The Curious Case of The Curious Case of Benjamin Button

It was just last year that Fincher delivered a great film, also three hours, on the subject of time. But while, in Zodiac — to say nothing of Charlie Kaufman’s Synecdoche, New York — the passing years wrap around the characters like a vise, catching them up obsessively in a single distended moment, in Benjamin Button the ravages of time are trumped by a kind of eternal, undying love that mere physics is at a loss to contain. And Fincher, try as he might, scarcely seems able to buy into Roth’s brand of Harlequin-romance hokum. In order for Benjamin Button to succeed on its own terms, there shouldn’t be a dry eye left in the house. Yet, when the lights came up, mine were like sandpaper.

Mostly, the film is an orgy of excess, in which Fincher, armed with a huge budget, some of the best technicians in the business and every available brush in the digital paintbox, indulges his passion for luxuriant image-making, with little regard for whether the story merits (or can withstand) such grandiose treatment. When Benjamin pays his first visit to Manhattan to see Daisy dance in a show, Fincher turns the incidental scene into an impressively mounted but torturously overextended succession of period cars, costumed extras and twinkling Broadway marquees — one of several occasions on which Benjamin Button conjures memories of Peter Jackson’s King Kong and its endless montages of vaudeville chorus girls and Depression-era breadlines. In both cases, the real 800-pound gorilla is the one in the director’s chair. “All I have is my story,” Benjamin tells us in voice-over early on in the film. The true worth of any story, though, lies in the telling, and some stories aren’t worth telling in the first place. Life, after all, is too short.

Merrick Morton

Cute as a very old button

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More About

• Benjamin Button
• Eric Roth
• David Fincher
• F. Scott Fitzgerald
• Brad Pitt

THE CURIOUS CASE OF BENJAMIN BUTTON | Directed by DAVID FINCHER | Written by ERIC ROTH, from a story by ROTH and ROBIN SWICORD, based on the short story by F. SCOTT FITZGERALD | Produced by KATHLEEN KENNEDY, FRANK MARSHALL and CEÁN CHAFFIN | Released by Paramount Pictures | Citywide