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Every time I've visited Chantal, we've gone to see some terrible (or at least mediocre) movie that was more fun to make fun of than to actually watch. That started to change on our last visit, when we went to Nick & Norah's Infinite Playlist, which wasn't extraordinary but at least wasn't as wretched as our previous choice, Tropic Thunder. (There are no reviews posted for either of them because I got lazy and stopped writing new journal entries for something like four months.) This time, she was determined to pick a movie that would actually be good, so we went to The Curious Case Of Benjamin Button. While it's far from perfect, it's easily the best film we've seen together, and since it's concerned with the idea of a true love that persists over time, it felt appropriate to see it with the person I love.

The plot, adapted from an F. Scott Fitzgerald short story (I've never read it, but from what I've heard about it, the screenplay differs substantially from the source material apart from sharing the same core concept), concerns a man who's born with the physical characteristics of an elderly man and grows younger over time. Benjamin is born in 1918 in New Orleans, on the day that World War I ended. Abandoned by his father as an infant and left on the steps of a home for the elderly run by a young black couple, Benjamin at first views himself as being no different from any of the other residents (he's been told from the start that he doesn't have long to live), but soon comes to realize there's something different about him. He meets the future love of his life, Daisy, when she visits her grandmother at the home, but it takes many more years and many more obstacles before that love fully blossoms, and in the meantime Benjamin experiences a variety of adventures and continues to grow younger. He ultimately has to come to grips with the consequences of his reverse aging in a manner that's profoundly painful, though to say more would be to spoil the story. All of these events are narrated via a framing device where Daisy's daughter reads Benjamin's diary, which neither has read previously, as Daisy lies dying in a New Orleans hospital during the hours before Hurricane Katrina devastated the city (obviously, Fitzgerald didn't think up that particular plot point).

When we talked about the film afterward, Chantal mentioned that it seemed to be trying to achieve the same sort of feeling as Forrest Gump, and I've since seen a couple of published reviews that make the same point. But there's one significant respect where the two films differ, and that leads me to one of the main flaws of Benjamin Button: it feels entirely disconnected from most of the historical realities of the lengthy time frame it covers, especially when it comes to the issue of race relations in New Orleans. This is a film that has a lengthy section set in the 60's but makes no mention of the civil rights movement whatsover, though it does make time to show The Beatles playing "Twist And Shout" on the Ed Sullivan Show; a film that suggests black and white were living almost entirely in perfect harmony throughout most of the 20th century in one of the southernmost states in the U.S.. Benjamin's environment feels like some kind of isolated idyll, immune to the realities of racial tension and conflict. While this has little impact on the story itself, it still feels a little odd. The only historical event that truly has any effect on Benjamin is World War II; otherwise, scattered references-- an appearance by Teddy Roosevelt in flashback, a mention of John Wilkes Boothe-- come and go with no real coherence or significance. They seem to be there simply to create that Gump-like feel, but they lack that film's consistency of purpose.

But this is probably because Benjamin Button's heart is in another place: a meditation on aging and on the persistence of love over time. Viewed realistically, much of its plot falls apart entirely. But the film isn't really meant to be viewed realistically. Rather, Benjamin's confrontation of his condition and the story of his love with Daisy are played out via a series of symbolic moments, visual metaphors for their emotional condition. And in this respect, the film works brilliantly. The best sequence in the film concerns how things might have turned out differently for one of the main characters (again, to say more would be a spoiler) if any of a number of small events in a longer chain of events had unfolded differently; the way this scene is executed visually, combined with Benjamin's narration, perfectly conveys the film's underlying ideas about fate and the strange interconnections of individual destinies that bring us to where we are. There are many smaller moments that reinforce these ideas as well-- a recurring metaphor involving a pier near the summer home owned by Benjamin's father, a hummingbird as a symbol of renewal and hope-- and they rarely feel obvious or heavy-handed. There's a gentleness and warmth to the way the film deals with its frequently sorrowful and painful subjects that makes it feel more hopeful than a simple plot summary would suggest. (On a side note, am I the only one who finds it kind of odd that such a sentimental work was directed by David Fincher? Maybe I'm just not familiar enough with anything other than Se7en, but I was surprised when I saw that he was the director.)

And the lead performances are uniformly excellent, even if Brad Pitt doesn't look entirely convincing once he devolves to teenage status. Both Cate Blanchett and Tilda Swinton have strong roles as intelligent, sensual, complicated women, and Taraji P. Henson makes the potentially stereotypical role of Benjamin's adoptive mother Queenie consistently effective. Some of the film's best moments belong to seemingly minor characters, especially a man who always tells about how he was struck by lightning seven times-- a funny recurring joke at first, but one that develops a serious undercurrent in its final version. The parade of colorful characters again evokes Gump, but since the ones here feel perfectly at home in this story, it doesn't really matter. xp