The American Spectator : The Curious Case of Benjamin Button

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The Curious Case of Benjamin Button

By James Bowman on 2.9.09 @ 6:02AM

Even more curious is why this awful flick is competing for an Oscar instead of worst movie of the year.

Never, quite possibly, in the history of the American cinema has a bigger, baggier monster been brought to birth and flourishing -- thirteen Academy Award nominations! -- from a more nugatory source than The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. Scott Fitzgerald's short story of 1920 is the slightest of jeux d'esprit, an avowed "experiment" based on Mark Twain's observation that it is a pity that the best part of life comes first and the worst last. To Fitzgerald, this proved the excuse for a joke, and a very slight one. In my edition of his short stories, the editor, Matthew Bruccoli, apologizes for that slightness by writing that, as he and (presumably) Fitzgerald see it, "the challenge of fantasy is to make impossible events convincing." Not anymore it isn't! It's simply to revel in the fantasy and convincing be damned -- which I, for one, don't call much of a challenge.

It should not be surprising, then, that one of the messages of this message-laden film -- they had to put something in it to make up for Fitzgerald's lack of substance -- is precisely that fantasy is as good as reality. Or, to put it as the not-aging-but-youthening hero, the eponymous Mr. Button (Brad Pitt), does in one of his frequent, heart-tugging voiceovers, "Anything is possible." Americans, or at least American movie-audiences, love to be told things like this, even though they are patently untrue. Lots of things may be possible but there are also a very great many which are not -- one of which is the birth of a child who is an old man and ages backwards. That's just not how nature works. Everybody knows this. Hollywood amuses itself by pretending that what everybody knows isn't true. The mystery is why it should amuse anyone else.

Apparently it does. At this writing, the movie has made over $100 million to go with the Oscar nominations, and yet I can see nothing in it of any interest at all. Instead, it is simply the piling up of one absurdity on top of another and not even for the purpose of raising a laugh. But then you'd have to have been pretty inattentive to our cultural milieu these last 30 years or so not to have realized that absurdity has stopped being funny and started being the stuff of and inspirational story-telling and homely moralism, often repeated. For instance: "You can be mad as a mad dog at the way things went; you can swear and curse the fates, but when it comes to the end, you have to let go." Do you, indeed? You can just about live with this combination, perhaps, if the absurdity has at least a hint of irony about it, but there is nothing like that in Benjamin Button. On the contrary, the seriousness with which it takes its own absurdities would make it quite insufferable even if it weren't nearly three hours long.

Benjamin Button, both movie and character, has the same sort of punkin-headed faux innocence as Forrest Gump (1994), and the film makes a similarly patronizing use of its Southern setting -- in New Orleans, mainly, but also, most oddly and implausibly, in Murmansk. Fitzgerald's story is set in Baltimore. Like Gump, too, it takes a simple-minded person and freak of nature and makes of him a sage and a shaman who is meant to teach us how to live our lives. It even has its own brainless banality as a catch-phrase, to match "life is like a box of chocolates" -- namely, "You never know what's coming for you." There is also a Gump-like attempt, though less systematic, to match its idiot-savant hero to events of national or world importance, including Hurricane Katrina which provides the framework for the story's telling in flashback, the movie likes its hero progressing crabwise. Benjamin in his earlyish old age also goes to Murmansk as crewman on a tugboat -- why a New Orleans tugboat should be in Murmansk is never explained -- at the time of the Second World War, except that the war is depicted as beginning, in typically provincial American fashion, with the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7th, 1941.

In fact, the Soviet Union was already six months into the German invasion of its western territory at that point and was fighting for its life. Arctic convoys of supplies from Britain (though as yet only to Archangel) had begun and been running for three months. Before that, the Soviets had been on the German side in the war and engaged in a war of their own with Finland. None of this elementary history makes it into the movie. "If there was a war, we didn't see it," as yet another syrupy voiceover tells us. Accordingly, Murmansk is a peaceful, even sleepy town where a still elderly (i.e. not yet young) Benjamin has a pleasant and leisurely dalliance with Elizabeth (Tilda Swinton), a sometime channel swimmer and wife of the British "trade representative." He is said to be really a spy, though we are not told for whom. He must not be a very good one if he can't figure out what his own wife is up to.

This idyll only ends with the Japanese attack on America, six thousand-odd miles away. At that point, the New Orleans tugboat that happens, inexplicably, to be in Murmansk, five thousand-odd miles away in the other direction from where it could reasonably be expected to have any tugging to do, joins the U.S. Navy, already on the spot more or less, and single-handedly takes on and sinks a German U-boat. Hurray for the U.S. of by God A! What any of this nonsense has to do with Benjamin's equally nonsensical reverse-life is anybody's guess, though there is a half-hearted attempt or two to make it the occasion for various voiceover meditations on fate. "Sometimes we're on a collision course, and we just don't know it. Whether it's by accident or by design, there's not a thing we can do about it."

Sure enough, but you don't have to live your life backwards to figure that out. In fact, what the central conceit, the "high concept" of Benjamin's backwards life has to do with anything else in this immensely long and unfunny shaggy-dog story, apart from providing the hero with his stock of gnomic wisdom and an excuse for leaving his marriage to his old-age sweetheart, Daisy (Cate Blanchett), and child during a young-life crisis, remains a mystery. As with Christopher Nolan's Memento (2000) -- which, you will remember, told the story backwards -- we have to ask if the gimmick that occupies so much of our attention is anything more than a gimmick. And in this case the answer is no.

About the Author

James Bowman, our movie and culture critic, is a resident scholar at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. He is the author of Honor: A History and Media Madness: The Corruption of Our Political Culture, both published by Encounter Books.

Letter to the Editor View all comments (25) | Leave a comment

Kitty| 2.9.09 @ 6:29AM

If you want a movie about a simple-minded person who's mistaken for a sage, you can't find any better than Jerzy Kosinski's Chance ("I like to watch") in "Being There."

...

Appleby| 2.9.09 @ 6:46AM

Modern Americans seem to believe that anything they cannot understand must be profound.

frost| 2.9.09 @ 7:31AM

Kitty was absolutely correct. Peter Sellers, as usual, was magnificent (almost as good as "The Party" and the Panther series). Mr. Bowman's writing, however, seems so clumsy and contrived, designed to impress us -- but it doesn't. Me, at least...

D| 2.9.09 @ 8:13AM

Good Lord, it was a fantasy.

And you have to admit, the clips of the guy who got struck by lightning seven times were pretty funny.

C. S. P. Schofield| 2.9.09 @ 8:28AM

It seems to me that this revival of a bit of Fitzgerald trivia is connected with the "Literary World"'s ongoing fashion for what they are pleased to call "Magical Realism". By "Magical Realism" as regards literature, they apparently mean fantasy taking place in a world not completely divorced from our own. In what way this differs from what Ray Bradbury was doing, rather better, in 1954, nobody seems willing to say.

The "Literary" efforts of the intellectuals (see Tom Wolf's book Hooking Up) have largely been failures, but it seems to be having a leak-over effect into the popular culture. Some of this is fun (Emma Bull's War For The Oaks), and some, like the movie under discussion, is tripe. Regrettably some of the tripe is going to be rewarded far beyond its due, simply because outside of some fairly closed-in subcultures (SF fandom and its derivatives), this is new and therefore fresh to the public. The same thing happened with the MATRIX films, which were going over some of the most thoroughly plowed ground in the SF genera.

Annoying, but not important.

mattled| 2.9.09 @ 8:34AM

I thought it was a movie about Obama? Substitute: Life is like a room full of community organizers, you never know what kind of freak you'll get.

Colin| 2.9.09 @ 10:56AM

Maybe it's just my cynical side, but this Button movie and its reviews may be way above the heads of your average duck. Matter of fact - and if my analyis is correct, the guys at DailyKos are still sitting around in their p.j.'s trying to decode satanic messages buried in ... Herbie The Love Bug and Rocky's III - IV and V.

Well, at least it keeps 'em distracted.

D| 2.9.09 @ 11:35AM

Don Ameche in "Things Change" doesn't quite fit the category, but close, And it was a great movie.

Joey Murphy| 2.9.09 @ 12:08PM

JB nails it again.

'Benjamin Button' is 'Forrest Gump' Without the AIDS

http://www.funnyordie.com/videos/1d76506803/the-curious-case-of-forrest-gump-from-fgump44

Obama Rules | 2.9.09 @ 1:25PM

Do you hate this movie only because it was made by liberals?

Next time, why don't you review "Beer for my Horses," that wonderful feel-good movie with Toby Keith!

PS. W. is a loser.

Obama Rules| 2.9.09 @ 1:29PM

Hey, has anyone seen that t-shirt for sale that says "Run, Liberal, Run! Palin 2012" and has an illustration of Palin holding an assault rifle?

Priceless!

I'm a-gonna have to git me one of those...since I don't have a job, maybe I can steal it?

GFranke| 2.9.09 @ 3:05PM

I can see why it is not on the worst movie of the year list. This is a really tough year for bad movies. This has enough of a plot that history can actually be detected. It is wrong, but at least detectaable.

Alan Brooks| 2.9.09 @ 3:15PM

Frost,
what's wrong with Mr. Bowman's writing?
i'll take his reviews over today's lib puff-pieces.

skep41| 2.9.09 @ 3:17PM

Kitty! Are you nuts? 'Being There' was a slap by liberals at Ronald Reagan; you remember, the charming, retarded dunce who wormed his way into the White House by blandly repeating a few shopworn cliches to the idiotic voters. It was also, like most of the movies which featured Peter Sellers and most outstandingly 'The Party' and the sonorous and unfunny 'Panther' series, unwatchable to present-day audiences. The only decent movie that unfunny dope was in was 'Dr. Strangelove' where he was the straight man for George C Scott, Peter Bull, Sterling Hayden and Keenan Wynn and directed by a brilliant director.

I went to see 'Buttons' and left scratching my head. What was this interminable movie about? Why was Hurricane Katrina shoehorned into this mess? To remind us of the Bush tryanny, no doubt. The USSR was portrayed very sympathetically, a minor point. The history was bent like a pretzel to make things fit but that would've been OK if everything had worked. It didn't. It also had a muddy lighting that made you wonder if they had accidentally kept the f-stops on the cameras one or two stops closed because they had trouble blending the effects into the picture. Why this movie made it to the best picture nominations with movies like 'Doubt' and 'Burn After Reading' out there is incomprehensible.

orson| 2.9.09 @ 4:38PM

Nanu Nanu!

J. Winters pwns B. Pitt

Deepti Harri| 2.9.09 @ 5:22PM

We used to be shocked by sex scandals in the clergy. Given the endless stream of those wrongdoings, we no longer are. Heterosex has also become old news. The rage now is about gay and paedophile monks.

The latest scandal involved an abbot in Nakhon Si Thammarat. His lover accused him of being unfaithful after finding out that the abbot had invited a group of teenagers to drink and party at his quarters. The last straw was reportedly the taint of semen on the abbot's mattress.

Their quarrel turned violent. The jilted lover, after being beaten up, reported the matter to the police. The abbot fled and quit the monkhood to avoid arrest and forced disrobement.

Having sexual intercourse, either straight or gay, is a cardinal sin in the monks' code of conduct. Their monkhood automatically ends once they commit the crime. When found out, they must be expelled from the clergy.

Alan Brooks| 2.9.09 @ 7:02PM

Obama Rulez ought to lay off hanging out in the 'hood high on meth,
and so's den he wont need to steal an assault rifle like de one Sarah gots.

Kitty| 2.10.09 @ 7:02AM

skep41: That "the charming, retarded dunce" didn't "worm" his way into the White House. That would have required a level of ingenuity which Chance the gardener simply did not possess. Chance was welcomed in by people around him. He served as a Rorschach test: They saw in him what they wanted/needed to see. I saw "Being There" more of an indictment on politics in general, not as a slap against Ronald Reagan (whom I adored). After all, the movie was released in 1979, when that PLO-lovin' peanut farmer was president.

For the record, I hated Sellers' movies. I imagine playing Claire Quilty in "Lolita" posed no challenge for him at all.

Whether I'm nuts has yet to be established.

...

Carol| 2.11.09 @ 5:02AM

I liked Chauncy Gardener...He used simple
phrases from nature, that the Washington
elites took as profound. It was not an anit-
Reagan movie. Chauncy walked on water
at the end.
Yes, Claire Quilty was a horrible person...
well-deserving of his violent demise.

Rich| 2.18.09 @ 5:51PM

wow what does this all have to do with liberals and Reagan? you people are nuts, it was a movie, a fantasy movie, the fact that the critic who wrote this column actually writes it like anyone with a brain thinks its possible is an even bigger joke.

why dont you all get off your high horses and see this movie for what it really is, life lessons, seriously, you all have to over complicate things, its actually that simple...watch the movie for the movie, not to decode it like some dead scroll book found up this critics ass

Dante NG| 2.25.09 @ 3:18AM

I agree with RICH opinion. If you all so good why don't become a producer.

"You can be mad as a mad dog at the way things went; you can swear and curse the fates, but when it comes to the end, you have to let go."

sixminutemile| 6.26.09 @ 11:39AM

I have to agree with the critic in this case. I am tired of movies that win awards and make money that aren’t factually correct. I find little value in things that don’t follow an unimaginative logical course to a predetermined conclusion. From now on I am only going to movies that adhere to a strict retelling of history – the version that I think happened. I know this will be a challenge for movie producers because I don’t even believe the news I read unless it happens to agree with me exactly. It’s time for movies to return to themes that would appeal to intelligent people. Intelligent people that can use the word “nugatory” in the first paragraph of a movie review.
I consider myself to be very intelligent. I know this is true because I don’t believe anything that disagrees with me. When presented with something disturbing, I console myself with the knowledge that if President Ronald Reagan was alive today it will all be different. This is especially helpful when debating movie reviews. Not because President Reagan was an actor and a part of the Hollywood establishment, but because he left office over 20 years ago. I can remember him and the time in which he lived much more fondly that I view today. This is because I am old like Benjamin Button. Maybe age, wisdom, memories and death are worthy themes, just not in movies only in the review of said movies.