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.
