The Spurious Case Of Benjamin Button
When I first heard about this movie The Curious Case Of Benjamin Button and its fantastic concept of reverse aging, I was reminded of a quote that’s attributed to George Costanza from Seinfeld series. He says ‘The most unfair thing about life is the way it ends. I mean, life is tough. It takes up a lot of your time. What do you get at the end of it? A death. What’s that, a bonus?? I think the life cycle is all backwards. You should die first, get it out of the way. Then you go live in an old age home. You get kicked out for being too healthy, go collect your pension, then, when you start work, you get a gold watch on your first day. You work forty years until you’re young enough to enjoy your retirement. You drink alcohol, you party, and you get ready for high school. You go to primary school, you become a kid, you play, you have no responsibilities. You become a little baby, you go back, spend your last 9 months floating with luxuries like central heating, spa, room service on tap, then you finish off as an orgasm! Amen’. To read more of George’s funny quotes, click here.
Anyways, I watched this movie and have mixed feelings about it. No doubt, its a brilliant movie and very well executed; but its a bit on the lengthier side. I actually wanted to use the word ‘laborious‘ instead of ‘spurious‘ in the title of this post, but then decided against it because the movie has lot many things going for it.
Benjamin was born in New Orleans on the day time started moving against the positive axis, and everybody was celebrating the last day of WW1. But as fate would have it, he waas born old and shrivelled like a shrunken raisin. His parents disowned him because they are not sure what birth-defect he was born with. His dad, a wealthy businessman who is into the button manuacturing industry, abandons him infront of an oldage home. And Queenie – the caretaker, adopts the infant. She takes care of him because she thinks the baby is suffering from some disease and may not live long enough. Benjamin, beats all odds, he was born to beat the odds, and starts growing younger by the day. He first takes to wheel-chair, then crutches and finally a walking stick which he soon forsakes.
One of the new joinees to the oldage home brings her grand-daughter Daisy with her. Here begins Benjamin’s love-story as he takes a liking to the kid. Since Benjamin is 7 years old, bilogically, he plays with Daisy, hiding under the bed, which sends out hints of paedophilia. I burst out laughing when Benjamin was busted under the bed and Daisy’s granny grunts ‘You should be ashamed of yourself ‘, that was hilarious.
If you analyze the movie well, its basically a love-story with the twist of a science fiction; more like harry-met-sally with HG Wells introducing a time-machine. The only difference being that, the time machine runs backward for Benjamin alone while everybody else is moving forward; thereby introducing a non-linearity amidst the linearity of the mundane around him.
From thereon, its all about time playing hide-and-seek with Benjamin and Daisy. They meet each other after long gaps of time and they have to contend with the reverse aging as well. When Daisy is 7 Benjamin is in his 70’s, when Daisy is in her 20’s Benjamin is pushing 50’s and so on. In between this time-travel, Benjamin gets a lot of worldy exposure after moving out of the oldage home. He bids a teary-eyed Queenie good-bye, and starts life on his own. He joins a sailor and has lots of sea adventure like having a first drink and losing his virginity in mid-60’s. This part of the movie got stretched beyond time, I believe they could have edited a few of the things like Benjamin joining the navy and the war scenes of WW2; it dragged a bit.
Daisy turns into a successful dancer in NYwhile Benjamin is confronted with the truth of his father’s existence. In a selfish turn of events, Thomas Button who had been noticing Benjamin grow younger by the year, approaches him and takes him back home. The senior Button is repentant for what he did to Benjamin, but at the sametime he requests Banjamin to take charge of the business as he dies peacefully. Life comes a full-circle for the father-son relationship; where the fear of the unknown[birth-defect] had made Thomas abandon Benjamin, another fear of the unknown[his impending death] brought him closer to Benjamin; life works in weird ways.
When Daisy wanted to come closer to Benjamin, he had refused and turned her off, that happened when she was in her early 20’s and was not a successful dancer yet. But when she turns a successful dancer, she breaks Benjamin’s as she is going around with another guy from the troupe. The love never dies though, it only grows further and gnaws at each other. This is the love that drives Benjamin to see her, after her accident in which she loses the power to dance again, but she turns him away. The accident is one of the most thought-out sequences of the movie, and in general as well. The accident itself is such an irony because its a time-bound event; had one of the players in the event done a thing differently then Daisy would have escaped the accident. This scene was shot brilliantly showing two different outcomes in a back-toback cut-frames, quick editing showing each of the players and what they did right/wrong. But as fate would have it, neither the cabbie, nor the doorman, just about nobody played God and Daisy meets with an accident.
And then, they meet again at the same oldage home. This time around, they finally realize that they are meant for each other and they decide to settle down. But when Daisy gets pregnant with Benjamin’s baby, he just cannot handle the situation because of his inner fears about the baby needing a father and his turning younger would make it difficult for Daisy to handle two kids simultaneously, so he leaves her once more.
Daisy gives birth to a baby-girl Caroline and she marries a well-to-do guy who handles the responsibility of the father. Benjamin visits her once and sees his daughter as a 12 year old, they also share a night of passion and laugh it off saying Daisy is getting too old for Benjamin who is now in his youth.
The next time Daisy hears from Benjamin is from some social worker who finds Daisy’s name and number from his diary; she has been taking care of an irate Benjamin in his pre-teens fighting puberty and dementia. Daisy rushes to the place and brings Benjamin home and takes care of him. Benjamin finally dies as an 80 year old infant in her arms. The scene was really moving and wonderful, the bitter-sweet tale of love and separation.
The diary that I have mentioned above is where the film starts from, an ailing mother asks her daughter to read a few chapters from this diary which was Benjamin’s journal.
The casting was superb, Brad Pittas Benjamin was fantastic. He did total justice to the character, gave an edge to the role and went that extra-mile in getting the mannerisms right. One thing that the screen-writers could have done better is that they could have added some contemplative stuff, the feeling of being one of a kind, they could have introduced some thoughtfulness in Benjamin’s character. The idea of growing younger did not cause a flutter in anybody’s life, nobody freaked out or behaved differently, Benjamin himself did not show as if he was baffled by this negative genesis. Daisy was very well played by Cate Blanchett, with varying make-up and the shrivelled look. While people noticed Brad, they totally missed out on Cate who had an equally daunting make-up session and the gruffy voice modulation. Taraji Henson, who played Queenie, was magnificent. All her expressions, her joy, her anguish was very well captured. Then as a comic relief. there was this guy telling how he escaped lightning seven times. Whenever the movie got a bit slow, they would bring this up from nowhere.
The story was ofcourse good, but the screenplay could have been a little tighter; quite a few loose ends in screenplay and dialogue department. The cinematography was good, make-up and special effects were brilliant; especially when they shot the down-sized oldage struck Brad Pitt. The movie was shot well, all credit to David Fincher for making this science fiction actually come-alive onscreen. He has done a tremendous job, his vision made this fantasy come true and visually compelling. Overall, a rich experience and a great treat to watch. The entire movie can be summed up in this one dialogue which Benjamin says ‘Our lives are defined by opportunities, even the ones we miss’.
Tags: benjamin button, Brad Pitt, caroline, cate blanchett, curious case, daisy, David Fincher, queeni, taraji henson, ww1, ww2
Anurag Kashyap
Abhay Deol
Dibakar Banerjee
Hansal Mehta
Khalid Mohamed
Kundan Shah
Anish Kuruvilla
Jaideep Verma
Manish Gupta
Navdeep Singh
Bhavani Iyer
D. Santosh
Onir
Ashvin Kumar
Ramu Ramanathan
Sudhir Mishra
Pankaj Advani
Revathy
Saurabh Shukla
Shilpa Shukla
Sujoy Ghosh
Suparn Verma
Santosh Sivan
Shashank Ghosh
Shivajee
Pavan Kaul
Partho Sen-Gupta
Prroshant Naryannan
Sam Langoria
Satish Kasetty
The film is a triumph of make up and special effects. I wasn’t impressed with Brad Pitt at all. After a point, I was unable to distinguish between what is real, what is the effect and whether it’s Brad’s body or his face that is being used in a particular scene. Cate Blanchet was superb but all in all, I did not understand the purpose of this film. Except for stretching an intriguing idea, the film achieves nothing. The way other characters and Benjamin himself have absolutely no reaction to Benjamin’s reverse aging, and accept it as some normal handicap, is really surprising. This leaves nothing in the film. It’s a well made film but not a great film.
while i do agree tat the film served no purpose and it was not a movie with a message. they stretched a creative idea, but i thought they did it well. i have also mentioned tat everyone around benjamin behaved normal, tat was a big setback. they shud have brought something out f it