David Fincher is an unlikely candidate to direct a film with a premise as whimsical as The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. Better known for the macabre grit of Se7en or the Ikea grime of Fight Club, his turn with a fantasy about a man aging in reverse through a life of love, loss and beauty seems like an incongruous step into the light for a director known for his darkness.
It’s appropriate, then, that Benjamin Button is a film most comfortable in its saddest places, its dashes of CGI magic ringing a little more hollowly. Uneven but ultimately gratifying — assuming you can wait out its more than 160-minute run time — Fincher’s journey into the light is sentimental, occasionally stumbling but also heart-wrenchingly familiar.
Beginning his life in 1918, abandoned on an old-folks home’s doorstep by his horrified father (Jason Flemyng), the newborn Benjamin (Brad Pitt) is already wrinkled and stricken with cataracts. Taken in by the home’s infertile caretaker, Queenie (Taraji P. Henson), Benjamin is raised among the home’s octogenarian residents until the normal urges of growing up launch him to journey around the world. The home is also where he starts a lifelong love affair with a little (and later not-so-little) girl named Daisy (Cate Blanchett).
Narrated through a framing device that has a dying Daisy listening to her daughter (Julia Ormond) reading Benjamin’s diary, Button’s style of storytelling and its “a life lived” subject matter do commit the familiar sin of sentimentality. Much of the film consists of simple folks spouting wise words. The script is essentially a platitude factory, doling out gems like “You never know how things’ll turn out” to any audience members who haven’t already learned that life is like a box of chocolates. And while it might be unfair to stick the “magic negro” label on Queenie and her Shakespeare-loving partner (Mahershalalhashbaz Ali), the film certainly does earn dubious props for introducing an advice-dispensing pygmy.
At the risk of trotting out the old cliché about clichés being themselves based in truth, Button does take on a poignant look at mortality. The tragedy of life’s inevitable end and the ethereal beauty of that impermanence play out nicely in Benjamin’s simple and occasionally epic achievements. Set against the film’s fantastical conceit, these ordinary questions are given a magical, endearing quality.
With later moments of welcome comic relief and sadness, it’s easier to forgive early scenes featuring a computer-generated Benjamin who looks more like Gollum than a human being, or the oddly inappropriate dubbing of adult actors’ voices into child actors’ mouths, or a hummingbird motif syrupy enough to feed itself. While Fincher’s fairy tale may stumble in the telling, the result is still light enough to enjoy.
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