Mixing fantasy and drama, director David Fincher (Fight Club 1995) brings to life author F. Scott Fitzgerald’s 1921 short story, f, the tale of Benjamin Button (Brad Pitt, Babel 2006) a man who literally lives his life in reverse. Although much of the original story line was changed (hardly surprising when Hollywood’s involved) the concept remains the same. It flirts with the idea of what it would be like to be born old and age backwards.
The movie takes us back in time to 1918 in New Orleans and, as the people are celebrating the end of the First World War, Benjamin is conceived. When his father, Thomas Button (Jason Flemyng, Stardust 2007), sees the child’s hideous body he runs out of the house and abandons him on the porch of a nursing home. Luckily, Benjamin is found and is taken in by Queenie (Taraji P. Henson, Hustle and Flow 2005) an African–American woman working in the nursing home. Henson’s performance as Queenie added a warmth to the tragic abandonment of Benjamin, making it a little less sad. As the years go by and as he kept getting younger, Benjamin meets six-year-old Daisy (Cate Blanchett, Elizabeth: The Golden Age 2007) the first person his age – sort of. Daisy accepts Benjamin despite his seventy-year-old appearance, and provides Benjamin with a chance to act like a child his own age. By now I was still trying to wrap my head around the fact that they turned Brad Pitt into such an ugly old man. There is a lot of foreshadowing about Daisy being Benjamin’s love interest, and as the story unfolds and they grow closer it is slightly unnerving that a seventy-four-year old starts having a crush on a young girl and vise versa.
Under Queenie’s wing, Benjamin grows to love her as a mother. He fits in perfectly with the rest of the residents because of his old age, but he still fantasizes about joining the neighborhood children as they play. As Button, Pitt was a lot more reserved in his role than usual; even his Louisiana accent was lazy, as if he chose each word carefully before he spoke it. Pitt could have added little more human emotion to his character.
In Queenie’s funeral scene, Benjamin is stone faced even when the wailing and weeping of her loved ones is crashing around him in waves. It’s true that at that point he had been used to death (growing up in the nursing home), but the loss of the first person to ever accept him and love him enough to raise him like her own child should have at least made him bow his head. It is noticeable that most of the expressions of sorrow or loneliness are depicted only with Pitt’s computer animated face and as the magic of technology fades away we are left with a stoic figure that is overshadowed by his female counterparts.
Since Benjamin can’t spend his whole life watching everyone he knows and loves wither away as he grows younger, he decides to finally see the outside world and leaves New Orleans on a tugboat run by his newly made friend Captain Mike (Jared Harris, Resident Evil: Apocalypse 2004).
While docked in Russia, Benjamin meets a married British woman named Elizabeth Abbott (Tilda Swinton, Michael Clayton 2007) and embarks on an almost yearlong love affair with her. The affair comes to an abrupt end when she leaves a day before Benjamin and the rest of the tugboat crew are shipped over to fight the Germans in World War II, which resulted in a random but spectacular action sequence.
On his return from the war, Benjamin meets his birth father. On his dying bed, Thomas Button tells his son the story of his birth and leaves Benjamin his wealth. For the rest of the movie Benjamin and Daisy, who is now a grown woman, try and fail to light a flame of romance. It isn’t until Daisy’s ballet career ends that she and Benjamin finally settle down together. With the movie’s length already reaching the two-hour mark we just see their time falling in love, as sequence of shots, all it needed was an upbeat pop song playing in the background.
The movie is beautifully shot and a variety of characters keep the story moving along. Even with all the metaphors and philosophy about life woven into the adventurous tale chronicling Benjamin’s life, the story is first and foremost a love story about Benjamin and Daisy finding one another despite Benjamin’s abnormality.
