Running Backwards
by Julia M. Klein
DECEMBER 23, 2008 TAGS:
In F. Scott Fitzgerald’s 1922 short story, Benjamin Button, the scion of an elite Baltimore family, is born on the eve of the Civil War as a 70-year-old man. Over time, he grows gradually younger, in both body and mind. In the course of his odd, backwards existence, he marries and then leaves his aging wife, serves valorously in the U.S. Army and is expelled from it, is rebuffed by Yale and attends Harvard, and lives long enough to be his own grandchild’s playmate.
Fitzgerald’s “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” is wry, sardonic, and fleetingly poignant. Director David Fincher’s overlong but affecting film adaptation, opening on Christmas, dispenses with satire and wallows gustily in sentimentality. Screenwriter Eric Roth (Forrest Gump) gives the tale a contemporary frame, as well as melodrama and images evocative of James Cameron’s 1997 film Titanic -- from the omnipresence of water to the powerful, doomed romance at its heart.
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button fast-forwards Benjamin’s birth to the end of World War I and transplants him in a sepia-toned New Orleans working-class milieu – specifically, a shabby-genteel old-age home where his black adoptive mother, Queenie, serves as a caregiver. This is an environment in which “death was a common visitor,” as Benjamin notes in his role as narrator. To add metaphorical resonance, Benjamin’s story is linked, somewhat awkwardly, to another myth, about a backwards-running clock made by the God-like figure of a blind clockmaker who has lost his son to war. The yearning to reverse death -- by reversing time itself -- is the central conceit of the film.
The most interesting change from Fitzgerald’s original is one that serves to underscore the terrible poignancy of Benjamin’s fate. The cinematic Benjamin (Brad Pitt, with help from terrific makeup and digital-effects artists) ages differently from his literary counterpart: He enters the world with the wrinkled features and arthritic limbs of a man in his 80s, but the mental processes of the infant he otherwise resembles. He matures mentally and emotionally even as his appearance grows more youthful; his spirit and his body are mostly at odds, except during a few halcyon years.
Those are the years that Benjamin spends making love at sunset (or is it sunrise?) with a dancer and ballet teacher named Daisy (Cate Blanchett, whose character’s name is purloined from Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby). The pair meet when they are both, in effect, children. The connection they make is immediate and strong. Their paths keep crossing, as Benjamin gets younger and Daisy grows up, but other lovers and a tragic accident keep them apart. At one point, he watches longingly as she dances to Rodgers and Hammerstein’s “If I Loved You” from Carousel, another tale of doomed love.
Benjamin and Daisy finally intersect for a glorious, all-too-brief interlude that comes to an inevitable (but arguably premature) end. But the heart, it turns out, does go on.
As well as a love story, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button is a picaresque: It follows its protagonist on a series of adventures with willing mentors: riding a New Orleans streetcar with an African friend, visiting a brothel with his biological father, engaging in his first affair, in Russia, with a married marathon swimmer, and plying the seas on a tugboat with a tattoo-artist captain. The lingering images of the tugboat in snow and fog are visual poetry.
But what we keep waiting for – perhaps impatiently – is for Brad Pitt to become recognizably himself, at which point clearly no woman will be able to resist him. From then on, the film has us inexorably in its grip, playing out the pending tragedy in ways both predictable and unexpected, much like life itself.
Benjamin endures the loss of loved ones: his father, the tugboat captain, the matriarchal Queenie. (“We’re meant to lose the people we love,” Queenie says at one point. “How else would we know how important they are to us?”) But there is a painful twist: As Benjamin ages backwards, he must also suffer the loss of himself. Back in the rest home where he first found acceptance as a childlike old man, he faces a childhood plagued by the infirmities of senescence.
The lessons of The Curious Case of Benjamin Button – life and love are fleeting, death gives life meaning, seize the day – are familiar. But this ambitious movie, like the hurricane that arrives to engulf its present-day characters, still packs a mighty punch.
Julia M. Klein, a cultural reporter and critic in Philadelphia and a contributing editor at the Columbia Journalism Review, is a regular contributor to Obit.
Fitzgerald’s “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” is wry, sardonic, and fleetingly poignant. Director David Fincher’s overlong but affecting film adaptation, opening on Christmas, dispenses with satire and wallows gustily in sentimentality. Screenwriter Eric Roth (Forrest Gump) gives the tale a contemporary frame, as well as melodrama and images evocative of James Cameron’s 1997 film Titanic -- from the omnipresence of water to the powerful, doomed romance at its heart.The Curious Case of Benjamin Button fast-forwards Benjamin’s birth to the end of World War I and transplants him in a sepia-toned New Orleans working-class milieu – specifically, a shabby-genteel old-age home where his black adoptive mother, Queenie, serves as a caregiver. This is an environment in which “death was a common visitor,” as Benjamin notes in his role as narrator. To add metaphorical resonance, Benjamin’s story is linked, somewhat awkwardly, to another myth, about a backwards-running clock made by the God-like figure of a blind clockmaker who has lost his son to war. The yearning to reverse death -- by reversing time itself -- is the central conceit of the film.
The most interesting change from Fitzgerald’s original is one that serves to underscore the terrible poignancy of Benjamin’s fate. The cinematic Benjamin (Brad Pitt, with help from terrific makeup and digital-effects artists) ages differently from his literary counterpart: He enters the world with the wrinkled features and arthritic limbs of a man in his 80s, but the mental processes of the infant he otherwise resembles. He matures mentally and emotionally even as his appearance grows more youthful; his spirit and his body are mostly at odds, except during a few halcyon years.
Those are the years that Benjamin spends making love at sunset (or is it sunrise?) with a dancer and ballet teacher named Daisy (Cate Blanchett, whose character’s name is purloined from Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby). The pair meet when they are both, in effect, children. The connection they make is immediate and strong. Their paths keep crossing, as Benjamin gets younger and Daisy grows up, but other lovers and a tragic accident keep them apart. At one point, he watches longingly as she dances to Rodgers and Hammerstein’s “If I Loved You” from Carousel, another tale of doomed love.
Benjamin and Daisy finally intersect for a glorious, all-too-brief interlude that comes to an inevitable (but arguably premature) end. But the heart, it turns out, does go on. As well as a love story, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button is a picaresque: It follows its protagonist on a series of adventures with willing mentors: riding a New Orleans streetcar with an African friend, visiting a brothel with his biological father, engaging in his first affair, in Russia, with a married marathon swimmer, and plying the seas on a tugboat with a tattoo-artist captain. The lingering images of the tugboat in snow and fog are visual poetry.
But what we keep waiting for – perhaps impatiently – is for Brad Pitt to become recognizably himself, at which point clearly no woman will be able to resist him. From then on, the film has us inexorably in its grip, playing out the pending tragedy in ways both predictable and unexpected, much like life itself.
Benjamin endures the loss of loved ones: his father, the tugboat captain, the matriarchal Queenie. (“We’re meant to lose the people we love,” Queenie says at one point. “How else would we know how important they are to us?”) But there is a painful twist: As Benjamin ages backwards, he must also suffer the loss of himself. Back in the rest home where he first found acceptance as a childlike old man, he faces a childhood plagued by the infirmities of senescence.
The lessons of The Curious Case of Benjamin Button – life and love are fleeting, death gives life meaning, seize the day – are familiar. But this ambitious movie, like the hurricane that arrives to engulf its present-day characters, still packs a mighty punch.
Julia M. Klein, a cultural reporter and critic in Philadelphia and a contributing editor at the Columbia Journalism Review, is a regular contributor to Obit.
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mani nasry wrote on January 8, 2009 8:53pm
CHECK MANI NASRY IN 'FLASHBACK" Used After Effects to color correct the opening sequence in effort to give it a news footage feel, adding subtle drop-outs and video glitches. For the murder scene, camera shake was added in post, along with color correction, in order to match the increasingly hostile mood. Blood was animated and composited in After Effects in a verite style, creating an immediacy for the viewer, as if the blood was actually splattering on the voyeuristic camera lens. These effects were designed to accentuate and compliment Mani Nasry’s dramatic performance in “FLASHBACK”. STEELE is an award winning full service post production and visual effects studio. Credits include commercial campaigns for some of the world’s most recognized brands, in addition to film, television and music videos for today’s most popular artists. [Report Comment]
Mary C wrote on December 31, 2008 3:03am
Queenie wasn't the one who said, "We're meant to lose the people we love, how else would we know how important they are to us?" The person who actually said it was the lady that taught Benjamin how to play the piano but he never could remember her name. [Report Comment]
