The Curious Case of Benjamin Button: A Lengthy Smorgasbord
By Lynda Nguyen
Staff Writer
If you are nostalgic for the movies Big Fish or Forrest Gump, Benjamin Button is the closest match currently available in theatres. However, its merits are a long shot from any highly acclaimed movie. The movie is tediously long, and many scenes leave you wondering “so what?” or questioning why the scene didn’t end up on the cutting room floor.
One of the film’s merits is its unique plot of a man who is born as an octogenarian, ages backwards and dies as a baby. It is loosely based on a short story by F. Scott Fitzgerald. I wonder if Mr. Fitzgerald met a child with progeria and let his imagination run wild. The juxtaposition of two biological clocks running in opposite directions is intriguing.
The thread of the entire movie takes place in a hospital ravaged by Hurricane Katrina. Benjamin’s daughter is reading from his diary to an aged Daisy, who is his love interest. The flashbacks from a diary depicting a former love story remind me of the movie The Notebook. In this case, however, the scenes set in the present time are exceedingly long, and the detail is of unknown purpose. For example, why do we care that the nurse has to pick up her kid from the baby sitter? Another example of a tedious scene is that the producer has more than adequately imbued the audience with the milieu of aging without the need to have us watch Daisy grimace in pain and get her morphine turned up for the umpteenth time.
The way the story is narrated by Benjamin is at times jumpy and at other times unbearably long. For example, there is one part that tries to emphasize the fortuitousness of events in life, much like in the acclaimed German movie Run Lola, Run. However, unlike the ingenious way in which this theme was portrayed in the latter movie, here the narrator has to take us through each excruciatingly lucid detail. It is like Run Lola, Run for dummies.
The CGI used to overlay Brad Pitt’s aged face on body double actors in order to make the aging believable is a laudable feat. The acting by Pitt and Cate Blanchett is well done, and I would not be surprised if either got Oscar nods. The only other merit I found was the poignant ending.
Otherwise, much of what comes in between is disposable. Many of Benjamin’s adventures seem disconnected and sporadic. Furthermore, the amount of action in Benjamin’s life is typically unrealistic for a movie, yet, the fantasy lacks the charm of Big Fish or Forrest Gump. There is not even a clear purpose to having the audience sit through all of the various events, unlike in John Irving’s novel A Prayer for Owen Meany, in which the reader is enlightened at the end by the purpose of all that had previously occurred. Some of the discontinuity in the movie can be attributed to the producer’s desire to condense all eighty years of Benjamin’s life into less than three hours of movie time and to depict as much of his relationship to Daisy as possible in an interesting, albeit contrived manner.
Overall, Benjamin Button is a mishmash of various other movies encased in one unique twist, with a tortuous path from beginning to end.
Lynda Nguyen is a fourth-year pharmacy student.