David Fincher and Brad Pitt’s collaborations produced two of the most well-regarded movies of the 1990s, the excellent thriller Se7en and the machismo-oozing Fight Club. Now, eight years into the next decade, both Fincher and Pitt have grown tremendously as artists, and it shows in The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. Pitt has gone from sex symbol to highly respected actor, with a series of critical successes including The Assassination of Jesse James. Fincher, coming off last year’s mind-blowing Zodiac, no longer relies on the surprise twists and the flashy camera tricks of his earlier career, and has become a much more mature filmmaker.
Fincher is helped tremendously by an excellent script from Eric Roth, adapted from an F. Scott Fitzgerald short story. Benjamin Button tells the story of a man (Pitt) whose body ages backwards, that is, he’s born with the body of old man and the mind of a child. His story is told in flashback, from the perspective of a daughter reading his diary aloud to her ailing mother in the present day. With the viewer along for the ride, Button grows up (or down?) from the end of World War I until present day, falling in and out of love (with Tilda Swinton and Cate Blanchett), watching his loved ones pass away, and learning about life in the process. Essentially, Fincher is telling all of our stories, and though Button is aging backwards, his experience is oddly real and human.
It’s difficult to describe how great Pitt’s performance is, but at one point, we see the 40-something Pitt playing somebody with the mind of an 8-year-old, in 80-year-old prosthetics. Those convincing prosthetics certainly help him out, but seeing Pitt portray a character at every point in their life is mesmerizing to watch. His mostly female supporting cast do terrific jobs as well, including the up-and-coming Taraji Henson as Pitt’s surrogate mother.
For Fincher, this is certainly a departure, away from the genre movies and his stylistically driven films of the past ‘-‘- he’s certainly come a long way from directing Paula Abdul videos. Like many directors before him, Fincher has made one of those ‘films about everything’ ‘-‘- life, love, impermanence, death ‘-‘- and he’s pulled it off better than most. Some may be put off by the length ‘-‘- running at close to three hours, which is a shame because it’s a movie that I didn’t want to be over. There are some truly stand-out scenes, and the last 20 minutes will leave you with your jaw dropped, not in an M. Night Shaymalan ‘big twist’ kind of way, but a ‘damn good filmmaking’ kind of way.
The trailer makes this look like some kind of Gothic fantasy, and I have to applaud Fincher for not actually making it that way. Instead, he springboards off the one unrealistic part of the movie into unexplored territory. The result is a film that somebody at every stage of their life can relate to, not an easy thing to do. In doing so, Pitt and Fincher have created a character, movie and world that will all stand the test of time.
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