“BENJAMIN BUTTON? BENJAMIN BORING BASTARD more like!”
That was my reaction at the end of David Fincher’s elderly-baby-based arse marathon THE CURIOUS CASE OF BENJAMIN BUTTON, the first Fincher film I’ve been furiously indifferent to. Does anybody want a run-down on what’s wrong with this movie? Can we be bothered?
It strikes me that the FORREST GUMP writer, in blatantly trying to emulate his earlier hit, has tried to avoid the controversy that greeted GUMP by removing all the elements some people didn’t like — the creepy political conservatism, the cheap exploitation of AIDS as a story device, the dumbness of the hero. So in BB it’s not clear what, if any, political views are being aired, which is strange in a story that takes in two world wars, the sexual revolution, several trips to the Soviet Union, and Hurricane Katrina. He’s also removed just about all the whimsy and fantasy and intersection with real historical figures, which didn’t work for me last time but at least staved off total tedium. We all know that awfulness is preferable to nothingness, which is why we put up with LIFE — and that little bit of pseudo-insight is at least as deep as anything in Eric Roth’s interminably uneventful screenplay which, placed under a microscope, would surely turn out to be composed of millions of little greetings cards.
I got deja vu from watching a older-than-he-looks Brad Pitt moping about New Orleans (INTERVIEW WITH A VAMPIRE) and from watching a dull, simple, naive Brad Pitt being boring for three hours (MEET JOE BLACK) and from seeing the ’50s evoked by a character getting on a motorcycle (INDIANA JONES AND THE TEMPLE OF THE CRYSTAL SKULL). I got deja vu from seeing dance filmed and cut with brutish insensitivity (just about everything in the US mainstream for the past thirty years).
All that kept me watching was the vain hope for a spectacular and grotesque conclusion. I thought, “Okay, at first he had the tininess of a baby coupled with the creaky wrinkliness of an old man. So at the end he’ll have the girth of an old man coupled with the bouncy pinkness of a baby. Brad Pitt will basically become a giant, 5′ 11 baby, toddling around like a hydrocephalic sumo wrestler, smashing through walls and trying to rip Cate Blanchett’s head off, like the monster does to Jane Seymour in FRANKENSTEIN: THE TRUE STORY.” Something that it might actually be worth waiting 166 bloody minutes to see.
Spoiler alert: that doesn’t happen.
shadowplay 