scene: The closing scene, as the strings are drawn around the elaborate web of Benjamin’s life, is an emotional powerhouse—wonderfully shot, scored, performed and edited. It’s what a film is supposed to be.

Ending: It’s impossible to spoil this movie. What we all expect to happen in the end…well…happens. But it isn’t the ending itself that makes the film—it’s how the audience is able to respond to it that speaks volumes about Fincher’s achievement.

Questions: What exactly happens to Daisy in the end? I feel better not knowing, but the curiosity is still there.

Rewatchability: Though it’s long, it’s just too damn good to not see again (and in my case, again and again and again).

OVERALL

Benjamin Button is a delightful mix between Forest Gump and The Notebook, but in many ways it’s better than both those films. Everything seems to fall into the place in the final moments, symbolism appears everywhere, and in one of those rare moments in movies today, things just crystallize.

The film’s length is its only real downside, but even this is forgivable because the time isn’t wasted. Fincher uses it to get to the core of the story, which deals with the very universal (if a bit clichéd) theme of how we live our lives, versus how long.

It does what many films aren’t doing; it allows secondary characters to carry the film and make the main players even better for it. Pitt is surrounded by Grade A talent from all over the globe (Tilda Swinton and Jason Flemyng, just to name a few) and the result is, hands down, one of the best films this year.

Movie Review : -

The late film critic Pauline Kael might have been right to rigidly refuse to see a movie more than once.  What at first seems a breath of fresh air, on second glance seems a tad stale and what is overlooked in the rush to take in the filmmaker’s overwhelming vision becomes apparent after a second go round.  This has been my experience with The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, the sumptuous romantic epic that marks the third collaboration between director David Fincher and Brad Pitt in which Pitt co-stars with the luminous Cate Blanchett.

Who would’ve thought Fincher, with his overtly sour resume would make what on first look seems such a strangely sweet movie as this?  Based on the sliver thin but tantalizing conceit by F. Scott Fitzgerald, the story follows the title character who is born old at the end of the First World War and then grows younger as the years advance and his on and off again romance with the red-haired Daisy, a free spirited dancer.  Pitt and Blanchett play the two love birds whose romance blooms in the middle when their ages and superb physical specimens finally match up.  But the romance is doomed because as Daisy ages Benjamin continues getting younger until he is glimpsed as a young boy beset with Alzheimer’s and old age maladies, and finally, as a baby, lying in Blanchett’s withered arms.  It’s not quite explained how Benjamin physically shrinks, however.

Also not explained is why – beyond the early physical fascination – the other characters are so drawn to the emotionally withdrawn Benjamin, who, until his affair with Daisy takes hold, seems only to exist by drawing on the life forces of the other characters.  The lively swirl of humanity surrounding Benjamin – his black step-mother, an artistic piano teacher, a “character” who takes him to a sporting house for his first physical encounter, a rough hewn sea captain, an icy diplomat’s wife, his guilt ridden father, etc. – all seem to leave more than they take from Benjamin the Black Hole who never reacts much to anything beyond a cautious smile.  Pitt’s character is a vacuum at the center of the film sucking in all the others and not really giving anything back.  That is until he finally looks like the movie star Brad that audiences have enshrined since Thelma & Louise.  The film finally comes to life when we see Pitt astride his Harley, a latter day golden haired Brando, as the women and gay men in the audience swoon and everyone looks on in
envy at such physical beauty and the confidence it projects.

The story is told in flashback by the dying Daisy to her daughter (Julia Ormond) as Hurricane Katrina is about to strike New Orleans.   This hoary old framing device offers Blanchett the chance to practice her old lady emoting and the special effects and make-up departments go wild at the opportunity but these scenes really add nothing to the overlong, episodic story.  Nor does Pitt as the elusive Benjamin, though for the first hour of the picture he also gets to play old and narrates the picture in his southern accent (his bland monotone voice works, however, because the character’s such a cipher).   Blanchett, playing the emotional Southern belle, a dancer whose career is cut short is just the opposite and her porcelain, delicate beauty and line shadings are entrancing.

The movie is gorgeously filmed with much of it given a golden glow.  It’s mostly set in New Orleans and the combination of the sultry cinematography, the vintage Dixie Land jazz heard on the soundtrack and a handful of quirky characters turns the city into one of the film’s strongest characters (it’s like a faded valentine rediscovered).  The New Orleans jazz is matched by another pretty, shimmering score by Alexandre Desplat.

Overall, the film seems more like a beautiful curio than anything else, a sort of artsy fartsy Forest Gump with the love affair played out against the great events of the 20th century (this is not unexpected as both scripts were penned by Eric Roth, this one co-written by Robin Swicord).  The relationship between Benjamin and Daisy has many of the stop/start aspects of Pip and Estella from Dickens “Great Expectations” that Roth also used in Gump but there’s not nearly as much of Pip’s romantic yearning that practically leaps off Dickens’ pages.  Pitt as Benjamin says a lot more in voice over than he ever seems to impart to Daisy (and the less said about Pitt’s affair during the strange Russian episode with Tilda Swinton, playing yet another iceberg, the better).  Also like Gump, many of the
voiceovers begin to sound like parody a second time around.  But there is something undeniably cool and weird and oddly compelling here – it’s a movie that Goths will surely adore – and whatever it is swept me away the first time I saw the film.

After that first screening of The Curious Case of Benjamin Button I thought something the piano teacher tells Pitt was the message of the movie.  Commenting about his tentative playing she says with reassurance, “It doesn’t matter how well you play, it matters how much you feel” but on reflection I think what Fincher the fatalist is really trying to impart is another of his grim messages – albeit one disguised within the center of his golden romance.  So movie romantics are warned to see the film once and never again because Fincher’s saying what he’s pretty much said in all his dour pictures and it’s the antithesis of what any hopeless romantic fool likes to take home from a movie – life sucks, then you die – and sometimes you leave behind a teeny, tiny corpse.