"Our lives are defined by opportunities -- even the ones we miss."
For me, any discussion of this extraordinary movie comes along with a disclaimer. A couple of years back, I attended a wedding in New Orleans (where this happened) while "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button" was in production there. On the way to the rehearsal dinner, traffic was being routed around certain parts of the city because they were filming a night scene. I later learned that they were most likely shooting the Benjamin-Daisy seduction scene in City Park, but ever since that brief coincidence, I've been following the marketing of the movie and keeping tabs on when it might be released.
With David Fincher directing and the remarkable Cate Blanchett ("Daisy") involved, you knew this was going to be a memorable flick, if nothing else. Throw in the tremendous Taraji P. Henson, who has made a career out of stealing scenes, as "Queenie" and an understated Julia Ormond as "Caroline," and the picture starts to take shape. The question surrounded Brad Pitt's casting as "Benjamin Button" as a character fated to live his life in reverse. It's a difficult role that holds the movie together, and Pitt has and always will have questionable — if not iffy — talents as an actor. And since the movie checked in at nearly three hours, if he missed the mark in this one, it could have degenerated into an interminable disaster.
With early- to mid-20th century New Orleans as the backdrop, a period peace that spans the globe, an interweaving of Hurricane Katrina into the plot, some incredible new filming techniques that captures facial deformation and changing, and a short story to base it all off, let's just say "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button" was overly ambitious and could have fallen off the tracks in several aspects. Yet, somehow, the ambitious Fincher, together with Pitt and Blanchett, pulls this all off. Like so many sweeping period pieces of this type, perhaps this one will be remembered for being a fascinating tale more than a truly great movie.
There were many moments that were evocative of "Forrest Gump," and the last-words-of-an-essential-story-from-a-dying-woman's-bedside technique has been employed to varying success in "Titanic" and "Evening," among other movies. What helps to set "Benjamin Button" apart, however, are the cinematography that captured stunning sunrises in Lake Pontchartrain and the bayou, the beauty of New Orleans's Garden District, the grandeur of old Manhattan, the sweeping vistas of Paris, and the horrors of war on the Atlantic.
The opening scene shows us a blind clockmaker constructing an enormous clock for a brand-new train station in New Orleans. Having recently lost his son in World War I, the clockmaker designs his masterpiece to count time backwards, in hopes that going back in time will bring back his son and other dying soldiers. We then flash to August 2005, where a woman named Daisy is dying, and her daughter, Caroline is trying to say goodbye as Hurricane Katrina bears down on the Big Easy. Daisy asks her daughter to read to her from a diary that Caroline has never seen, and, predictably, Caroline discovers that her mother loved a whole life she never knew about -- or several lives, to be more accurate.
The story of Benjamin Button really starts in November of 1918, at the end of the first World War. We see a man running through Jackson Square to find his wife, who is dying in childbirth. In her last words, she makes her husband promise to care for the child, to make sure he "has a place." However, when the husband finds a son born with the grotesque appearance of an 86-year-old man, he first tries to throw the child into the Mississippi River, but then abandons him at a nursing home, where he's found by Queenie and her husband. (On a side note, you know how every three years or so, some old lady in Madagascar sees the likeness of the Virgin Mary in a potato chip? Well, the other evening I saw two overcooked potatoes that looked just like Benjamin Button as a child. So … miracles do happen and all that.)
Benjamin suffers many of the problems that one would imagine come along with being an old man trapped in a child's body, but he eventually grows a rip-roaring mullet and leaves New Orleans and his friends, including a young Daisy, behind by becoming a sailor on the tugboat Chelsea. He works under the charismatic and life-loving Captain Mike, who takes the odd and enigmatic Benjamin under his wing and shows him many, many "firsts." In defiance of his seafaring father, Captain Mike is an artist at heart, turning his body into his canvas with myriad tattoos, including a memorable one of a hummingbird. After a secretive, whirlwind affair with the wife of a British spy, Benjamin is thrust into the middle of World War II after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, along with his mates. Tasked with towing damaged American ships back to the country, the Chelsea eventually gets caught up in a firefight and sinks, with Captain Mike and most of the other sailors -- who had become Benjamin's de-facto family -- dying. The hummingbird, who will die if it ever stops flapping its wings, becomes a symbol of death for Benjamin, and after he's rescued, a hummingbird buzzes by him way out at sea.
Upon returning to New Orleans, Benjamin rekindles a friendship with a local button-maker, and unbeknownst to Benjamin, it is his father. Thomas Button has kept tabs on Benjamin throughout his life, and now near death, he reveals his true identity and bequeaths his booming button business to Benjamin. Another return reveals the death of Queenie ("It's a funny thing about comin' home. Looks the same, smells the same, feels the same. You'll realize what's changed is you."), the only family that Benjamin ever really knew. Now backtracking to near middle age, Benjamin pursues a start-and-stop relationship with Daisy, who has become a renowned dancer in New York with a taste for the fast life and easy loves. Eventually, as their ages finally meet in the middle, things click for the two, and the love-affair highlight of Benjamin's life ensues.
However, Benjamin's reaction to news of Daisy's pregnancy is bittersweet. He is haunted by thoughts that he'll be unable to be a father to his child, since he'll be regressing into childhood as his son or daughter grows. Daisy assures him that they'll find a way, but soon after Caroline is born, a strange, awkward scene is presented—without a word, Benjamin looks at his daughter and his wife and silently leaves in the dawn, hopping on his motorcycle and roaring off as Daisy looks on, shocked. To me, it seemed a little too easy for him to just walk away; I would think that the immediate bond that develops between a father and his daughter, and the thought that Benjamin finally has his own true family, would have at least made his decision to walk away more difficult. We know that what he is doing is probably technically best for all involved, but something in his behavior and decision-making process didn't ring true for me.
We follow Benjamin as he runs away to Southeastern Asia and India, among other places, always seeking something he can't quite reach. He eventually returns to New Orleans in 1980, appearing as a 25-year-old, and meets Daisy, who has since remarried, at her dance studio. Later, they share one more evening of passion in his hotel room as the reality that nothing lasts sinks in wistfully. Daisy's departure from the hotel, in which she doesn't speak a word and hardly meets Benjamin's eyes, echoes Benjamin leaving her and Caroline years before. Modern-day Caroline, who is dealing with the reality of the hurricane and her mother's impending death as she's experiencing the emotions of finally learning who her real father is, remembers meeting 25-year-old Benjamin and chastises her mother for keeping the truth from her. However, in the diary, she discovers a stack of touching postcards, one that Benjamin sent for every one of her birthdays, and they each name off another thing he wishes he could have done and experienced as her father.
As she continues reading, she learns of Benjamin's continued regression age- and maturity-wise. Suffering from dementia-like symptoms and homelessness, he eventually becomes a confused child, an angry toddler and then an infant, forcing Daisy to eventually move back into the nursing home to care for him in his final days. Painfully, we are shown Daisy teaching Benjamin to walk and talk, until he eventually gives her a look of recognition and passes away. As Caroline reaches the end of her reading, the hurricane is upon New Orleans and Daisy passes away, with her last action being to see a hummingbird flitting next to her hospital-room window before soaring away into the storm. The final scene is of the old backwards-running clock, sitting in the corner of a dusty basement, as the floodwaters lap at its edges, as Benjamin's final musings on what he learned and what his life meant reach our ears:
"Along the way you bump into people who make a dent on your life. Some people get struck by lightning. Some are born to sit by a river. Some have an ear for music. Some are artists. Some swim the English Channel. Some know buttons. Some know Shakespeare. Some are mothers. And some people can dance."
This was a movie that took nearly 15 years to progress from the idea for a remake to actual release. It was originally slated to be a Ron Howard movie starring John Travolta, eventually passed hands to Spike Jonez to direct, then finally landed in the lap of Fincher, who shot "Zodiac" first, then "Benjamin Button." Pitt likely took on the movie as a tribute to New Orleans, a place he has fallen in love with and has made a personal crusade to try to save.
I was unaware that this flick was "loosely based" on a short story by F. Scott Fitzgerald, written in 1921. In the book, Benjamin actually lives with his father instead of being abandoned by him, and he goes on to attend Harvard and become a football star until the demands of growing young make it impossible for him to compete or handle the workload. He fights in the Spanish-American War, gets married, has a son and is eventually cared for by that son as he grows younger and younger—eventually even attending kindergarten with his grandson.
I expected New Orleans to play an even larger role in this film, and based on the trailers, I expected it to be a little creepier. However, those expectations were happily discarded, and replaced by a near-epic masterwork of cinema magic. There are holes here and there and the obvious pervasive suspension of disbelief … but if you allow yourself to get swept away by the floodwaters and caught up in the tides of history and lost in the beauty of the bayou and of the intangible quality of those moments in our lives that are impactful in their purity and melancholy in their fleetingness, you'll let yourself believe for a moment.
And you'll be rewarded with an incredible movie experience.
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