The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
By Nick Manteris · 0 Comments · Leave a Comment
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button is the story of a man who is born old and, instead of aging like everyone else, grows younger and it was (very) loosely based on an F. Scott Fitzgerald short story from 1921. It took over twenty years for this project to make it to the screen…even with big names like Stephen Spielberg, Tom Cruise, Ron Howard and Spike Jonze attached to it at different times during its development. The main obstacle that prevented filming was the erroneous idea that a number of different actors would be needed to portray the character at different stages in his life. Director David Fincher – with the help of an untold number of visual effects specialists and sound designers – finally brings the story to life using (what appears to be) only one actor in the main role. Brad Pitt provides the face for Benjamin Button for the first part of the film, but the movie actually suffers until the character becomes young enough to actually be played by him.
The film suffers even more from a lack of conflict…it isn’t until the character of Daisy (initially played by Elle Fanning and voiced by Cate Blanchett) is introduced that the story seems to have any life at all. The idea that these characters are meant to be together despite the seemingly irreconcilable age difference provides just enough interest to hold the series of random occurrences together. And the film really does play out in a mostly haphazard manner as Button just passively goes with the flow, learning important life lessons from the people that he encounters along the way. There is a sequence where the events are shown side by side with what might have happened if even one tiny thing had been changed, and this scene is second only to the excellent submarine discovery scene…even though the change in storytelling seems somewhat out of place. Hurricane Katrina even makes an appearance in the film…in an even more out of place framing device that should have been left out of the film entirely.
It’s surprising that Hurricane Katrina makes an appearance because the state of the city after the storm almost forced the crew to look for another location…despite the fact that the tax incentives from Louisiana were going to save the filmmakers millions of dollars. Fortunately for New Orleans, they stayed to film in the city and Benjamin Button ended up being partly responsible for the revitalization of one of the oldest and most interesting cities in the United States. The Curious Case of Benjamin Button isn’t a bad movie and many of the emotional beats play out exactly as designed, but the visual effect breakthroughs overshadow the story and the greatest achievement of the film is the real-life effect that it had on the birthplace of jazz.
