the curious case of benjamin button is philosophy produced from a photograph found in the attic of american literature. it is gimmick made beautiful, which makes it a truly american film, caught between the circus and the opera as it were, and in the tradition of ‘fable americana’ films like forrest gump, and big fish. like those movies, benjamin button is a myth of the american life, making all that is wonderful about americana visible through an individual who is outside of it, but simultaneously produced by it. that benjamin button is a man who ages backwards escapes being gimmick, in that it produces pain and introspection where a less skilled director may have mined cheap, clever gags, and aspirations to the supernatural.
not that it is cursed to the fates of movies like forrest gump, big fish, and being there, which generally veer toward the fantastic and the allegorical. benjmain button in fact works in the opposite direction, as the fantastic appeals towards the ordinary, finding the extraordinary within the mundane and revealing it. brad pitt’s portrayal of benjamin button, a man who was born the day the first world war ended and ages backward, is brilliant, managing to feel like a lived reality, not simply plausible narrative. button is quiet, pensive, and wise, characteristics produced by his otherworldly adolescence. by chance of fortune, he “grows up” in a home for the elderly, and becomes acclimated to death before he really understands life, the suggestion being that only in facing and understanding death can life really be understood.
three major narrativic sites exist within the film. the first is the foundational reality of a woman dying of old age in a hospital in lousiana, hours before the landfall of hurricane katrina. as she slips off into the world from which benjamin button and the film is born, she motions to a journal, begging her daughter to read. but before the daughter takes up the text, the woman introduces a second setting for our narrative, revealing or inventing a space of legend where a blind clockmaker creates a clock that works backward, to not simply remember the victims of world war one, but in fact to mechanistically recall them. with this second narrativic site introduced, the daughter begins reading the journal positioning us finally in the film’s primary story space, a domain of the cinematic mythological, which is to say the reality that we are meant to regard as the most movie-like, and simultaneously the most fictive but instructive.
lush film tones and good pacing do the rest. though the film is nearly three hours, we are compelled further into its fiction. particularly by it’s warm, human colors, and the sense that the film, like benjamin button, is slow to life, but increasingly vital. as benjamin button becomes more brad pitt, we are encouraged to celebrate his life, which is the overwhelming goal of the film, to engage with questions about how we appreciate and perceive life. the interconnectedness of life and death, embodied by benjamin button’s birth “of unusual circumstances,” is the film’s thematic focus, which occurs even in the film’s most superficial layer, where the dying woman is reminded of her life. cate blanchett, who plays benjamin button’s red-headed love interest that eventually becomes this dying old woman, has told vanity fair that film is a muse on death. she also said that the film is “a repository for your grief, about whatever you grieve about.”
go see this movie. go see it before it is popularly hailed and taken up as the moralists’ must-see-film-of-the-year. my greatest fear, personally, is that it’s honest, brilliantly open narrative will be consumed by book club types and christian groups, who will champion is joie de vie as a dr. phil admonishment to enjoy life. which is not an unfair conclusion for the film, but it will threaten the quiet genius of pitt’s protagonist, who doesn;t need to stand up on a soap box to have an amazing meaningful life, and neither do we need to make the next forrest gump.
although it is, and better than.