The Kismet of Benjamin Button
There’s a piece of dialogue in The curious case of Benjamin Button which often gets repeated.
You never know whats coming for ya.
The future is always uncertain, and maybe that’s what makes us look forward to the next day. Somehow as we trudge down this walkway called life, our paths cross with others with whom our life is inexorably linked. What we do affects them, and what they do affects us. Some of us call this fate, we also call this Kismet.
Benjamin was born in unusual circumstances, he was born old. This was his Kismet, something which was quietly accepted by the people he spend his initial years with. They believed what they saw, just as we willingly suspended our disbelief to believe what ever was going to be shown to us on the screen.
Eric Roth’s screenplay and David Fincher’s mesermising grasp over his craft sucks us into a timeless tale of a man and a woman aging in opposite directions. At it’s heart is an emotional love story, whose inevitable, tragic ending we all can guess. On the surface it’s an ordinary life story of an extra ordinary man whose life is made up of incidents that can happen to anyone, including you and me.
Benjamin’s father abandoned him outside a home for the aged, and it’s transitory occupants are his companions for the first few years of his life. We notice the keen and alert expressions of a child on his aged face, he is restless to step out of his home and play with the kids on the street.
We measure the time we’ve spend being alive in numbers which start from zero and suffix ‘ years old’ to them. When Benjamin meets Daisy for the first time she is 7 year old, in the sense we would normally understand. He’s 17, or rather sixty something. They strike up a friendship which soon develops into an undeclared mutual attraction. They are destined to fall in love but that time is yet to come as Benjamin decides to leave New Orleans to learn what the world is about. He learns it’s all about working hard, being honest and trying not to fall in love.
Shades of Forrest Grump here? Not surprising, firstly because Eric Roth wrote that movie and secondly we must remember this a story about an ordinary man’s life.
Daisy is discovering what youth is all about. It’s about being as fit as you can be and in her case it’s about being fit enough to be a Ballet dancer in New York and having the energy to enjoy the high life that comes with it. But good times never last, not at least in movies.
We’ve seen accidents happen in films. They help change the course of a story, it’s so convenient. But what if we are told about the series of incidents that would lead to an accident taking place. What if this wouldn’t have happened if this had not happened and so on? But it all happened, it had to, it was destined, it was in Daisy’s kismet.
This is one of the best sequence’s of TCCOBB. Fincher cross cuts several scenes ( each a few seconds long ) held together by a voice over as we are led to witness an accident on the cobbled streets of Paris.
Kismet intervenes here, brings Benjamin and Daisy together again.
There’s is a relationship which would last a lifetime. No big deal, we’d say. Most relationships last a lifetime, people get married and age together. But Benjamin and Daisy are aging in opposite directions. While Benjamin’s wrinkles disappear, they appear on Daisy’s face. It’s fascinating to watch Cate Blancchet, who plays Daisy, age in what is a lifetime for her and is just two hours of screen time for us. But Cate is a timeless beauty, she’s a woman who gets more beautiful as she ages, more graceful than before.
It’s ironical, how we take our youth for granted, not realising that every day we fritter away we loose a tiny part of it. Most of us here on PFC are young, we must realise that we have very little time to achieve what we have set out to do.
As Benjamin’s and Daisy spend their middle years together, it’s time for their collective Kismet to take another twist. It’s time for them to separate again, to accept reality, to move on and move away.
The last few scenes tug at your heart, they are emotionally draining, you realise a lifetime is going to come an end, but this is not how most lives turn out.
This is a movie about moments that make up one’s life. It’s about people who make a dent on your life. As the tag line of this movie says life is not measured in minutes, but in moments.
It’s only when the movie ends it does strike you that you’ve experienced some special effects which had effortlessly woven their way alongside the narrative. You’ve seen what Brad Pitt would look like 30 years from now and how he looked 20 years ago. We’ve seen the world change from the year 1918 to present day. We’ve seen some spectacular sun rises and some battle scenes which make you feel you’re right in the middle of the action.
Amongst the supporting cast, the actor who play’s Benjamin’s mother gives an outstanding performance.
I know TCCOBB has been reviewed and discussed before, but I got an opportunity to see it on the big screen only last night, thanks to it’s delayed release in India.
As I walked out of the very late night show I wondered if this story could be adapted by Bollywood. The ingredients are all there, the romance, the conflicts, the emotions, but perhaps the visual effects would be a challenge.
Tags: Brad Pitt, cate blanchett, David Fincher, eric roth, Kismet, Reviews, The Curious case of Benjamin Button
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
I truly agree with you. Tharshed by many indian critics I expeceted a very boring never ending tale like austarlia. One critic even mentioned that the special effects have overshadowed the movie. But I was suprised by how the movie unfolded and quite enjoyed it. It told a nice story of how love is bound to find its way in any situation.
Personally i think it should have won oscar for Best Movie (and maybe Best Actor..havent seen milk tho). The screenplay was so profound and made up for any weakness in the film.
I totally agree with you. It was a good emotional love story and i quite liked the fact that they showed Benjamin ageing in a reverse direction in oblivion.if they would have shown a lot of publicity or tried to find the reasons for his reverse aging, i think then the movie would have been yet another sci-fi movie with special effects and have not got the deep emotional meaning it gets now.i also liked the way they connected the story of the clock running in anticlock fashion to benjamins story..and the closing sequence which shows all important people in benjamins life and a voiceover saying some very inspiring descriptions about them…and finally THE CLOCK..fabulous!!
Lovely film, kya timing hai boss! Even I saw it yesterday and was searching for a familiar voice. I guess the film will take time to age, as of now people are too busy reacting to it as has become the norm of mainstream cinema. Lots of positives – Brad Pitt(so underplayed, no glances in the camera, no overt flashes of greatness or character arcs), Cate Blanchett(she can hardly ever go wrong now, was fun even in a confused outing in Indy-4, but here I loved her vulnerability, something she did wonderfully well in another sensitive-relationship-human film called Notes on a Scandal. When she lives through a younger Benjamin as she is losing grasp over life, I was reminded of her sensitive portrayal in Notes where her character handles a much more sexually aggressive/potent Judi Dench, Cate is classic stuff in the final sequences, it is as much her film as is Brad’s), Jennifer Hudson(her exaggerated portrayal works), and above all, a film maker who exudes confidence in the film. Raising eyebrows be damned. The way the silence plays out in the film is in right spirit of self-respecting cinema. Lovely visuals not to mention, such times of sensational scripts need films that reinvent the wheel(much like our very own Vaaranam Aayiram) and just lament at the tragedy called life at times.
As of the negatives, Brad’s sexuality did bother me, it didn’t come out clear if he craved for Daisy or loved her. I mean that did become a problem of course as we moved backwards until he becomes a kid. I will read the script, or rather attempt too, if it offers an interesting read.
It’s a longish script, Tushar. You could glance through it, lots of very descriptive action sequences ( useful for the art director), very interesting mix of V.O’s and spoken dialogues.
@ Ratna, Zorever,Prafulla
Most people would expect this to be a sci fi or a thriller movie, as that’s what the title suggests. It’s only when you sit down to view it you realise it’s a romantic film with some drama thrown in.
I suppose word of mouth publicity will draw in viewers.