The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (2008)
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Credits
Release Date: Dec 25, 2008; Rated: PG-13; Genres: Drama, Fantasy;
With: Cate Blanchett and Brad Pitt
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By Lisa Schwarzbaum
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button tells the haunting,
existential fable of a man, born at the close of World War I, who
ages backwards while those around him age forward, the
old-fashioned way. Where others are born unformed and unwrinkled,
Benjamin comes into the world a decrepit old man; where others
wither, he dies in a pink and creaseless state of infancy. For
Benjamin, love is inextricable from loss since his path runs
counterclockwise to nature. This unsettling, melancholy notion is
attached by the thinnest thread to its original literary source, a
1922 short story by F. Scott Fitzgerald. But in the hands of
director David Fincher, and with Brad Pitt as Benjamin, this
Button is a curious case indeed: an extravagantly ambitious movie
that's easy to admire but a challenge to love.
Perhaps that's how it ought to be. Eric Roth's fanciful screenplay
makes use of a cheesy Bridges of Madison County structure to frame
the mythic saga — a grown daughter (Julia Ormond) learns her
mother's romantic secrets as the old woman lays dying in a New
Orleans hospital bed just as Hurricane Katrina is gathering force.
The old woman, named Daisy, is Cate Blanchett after many hours
with make-up artists; the secret is that Daisy met Benjamin in
Louisiana a lifetime ago when the two were kids and he was
old/young, and their love went on and on in its fashion. A
different director might have emphasized sentimentality in the
manner of a Robin Williams weepy with a message: We're all going
to die, so love while you get a chance! Instead, Fincher's innate
astringency — his hardness, even, which he has put to such varied
effect over the years in Fight Club, Seven, and Zodiac — becomes
exactly the kind of tonic needed to balance the sweet/tart
proportions of so audacious a cinematic project.
At any moment in this singular Hollywood spectacle, two marvels
predominate, one technical and the other...Bradical. The movie has
been in the works for years, pored over by Fincher like a favorite
fairytale from his childhood. But only now has computer-driven
wizardry matured enough to meet the story's challenges so
unobtrusively. Likewise, Pitt, a comely actor, is no longer the
golden surprise he was 18 years ago in Thelma & Louise. What he
is, though, is a phenomenon of heightened celebrity. And that
rarified status, combined with good grooming and exquisite digital
effects care, produces the exact force field of fame needed to
take our breath away in that first moment on screen when, rid of
gray hair, Benjamin is bathed in light that honors the movie-star
beauty Pitt is. Was. Is.
In his transient loveliness, the star's character is rewarded with
the company of an equally radiant woman. Or three. At first, when
young/old Benjamin is a grotesque-looking abandoned newborn, he's
taken in by a kindly New Orleans nursing-home attendant (a tender
Taraji P. Henson) who loves him as a son. Later, before he and
Daisy meet up again in adulthood, the hero learns about sex and
desire from a wise, worldly lady (Tilda Swinton, never better). By
the time his love affair with Daisy crests, the pair are equals,
and as a couple of blooming lovers, Blanchett's limpid performance
rises up to meet Pitt's, petal for petal.
Yet Fincher has little time for assuring sweetness or audience
caresses, not when Daisy's future is physical decay while
Benjamin's is mental regression. Calling forth the flood waters of
Katrina as a symbol of the inability to stop time is distracting,
even presumptuous and brutal. Still, the point is made: Life is a
tide, a flood even, against which youth, beauty, and even Brad
Pitt have no magical powers.
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※ 編輯: hisunshine 來自: 118.166.11.204 (12/27 15:23)