The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (2008) -

A cloying spectacle of melancholic whimsy. The conceit is simple, even simplistic. Benjamin is a boy born old, a child trapped in a old man's body. However, marvelously, as Benjamin ages, his body becomes ever more youthful. Of course, this "simple" scifi paradox obliges all kinds of narrative cleverness to facilitate a legible story. I can't even bring myself to summarize it fully. The meandering maneuvers of this film detail an epic life in John Irving style, poignant quirkiness piles atop quirky poignancy, as delightful eccentrics punctuate the life path of our putative hero, Benjamin. There's the man struck by lightning seven times, the tugboat captain who's really an artist, a lovelorn woman who almost swam the English Channel, a faith healer with a heart condition, and an African man who performed as a "pygmy" in the monkey cages at the zoo. (I knew I was in trouble when the pygmy showed up shortly after a Kipling story had been read.) So, through this pile of poignant quirk, David Fincher stitches two main narrative subthemes (the peculiar estrangement intrinsic to parental love and the devastating vicissitudes of romantic timing) within the high concept's main conceit, itself a pensive riff on the glib aphorism "youth is wasted on the young." Basically, the film is a 168 minute affirmation of the idea that spiritual maturity is defined by the capacity to acknowledge and accept loss. But to make these ostensibly "big" ideas cinematic, Fincher et al decide to make a visually sumptuous film -- an epic of implausibly enlightening beauty. Indeed, the film feels, at times, like someone decided to tell someone else's life story using only those motivational prints they sell in the skymall catalog, the ones that have some aspirational ideal ("Make It Happen!") emblazoned beneath some impossibly beautiful vista (like a climber arriving to the apex of a snowy mountain). And, after a certain point, for me, the film's slideshow of profound poignancy became merely tedious, as though I was following in the footsteps of someone else's trudge of happy destiny. In short, the film -- while often captivating -- lacked an emotional urgency and/or a compelling mystery to sustain my fascination. I just wanted the many narrative threads to resolve. Indeed, one of the inadvertent problems of the film is that it depends so much on an elaborately aged Brad Pitt for its emotional hook that the one of few genuine aspects of suspense derives from the question: when is Brad gonna get pretty? And, once he does, it becomes a fleeting disappointment as we know this "real" Brad will shortly disappear again into some other elaborate cgi/make-up apparatus. (Two other problems emerge here: one, the convergence of the "unaltered" Brad and Cate almost cheapens the rest of the film, as it seems to suggest that the true height of lived experience is one's 40s; second, the filmmaker's choice to use unaltered children instead of elaborately crafted concoctions for the last years of Benjamin's life cheats the audience of the experience of our own loss of this strange, lovely creature.) But, really, whatever. The film is an elaborate, spangly concoction. I actually quite liked the way the film approached the intimate estrangement of parental love, how parenting is always a kind of loss. But the fated, destined love affair was obvious and lame. The only thing that really pissed me off, though, was the character given to Taraji P. Henson (an instinctively maternal, religiously devoted, sassy black female caregiver named "Queenie"). The day after admiring Doubt's Mrs. Muller as a black female character nearly bereft of cliche, I'm faced with a black female character that leaves no cliche un-embraced. Taraji Henson is a brilliant, charismatic actress, a actor who is gloriously capable of adding irreverent, complicating humor to even the most boilerplate of characters. And she is utterly effective in this Mammy role. But, cripes, why must her gifts be confined to this sassy black mammy character? And why is this character/ization being so celebrated? (The audience I saw the film with giggled and guffawed at the revival meeting in a way that was just beyond uncomfortable. No other group -- not even the bohemian Greenwich village hipsters or the tugboat crew -- suffers the same degree of spectacular mockery.) Taraji Henson is waaaaaaay overdue for recognition by awards bodies but this just...unfortunate. That said, I'm impressed at how -- once again -- the two most accomplished performances in this film (Taraji Henson's and Tilda Swinton's) help to underscore what is for me the central failing of the film: its inconstant, even incoherent, tone. Henson, Swinton, and even the lightning man all remind us that this film is a whimsical fantasy, even as much of the film seeps toward lugubrious epic style. Indeed, had this film been treated as a wacky, whimsical comedy approaching profound themes, I might have really been caught in its swoon. But at it was it felt like a really long episode of Touched by an Angel, or something else brought to you by the Hallmark Hall of Fame. The film is a formidable accomplishment and (judging by the audible reaction of the audience I saw it with) the film promises to be enduring crowd pleaser. (On the way out of the theatre, I overheard three separate intergenerational clusters of female moviegoers enthusing about buying the dvd when it comes out. The men in the pissoir, on the other hand, mostly chatted about either how long or how strange the film was.) I might have liked the film had it told the same story in about half the time but no measure of miraculous hummingbirds flying could assure me that I hadn't been sold a pile of piffle under the label of cinematic profundity. Gah.