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This movie was great. Packs a heavy emotional punch. A little to Gumpian, but that's fine in Fincher's hands. The Viper camera's raw 4:4:4 imagery was jaw-dropping. And I actually prefer the old Pitt in the beginning to the rest. And I don't think I've seen Cate Blanchett any more beautiful than she is in this movie. (Still, I think Dark Knight was the better film, though clearly not as emotional. And since I got to the theater early and sneaked into Valkyrie, I was surprised by how taut that movie was. Very promising. Maybe I will see that one in theaters.)

Yes, there is a certain flavor of "Forrest Gump" in the film, but without all the bullshit of that film. The ONLY thing I could have done without was the hummingbird, particularly the second time it appeared. Other than that, I really appreciated Fincher's patience in telling this story. I don't mind the length at all. It's certainly not his best film (I don't know if I'll end up buying it on DVD), but that's alright. It's still very good.

Sorry to disagree with those who liked it, especially because I was looking forward to this very much, but I hated it. We finally scrammed after 2+ hours; we couldn't take it anymore. What a Big Dumb Movie. rs98762001's take on it from the previous page is dead-on. The script, the thunking "dying woman tells her story of love and loss to loved one from deathbed" structure, even the acting is beyond hammy. Blanchett, who is one of my favorite actresses, seems to be almost doing it on purpose; when she comes home and sees Benjamin, that stupidly earnest eyes-widening-mouth-gaping mug of recognition is the stuff of your worst soap-operatic reunion. Sigh. Yet another film that I was terribly excited for this year that disappoints.

And a side note re the shooting- The Riverview is one foul place. In the 10-odd times I've been there, I've been witness to everything but an actual shooting. I've been to many theatres but I can't really say that any audience tops the one you're forced to commune with for friday night premieres in a packed and decrepit theater at the Riverview for sheer awfulness.

jorencain wrote:Yes, there is a certain flavor of "Forrest Gump" in the film, but without all the bullshit of that film.

Actually, I would say that Button has WAY more bullshit than Gump. At least Gump was honest about what it was - shamelessly manipulative hokum that used its state-of-the-art effects primarily in the service of an old-fashioned narrative. Fincher is clearly embarrassed by the heavy-handed schmaltz and sentiment inherent in Roth's awful script, and attempts to obfuscate them by throwing startling effects and big sequences at the screen in the hopes that people are too overwhelmed to realize the empty, gaping void at the center.

To those who like the film, let me ask: what is the point of a number of these enormous sequences? 15 minutes of a sea battle in WW2 ends with Brad Pitt staring soulfully into the water, having learned the 'lesson' that people die in war for little reason. The 10-minute, meticulously over-designed sequence that leads to Blanchett's accident has a banal point that could be summed up in a few seconds: coincidence, chance, fate, blah blah blah. Stop the presses, and pass the fortune cookies (in fact, I'm surprised the cliched black mother character didn't tell Pitt, "Life is like a box of chocolates").

And LQ- I can't tell you how tempted I was to split halfway through as well; specifically, during the sequence where Pitt and Blanchett thrillingly decorate their living room for what feels like an eternity (and to the Beatles to boot - could Fincher not come up with anything more original to depict the early Sixties?). I feel like I should have been given a medal for suffering through that scene and all the way to the bitter end.

rs98762001 wrote:Actually, I would say that Button has WAY more bullshit than Gump. At least Gump was honest about what it was - shamelessly manipulative hokum that used its state-of-the-art effects primarily in the service of an old-fashioned narrative. Fincher is clearly embarrassed by the heavy-handed schmaltz and sentiment inherent in Roth's awful script, and attempts to obfuscate them by throwing startling effects and big sequences at the screen in the hopes that people are too overwhelmed to realize the empty, gaping void at the center.

Uh, I disagree. To the extent it's even possible to know, it's reasonable to conclude Fincher believes in the story, the script, and the idea of the movie. "Fincher is clearly embarrassed..." is one of those chatroom criticisms that don't hold up. If anything, he probably sees the "emotion" in the movie as a positive turning point for his career.

rs98762001 wrote: To those who like the film, let me ask: what is the point of a number of these enormous sequences? 15 minutes of a sea battle in WW2 ends with Brad Pitt staring soulfully into the water, having learned the 'lesson' that people die in war for little reason. The 10-minute, meticulously over-designed sequence that leads to Blanchett's accident has a banal point that could be summed up in a few seconds: coincidence, chance, fate, blah blah blah. Stop the presses, and pass the fortune cookies (in fact, I'm surprised the cliched black mother character didn't tell Pitt, "Life is like a box of chocolates").

I agree here, definitely.

rs98762001 wrote:And LQ- I can't tell you how tempted I was to split halfway through as well; specifically, during the sequence where Pitt and Blanchett thrillingly decorate their living room for what feels like an eternity (and to the Beatles to boot - could Fincher not come up with anything more original to depict the early Sixties?). I feel like I should have been given a medal for suffering through that scene and all the way to the bitter end.

I like this sequence, sorry to say... it's a convention, to be sure. You've seen a version of this sequence a million times. But usually it connotes merely a passing of time, whereas here we know their love affair won't last. Thus the whole thing carries an air of sadness, of death, which is good -- it's moving. The Beatles? Didn't bother me at all. Should he have played ? and the Mysterians?

The movie looked great, however.

Maybe "clearly embarrassed" was a bad choice of words. But my point is that Fincher works overtime concealing the banality of the material with as many big tricks as possible. It's only if and when you look past the spectacle (i.e. the fact that the movie looked great) that you realize there's nothing new, original or interesting there. Fincher uses his artiness to disingenuously conceal the fact that Roth's script is little more than Gump Redux.

And, yes, ? and The Mysterians would have been more interesting. Any other choice than the Beatles would have been. I'm as big a Beatles fan as you will find, but surely a filmmaker using their music to say "Hey, it must be the Sixties!" is as lazy and obvious as it gets.

I just wish he got rid of that stupid framing device. I could have forgived the rest of the flaws had that framing device not been there. That said because of the technical marvel I'd pick upo a DVD if there were a Fincher solo comentary.

Films like this and A Christmas Tale go from harmless misfires to aggressively, offensively bad films by having the audacity to extend past 2.5 hours. If Fincher really wanted to hide the fact that this material is hopelessly weak, he should have taken a hatchet to it in the editing room, not make us sit through heaps of embarassing dialogue and special effects that are only impressive in theory. Forrest Gump was a much better film than this cinematic abortion, in my humble opinion.

I kept thinking about Spalding Gray watching Big Fish, which allowed him the currency to accept suicide as an option in his life (and try as I might, he succeeded where I failed, in vain). I don't think the same is possible with Benjamin, but to see Fincher embrace this kind of happy hollowness in exchange for his usual beaten-down faith in humanity is baffling, or else he's just as foolish as the people he seems to love to subvert (we, the people). If there need be further proof, the entire, packed audience sitting around me started clapping during the final shot's fade-out, most of them weeping while I ran out of there as fast as I could. I was crying, too.

And though the milieu with Tilda Swinton was quick and painless, time-wise, it was the only one which hadn't come unglued afterward. I should probably revisit The End of the Affair, soon and often.

In my opinion, what Button lacks most is focus.

I remember reading the first draft and seeing tangent after tangent, where Button would narrate a little story about a secondary character. I was surprised to see some of it still in the film, because none of it ever mattered. It was never important.

First of all, no one else's story is important simply because Button is the central figure and we need to devote as much screentime as possible to the telling of his story,

Second, Button is the most interesting character. He's aging backwards. Why do I care about a sea captain or an opera singer when I could hypothetically meet these very people myself?

The device has its purpose. He learns from others' experiences. But isn't the point of a character aging backwards to have the character gain such personal experience as to be an enlightened, wise old man in the body of a young adult?

Yet those precious passages are left out of the story.

The peculiarities of growing up are made anecdotes - sex, the first drink and so forth. There is nothing learned. Button's aging is arbitrary - he might as well have a common skeletal defect because his aging has little meaning.

What Roth and Fincher needed was focus. It should have been a two part epic. And just stop for a second - consider that: "epic." This could have been an epic of life itself. God, it's sad to think what could have been.

Anyhow, the first part should have been an old man experiencing the world of a child. We see Button watching other children play, we see him playing with toys, but we don't really learn anything and neither does he. He should have truly gained insight into the world, rather than being a cursory sightseer in his own life.

The second part, as described previously, would have been the journey of an old, knowledgeable man in a young man's body. Instead, we have a narrative ellipsis and a montage of Brad Pitt in India.

This travel to India seems to mirror the adventurous spirit of many young kids, but he should have done this when he was younger, when he was an old man. Most young adults have a childhood wherein they are raised by parents, go to school, live a household life, and then they take a trip to Europe or have some enlightening adventure. This should have been Button's life. His seafaring days are intended to function as this adventure, but they fail. Instead, we get glimpses of characters defined by arbitrary idiosyncratic traits - like the fighting brothers or patriotic soldier - and then they literally disappear. Their deaths are intended to have a great impact, but we the audience are not impacted because we do not care. They are not people, but walking idiosyncrasies.

When I look at Button now, I see things that didn't need to be there in the first place. It's a situation of focus. Focus on Benjamin, nothing else matters. Instead we have Benjamin essentially narrating other people's lives, rather than his own. This is The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, not The Curious Cases of a Random Collective of Individuals Who Happen to Have Met Benjamin Button at One Point or Another.

Interesting responses. I have yet to see it. I'm beginning to suspect that it may require a wholly different praxis for evaluation than what I was prepared to bring in. That may be a very good thing.

You guys might want to take a look at this though. In the linked piece, Robert Davis wonders how Kent Jones could love the film. I'm not crazy about Davis' taste, however, so if he didn't like it, that doesn't mean much to me. This whole series of overviews of critics' best lists is worth reading. Oh, and there's a link to Rosenbaum's evaluation at the bottom as well (but I just made it easier for you).

In response to Davis' question, Jones has written about Button extensively in the new Cinema Scope. Perhaps someone who's read that could chime in. For the time being, here's what he said in the Sight & Sound poll:

“It’s about time passing, just like Zodiac,” said my son, quite rightly. It’s a movie for any moment, but speaks to this specific one with great eloquence because its particular reflection on time carries both mourning and hope. Benjamin Button is so moving and so frank (about mortality) yet so wondrous that you might almost forget that it also happens to be a technical feat of the highest order.

Edit: And here is a discussion with Jones and Nathan Lee on the films of Fincher, Button in particular.

Egads, this film is much ado about stuffing. I think any profundity that certain viewers may extract from it is more a reflection of what happens when your mind is forced to occupy itself for three hours of directionless visual stimulus than any inherent content in the film. The film is about time, for sure, but all I was left thinking after viewing it was what a waste of that commodity this represented, not only for myself as I lost a sizable chunk of my final day of a two week break before returning to work, but for the artists that could have and certainly should have been doing something else during the making of this film. What a nauseating blip 2008 was been on Cate Blanchett's resume. And has a recent filmmaker had a more disastrous falling off than Fincher from Zodiac to this? The fault for this experience must originate with Eric Roth and the producers who allowed this project to start. It was an absurd fallacy to think that Fitzgerald's charming little conceit was calling out to be inflated with Roth's (or anybody's) whimsical storytelling obsessions. The result is something more offensive because of its vague pretensions than any modest trash could possibly be. It's truly forcefully, obnoxiously bad.

At The House Next Door, fellow blogger/critic Jason Bellamy and I engage in a VERY long and in-depth conversation about David Fincher, starting with Benjamin Button and then moving on to the rest of his films.

Liked parts of the film, especially the scenes that were homages to classical Hollywood films such as when Cate dances in the fog for Benjamin a' la Gene Kelly in An American in Paris or the sequence of fate, which is reminiscent to the horrific tale of dancing that Powell/Pressburger were able to create in The Red shoes. The funeral scene also reminded me of the funeral in Imitation of Life with the interplay of races and grief.
What makes the film less than spectacular is its star, Brad Pitt. As Hitchcock so often said if an actor's eyes are blank then there is no emotionality or sense of thought. Brad Pitt's eyes lack a sense of emotion or thought, what he is able to use is merely his expressions, gestures, and movements, all of which are heightened in this film by the CGI. I have never understood the fascination with Pitt, he is mildly interesting in Seven but throughout his career I would argue he lacks the ability to engage the viewer at a gut level. He is capable of being a sex symbol but there is more to acting than simply being sexy or hot.
The film is a lot like Forrest Gump, yet what sets this film apart is its cynicism and liberal political message. After all, the last shot of the clock still running backwards as the flood waters of Katrina rush into the warehouse can be read as an effort to try and turn back the last eight years only to be destroyed by nature. Or it could be interpreted according to Republican ideals as the forces of nature legitimizing the destruction of the decades of progressive identity politics that changed the American experience. In either case, there is some level of political engagement that this film demonstrates versus the sugary hokum of Gump and its adherence to Reagan ideals of the self-made man. Benjamin is nothing without the people who surround him, and in many cases he is a better person because of the larger community that he is a part of as he progresses through the film. The happiness that he seeks is based in the good opinion of others and it is only when he tries to go it alone that bad things transpire.

Ed, thanks for the link and a fantastic read. The discussion has reignited my interest in Benjamin Button which I will go to see after all when it opens here. I was a bit disappointed only by seeing Alien 3 getting such short shrift in that conversation. It is a mess and a very conflicted film but I also feel that individual moments in it are superb (have yet to see the assembly cut).

Saw this today and I completely agree with LQ and rs about this film. For me the biggest problem of the film is Benjamin Button himself. At least in Forrest Gump (which I have no problem saying is a much better film), the lead had some real conflicts to deal with and actually showed emotion - anger, despair, love, loneliness - from time to time. Here, Benjamin is blank slate from the first frame right to the end of the film. Oh sure, in the tepid voiceover he tells us how he's feeling, but we never see it. He just kinda glides through life, sorta chasing the love of his life, but also getting sidetracked into pointless diversions (can someone tell me why we needed the Tilda Swinton sequence?) but never really experiencing anything. But the film went merely from boring me to pissing me off completely with India trip (I can bet you that was Pitt's idea) and bookending the film with Hurricane Katrina. Also, the hummingbird thing would be stupid if it wasn't so nonsensical: why tack it on the end? Wasn't that bird the symbol of Captain Mike and not Benjamin Button? Also, I found it exceedingly hard to believe that Daisy would never have mentioned here dancing career to her daughter. She just happens to run a dance studio but was never a dancer? No one ever stumbled over photos or progams? Puh-leeze. And that was just one of many anachronisms in the film (ok, one more - who sells a big vintage house in perfect shape to buy a duplex with shitty plumbing?).

Eric Roth, who has written some decent screenplays in his time, should be thoroughly ashamed here.As for Fincher, I am at a loss to understand why he even bothered with this film. His work here is good, but he's never been a director of big emotional scenes, and his distant directorial style only further highlights the flaws of the screenplay. I guess it gave him an excuse of indulge in his period fetishes and shoot some cool looking digital scenes but that's about it.

Saw this a month ago and thoroughly enjoyed it. It was an almost flawless film. Everyone from the kids to the adults were perfect in their roles. It is an extremely touching story, and deserves to win at least one Academy Award.

I thought it was pretty average really. I can understand why Pitt's getting nominations left, right and centre for playing Button across some 60 odd years, wearing latex and what have you for most of the film. However, it's interesting to read that this film was originally devised for Ron Howard to direct and was written by the screenwriter of Forrest Gump. If I didn't know who directed this, I would have plumped for Howard. However this was directed by one of the most innovative mainstream American film makers yet Fincher turns in a half-baked and overlong film full of lousy one liners within the script about fate, destiny etc and rather than tackle serious issues it turns into a sickly love story between Pitt and Blanchett. I suppose Fincher has to deliver a return on a $150m budget but there's none of his signature techniques that has made him such an interesting film maker over the last decade. I saw a free preview so I can't complain but I'd have felt much more disappointed had I paid money. What it says about the last year in film when this is the most nominated film at the Oscars (though unlikely to win much beyond special effects etc), I don't know.

Another over-rated tale for dummies in time crisis.

Amelie Poulain meets Forrest Gump with aborted stories in each supporting actor and actress.

Anyway, the love affair in the late 30's, in the lost Russian hotel between B.Button and the English upper class is a beautiful story. I loved it. Very real, beautiful and romantic.

The rest of the film ](*,) I suppose the film will be an instant classic for pop corn eaters. Another file to erased on my computer.

rohmerin wrote:Anyway, the love affair in the late 30's, in the lost Russian hotel between B.Button and the English upper class is a beautiful story. I loved it. Very real, beautiful and romantic.

I agree about this sequence. This should have been a short film. As such, it would have deserved an Oscar nomination perhaps. I think Swinton is the only contributor who comes out well from this thing.

Really good, in depth interview with Fincher.

exte wrote: And I don't think I've seen Cate Blanchett any more beautiful than she is in this movie.

Just saw the film, and I have no idea what you´re talking about here. Whoever CGI-ed the Blanchett face did a lousy job. She looked like something belonging in an Akon video. The age make-up/CGI only worked on Pitt - Jason Flemying looked like an idiot in his old man make-up. And was it Blanchett playing Daisy as an old woman? Her voice annoyed the crap out of me...

Still, the first 45 minutes were pretty funny (including an Elias Koteas cameo =D> ), and the Tilda Swinton scenes rather good. Then it turned to shit. My favorite scene was the funeral scene, only the extras looked as if they were actually at a funeral. Pitt wore the same expression as he did in the rest of the film, and Blanchett looked as if she was waiting for it to end.

One question about the quite nice derivative score: The theme they repeated 40-50 times throughout the film, where have I heard it before?

RobertAltman wrote:One question about the quite nice derivative score: The theme they repeated 40-50 times throughout the film, where have I heard it before?

Throughout the film.