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To switch up metaphors, Button is a dazzling contraption at times, to be sure…but a contraption it remains. Unlike Milk, which felt alive in every moment of its run, the stately, strangely inert Button — despite trying to wring emotion from more death scenes than your average season of Six Feet Under — moves to a tidy, mechanical, and clockwork pulse that ultimately feels pretty far removed from the messy emotions and drawing-outside-the-lines sensations of real life. Fincher, the actors (particularly Brad Pitt, Cate Blanchett, and Taraji P. Henson), and the special effects team put forth an undeniably impressive effort, but as the movie progresses, it starts to feel more and more like what it in fact is: well-made but sloppily written Oscar bait. And the more you think about Button, the less it holds together.
Trade out feathers for hummingbirds, and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button is, for all intent and purposes, Forrest Gump. (Indeed, while Button began as a Fitzgerald short story, the two films share a screenwriter in Eric Roth. It shows.) After a Katrina-era framing device is established, involving an old, terminally ill woman sharing her last few moments with her daughter (Julia Ormond) in a New Orleans hospital, we head back to 1918 and the end of World War I, as Benjamin Button begins to recount his tale…with a Gumpish southern drawl, no less. Born “under unusual circumstances” and left at the doorstep of the local old folks’ home, Button (Pitt, good but something of a cipher), as you probably know by now, ages backwards — He begins life as a very old baby and grows younger over time, like Dick Clark or the Bob Dylan song. (I’ve skipped over a short story involving Teddy Roosevelt and a distraught clockmaker (Elias Koteas) which, with the final visual payoff of the Katrina angle, may actually be the most beautiful and affecting part of the film.)
The central conceit established, Button’s life then proceeds to follow a surprisingly Gumpian course. Raised by his take-no-guff, God-fearin’ mama (Taraji P. Henson, a much-needed breath of life throughout) and considered a “special child” by all around him, Button eventually embarks on a series of grand adventures. He hooks up with a gruff but lovable sea captain (Jared Harris, nothing at all like Lt. Dan) who teaches him the ways of the world. He eventually finds himself in the midst of war, and spends several years traveling by himself all around the globe. And throughout his days, he finds himself continually drawn to his childhood friend turned free spirit, Jenny…uh, Daisy (Blanchett, graceful, alluring and thoroughly unDylanesque). But Daisy, like the rest of us, is aging along the usual lines. (Indeed, given that Daisy is a prima ballerina, her window of time seems that much shorter and more precious.) How can Benjamin and Daisy forge anything lasting when they’re at best two ships passing in the night? However happy they are at any given moment, time is against them and they know it. And time, whether one ages backwards or forwards, has a way of inexorably marching on.
There are scenes (such as Daisy trying to seduce Benjamin through dance one midsummer night) and vignettes (such as Benjamin and Tilda Swinton in their own version of Lost in Translation) that are eminently engaging throughout, and yet The Curious Case of Benjamin Button ultimately seems to add up to less than the sum of its parts. (This is particularly true of the last hour, where it begins to devolve into an interminably long Abercrombie & Fitch ad.) Part of the problem is that the script starts beating its central thesis — “time keeps slipping, slipping, slipping into the future” — into the ground after awhile. But, even allowing for that, there are clumsy plot holes throughout. Ben and Daisy (well, Ben) reach a decision near the end of the film that makes zero sense from any perspective, other than to add further poignancy to their romance. Characters are created (Benjamin’s sister, Julia Ormond’s dad) that seem to have no other purpose than to drive the story along, and disappear as soon as it’s convenient.
Taking a step back from the basic plot mechanics, Button often seems confused about what it really wants to say. At times, it veers in the direction of “No fate but what we make“…ok, I’m all for free will. Later, in the middle going, it digresses in Paris for a visually arresting but totally-out-of-left-field Amelie-style reverie on the cruel vagaries of luck. (Which seems clever, until you realize that the entire sequence makes no sense given that we’re meant to have been reading from Button’s diary the whole time.) But if free will and/or randomness is the order of the day, then why do Ben and Daisy seem to keep circling each other all their lives (and why do so many second-tier characters seem to hold down the same jobs their parents did?) Is it…fate? I wasn’t expecting Button to come up with a unified theory of the universe or anything — Life sure doesn’t have one that I’m yet aware of. (Ok, other than “life is a box of chocolates,” etc. etc.) But the movie is so emphatic and precise about the short term points it’s making that, taken as whole, it all seems a bit poorly thought through.
Now, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button isn’t a disaster by any means. In fact, it’s one of the most sumptuously filmed movies I’ve seen this year. Still, as I walked out of the theater — and even more in the days since — I found the film wanting. At first, I assumed the problem was Fincher, who’s a quality director (Zodiac, Fight Club) but whose style might’ve been too cool, clinical, and remote for this particular project. But, the more I think about it, it was probably Fincher’s distance and reserve that prevented Button from becoming an unwatchable schmaltzfest. (Roth seems the real culprit.) In any case, Benjamin Button is a likable lad who shows occasional flashes of real potential. But, other than that whole aging-young thing, he unfortunately doesn’t end up seeming all that special.
Defiant and almost combative about the cinematic merits of Australia (“A lot of the film scientists don’t get it“), director Baz Luhrmann announces he’s moving right ahead on a new film version of The Great Gatsby. “If you wanted to show a mirror to people that says, ‘You’ve been drunk on money,’ they’re not going to want to see it. But if you reflected that mirror on another time they’d be willing to…People will need an explanation of where we are and where we’ve been, and ‘The Great Gatsby’ can provide that explanation.‘”
“I was born under unusual circumstances.” The moody and mesmerizing teaser for David Fincher’s The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, from the short story by F. Scott Fitzgerald and youtubed in Spanish a few weeks ago, is now officially online, and in hi-def.
As seen in front of Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (twice), Brad Pitt goes back in time in the trailer for David Fincher’s Curious Case of Benjamin Button, from the story by F. Scott Fitzgerald and also featuring Cate Blanchett, Tilda Swinton, Taraji P. Henson, Jason Flemyng, Elias Koteas and Julia Ormond. (Until it officially is released, this is the Spanish-language version.) Looks intriguing…and is it just me, or is it exceedingly strange to see Swinton and Blanchett in the same film?
Also in today’s trailer bin: Robert DeNiro and Al Pacino look for two full hours of that Heat magic in the second preview for Jon Avnet’s Righteous Kill, also starring Carla Gugino, John Leguizamo, 50 Cent, Brian Dennehy, and Donnie Wahlberg. (I’m not sold yet, even if Inside Man‘s Russell Gewirtz is the scribe.) And, over in former Soviet Union, the new international, R-rated trailer for Timur Bekmambetov’s Wanted pops up on the grid, with James McAvoy, Angelina Jolie, Morgan Freeman, Common, Terrence Stamp, and Thomas Kretschmann. Definitely maybe…although Night Watch had a good preview too.
Update: I neglected to post this one the other day: Uptown girl Nicole Kidman and cowboy Hugh Jackman find love during World War II in the trailer for Baz Luhrmann’s historical epic Australia. Not really my cup of tea, but you never know.
“For a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.” – F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
Well, that’s that — the 2005 round-up is out-of-date. If you’ve ever seen a Terence Malick flick (Badlands, Days of Heaven, The Thin Red Line), you can guess the contours of The New World — a Fall of Eden motif, a languid, dreamlike pace, resonant images of natural splendor, conflicted characters wrapped up in voiceover self-reflection, all punctuated with the occasional underwater swimming cam and chaotic sortie of Man against Man. (At my sparsely attended afternoon show, the guy to my left fell asleep, and the woman to my right walked out.) That being said, I thought this movie was the perfect match of director and material, and one of the most transporting and beautiful films I’ve seen in years. Sure, it has some serious historical issues, and sometimes dabbles dangerously with the noble savage schtick, one of Malick’s favorite tropes. But as a work of cinema, I think it may just be a masterpiece.
The year is 1607, and — with Capt. Christopher Newport (Christopher Plummer) at the helm and Capt. John Smith (Colin Farrell) in the brig — three English ships put to in a sun-dappled marshland, recently named after their late Virgin Queen. Short of food and enthusiasm after their exhausting Atlantic crossing, these new arrivals to the New World convey a tense hello to the “naturals,” construct a fort, plant a few token crops, and then begin frantically panning for gold and silver. When it soon becomes clear that the survival of the fledgling settlement will require both the forbearance and the trade of the nearby Powhatans, Smith is sent to visit the tribe in hopes of striking a deal. There, he is saved from a grisly death in the longhouse by the love, compassion, and curiosity of young Pocahontas (a radiant Q’Orianka Kilcher), daughter of the chief. (Lucky for Smith, and as the story goes, he gives her fever.)
Here is where some historical purists might start checking out (if they haven’t already), as the much-written-about romance between John Smith and Pocahontas, however enthroned in our overly happy tales of early Native American contact, probably didn’t happen. (The tale of his being saved may well be true, but it was probably an elaborate but traditional tribal ritual, one in which Chief Powhatan displayed his magnanimity to a potential rival by having a family member spare his life.) Similarly, the later relationship between Pocahontas and John Rolfe, America’s first (white) tobacco entrepreneur (Christian Bale, so that‘s how Batman made his money) had less to do with the chastened love story shown here than with an attempt to keep the peace — In Rolfe’s own words, he married “for the good of this plantation, for the honour of our countrie, for the glory of God, for my owne salvation, and for the converting to the true knowledge of God and Jesus Christ, an unbeleeving creature, namely Pokahuntas,” in that order.
Some other details rankle too. I’m not a colonial historian, but I highly doubt the brief reign of Capt. Wingfield (David Thewlis) ended exactly as it’s shown here. (Speaking of Thewlis and a la Thin Red Line, there are a number of recognizable actors skulking about Jamestown, including Ben Chaplin and Noah Taylor, and one film-fan cameo presiding over the Court of King James.)
But, really. To get too hung up on the history here is — quite literally — missing the forest for the trees. Like other Malick films, The New World is about impressions and evocations more than plot mechanics, and in that sense it’s a revelation. Through both natural sights and wondrous sound editing, the film does a stunning job of conveying the sublime strangeness of the other, and the magic and terror of an unfamiliar environment. In fact, the movie does it twice — Wes Studi has some powerfully haunting scenes in the third act, when, as an envoy of Powhatan, he is dumbfounded by the starkly manicured gardens of Europe. After the overgrown wilderness of Virginia, he — and we — might as well be on Mars. (Along those lines, I can’t remember the last time a film altered my perspective so much on the way out. After two and a half hours in this World, the Upper West Side seemed a bizarrely cluttered and unnatural realm for the rest of the evening.)
Terence Malick’s The New World is a masterfully crafted tale of discovery and transformation, passion and misunderstanding, intimacy and heartbreak, love and loss, and worlds Old and New. In short, it’s the best film of 2005 (and well-worth seeing on a big screen.)
In related news, David Fincher has also picked a new project, and it’s F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Benjamin Button, about a man who begins aging backwards at the age of 50. Well, I haven’t seen a second of it, and it’s already more interesting than Panic Room.
“In the summer of 1937, broke, in debt and trying desperately to dry out, F. Scott Fitzgerald moved to Hollywood, where he joined the legions of jerks with Underwoods…” The University of South Carolina acquire the papers of Fitzgerald’s late Hollywood years, which disclose that the author of Gatsby actually struggled to make the Great American Movie, to no avail.