Episode 10: The Curious Case of Benjamin Button and Bottom 5 Diseases

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button

How to deal with a movie in which the central concept Is so ludicrous, and yet the filmmaking is so earnest?

• David Fincher, screenwriter Eric Roth and company all set to tell this thing as seriously and realistically as possible. Quite a feat, because for most of its excessive running time it actually works.
• The technical aspects of the movie are astounding, whether it’s Fincher’s confident direction, the gorgeous cinematography by Chilean director of Photography Claudio Miranda (Oscar winner for Life of Pi) or the surprisingly realistic special effects. And even the acting is spot on, with Pitt working wonders under all manner of makeup and turning in perhaps his most nuanced and believable performance. Also very good is Taraji P Henson as Queenie, Benjamin’s adopted mother, who like Pitt was nominated for an academy award in 2008.
• The weakness of the movie is it lack of focus in telling Benjamin’s tale, which is loosely based on the F Scott Fitzgerald short story of the same name. On the outside, it’s a quirky tale about the challenging life of a man who was born aging backward, so as a baby his body is old and frail and he simply gets younger as he matures, sort of evening out in mid-age. But in truth, it’s about the passage of time, and it uses Benjamin’s condition to make statements on what it means to age, what our responsibilities are as lovers, parents, and friends, and how those responsibilities change as we age.
• It has A LOT to say, and much of it is as cleverly written as it is cleverly rendered. When Benjamin is a young boy, Fincher, Pitt and the incredible make-up effects team lead the great Greg Cannom – who I started loving back in the 80’s for The Howling and who took home the Oscar that year for his Benny Button work – work freaking miracles with the help of the visual effects masters at James Cameron’s Digital Domain, to show this bizarre old-man-child creation. And honestly it’s never all that weird or awkward so much as fascinating and impressive.
• Not as successful? Elias Koteas’s weird make-up job as “Gateau,” the blind clock-maker whose son dies at war. His mustache and glasses reminded me way too much of Dr. Robotnik from Sonic the Hedgehog. And his story, likewise meanders. As a memorial to all the boys who didn’t make it home in World War I,  Gateau  creates a clock that ticks counter-clockwise for a train station in New Orleans. And, I guess(?), when they unveil it is the moment Benjamin is born, so like the clock, he in stuck in time backward. Or something.
• That’s the biggest issue with this movie – it goes on these eccentric tangents that don’t really need to be there as several don’t even seem to be all that connected to the story or the themes of the movie. Eric Roth – who I have a bone to pick for Denis Villeneuve’s Dune but who gets a pass for his awesome work on The Insider – writes the screenplay like it HAS SOMETHING TO SAY, all caps, and honestly, it sort of does, but only as things directly relate to Benjamin.
• So Gateau’s tale, the mother-daughter wraparound set at the mother’s hospital death-bed during Hurrican Katrina, the older fella at the assisted living home who keeps recounting his times being struck by lightning, the ship captain who gets tattoos because his father told him he couldn’t be an artist, the woman who swims across the English Channel – all of it just feels super unfocused.
• In the first ten minutes, you meet so many characters and go through so much, that it’s actually a little dizzying:
  • The mother and daughter in the hospital in modern day New Orleans
  • Gateau and the clock post World War 1
  • A really cool, but totally unnecessary reverse motion sequence that includes a World War 1 battle
  • A mother dying during childbirth , and a father being chased through the streets on 1918 New Orleans while trying to decide how to get rid of the baby
  • A woman working at an assisted living home for the elderly and her suitor who discover the baby on the stairs by stepping on it.
• It’s A LOT. And this movie runs a solid 2 hours, 46 minutes – five more than Mike’s beloved Out of Africa – and it’s all pretty much crammed with this much stuff. After a while, you just want the main storyline and not so much of the rest.
• As with all the best movies, the characters and relationships in Benjamin Button are solid
  • Queenie is 100% a mom to Benjamin, and the friendships he makes in the story – whether they be with a small person named Ngunda who spends time at the home  or that rough and tumble yet poetic boat captain or the woman who teaches him piano – are all well-acted and attended to script-wise.
  • It’s the relationships that got me swept up in the story – the people as they interact with this rather curious character who looks older than he acts, then later acts older than he looks.
• Alas, everything falls apart when you hit the third act and Benjamin and his longtime love Daisy played by a rather bored-looking Cate Blanchett. I mean, I adore Cate Blanchett in almost every movie I see her in, but here she seems like she’s trying to play Gwyneth Paltrow. And here you’ve been waiting the entire movie for Benjamin to be reunited with the love of his life – who he meets as a little boy-old man when she is a little girl (CREEEEEPY as it sounds) and now they meet and… montage sequence! It feels hollow and low effort, but what follows is worse.
• What’s worse is that there are so many scenes where intimate small gestures carry such significant weight. Whether it’s the hug in the hospital between the mother and daughter at the start of the film, or the way Taraji P Henson’s Queenie kisses Mehershala Ali’s Mr. Weathers – which might be one of the steamiest kisses I’ve seen in a while – or how Benjamin listens to the sounds of houses or the hands touching when Benjamin first kisses Tilda Swinton’s Elizabeth Abbot – all of this works so well to anchor us in his experiences, which is why the montage into the third act just feels like a betrayal. We’re pulled out of the story by a traditional passage of time trope, which would be entertainingly ironic if it were handled better.
• And when we descend back into the story, it’s to watch Benjamin become a deadbeat dad! This is where the film lost me, as did Pitt’s performance.
• I’m not a big Pitt fan. I find him underwhelming and bland in most of his movies, but here – when he’s under prosthetics or just prematurely grayed – I was floored by his authenticity and gentleness. But when he is just, you know, Brad Pitt, he’s distant, difficult to care about and, when he decides it’s too much to parent his daughter because of his “condition” and he leaves the love of his life behind as well as his child, he – and the movie – lost me.
  • The great thing about the movie is it often uses its outsized concept to point our the peculiarities of aging and enforce that we all are Benjamin Button in some way – for all of us deal with the passage of time, tough decisions, lost love, etc.
  • In any case where a couple embark on parenthood, there are decisions to be made and accountability to be assigned. We all change in time – no one is static. And Benjamin’s condition wasn’t so severe that he couldn’t have been a parent to his daughter Caroline.
  • We are all faced with choices, and he chose to be a coward, something the screenplay both wants us to overlook and, incredibly, wants us to feel sympathy for.
  • And the flimsy rationale that it would be too much for Daisy to take care of Caroline AND Benjamin was dumb. That’s a chance we all take when we partner up. And what happens? She ends up taking care of him anyway, as he becomes a young boy with dementia.
  • I ended up disliking the character for his late-in-life choices and spent the rest of the movie detached from his experience until he was an old man in a young child’s body. At that point, the tragedy of the situation become too much for me to bear.
• The death of a baby, even if it has lived a long life as Benjamin did, is a VERY tough thing to consider, never mind WATCH. When he breathes his last, my heart broke and I didn’t know what to think of the whole picture.
  • On one hand, I admire its commitment to the story and where it inevitably had to end. On the other hand, it was so challenging to take in, that I felt winded.
• Ultimately, it tries to tie his end into all of the other threads of life he touched, conveying a message about how the opportunities in life don’t just belong to the young. It also attempts to yank in the reverse-time clock as the floodwaters of Katrina approach its resting place in a backroom. It’s a bit ham-fisted and – after all we’ve been through with Benjamin – exhausting.
• The real point of the movie was described by screenwriter Eric Roth like this: “It doesn’t make any difference whether you live your life backwards or forwards – it’s how you live your life.” Fine. If he wanted us to care more about Benjamin, though, he should have been a better person.
• This flick has Zelig and Forrest Gump in its DNA, with an idiosyncratic lead character that bops throughout a colorful life filled with eccentric characters and brushes with history. But in the end, it lacks Woody Allen’s satirical sense and Robert Zemeckis’s heart-stained sleeve.
• It becomes, an anomaly – a film filled with technical wizardry, strong performances, and a well-executed high concept that completely blows its landing and instead feels like an overlong bore by the time the credits roll.
• Very weird that this where Fincher went with his career after Fight Club, Panic Room and Zodiac. This thing really seems like an outlyer in his career.
• I was a BIG Fincher fan in the early 90’s for his music videos. I mean, Madonna’s “Express Yourself” and “Oh Father,” Aerosmith’s “Janie’s Got a Gun” and Billy Idol’s “Cradle of Love?” Yeah, big fan.
• Then… Alien 3. And when I was in film school I was doing a serial killer screenplay that – on its surface – seemed to share DNA with Se7en, so I never watched it! The Game was underwhelming, Fight Club left me cold – another terrible third act – but I did appreciate Panic Room and Zodiac. I think I actually like his work for TV – House of Cards and especially Mindhunter, more than his movies! For many, he’s a must-watch director, but for me – I just… am ambivalent.
• Benjamin Button is another one that I wish I could re-edit.

Bottom Five Diseases

God, this is a pretty tough list to cobble together when you’re still dealing with a two-year-old pandemic.  And yet, we shoulder on… just as we do every day in this thing. Just as these characters do.

5.) Dog Flu – Isle of Dogs

• Wes Anderson’s 2018 stop motion flick is a terrific watch, but with a brutal central premise that makes it hard to stomach – a canine illness that results in weight loss, dizziness, aggressive behavior and, alternately, narcolepsy and insomnia infects dogs in a fictional city in Japan.
• All dogs are quarantined and sent to “Trash Island” which is then given a new name, “The Isle of Dogs.”
• The story follows a young boy named Atari who goes to find his best friend, Spot.
• It’s such a heartbreaking idea – a life without dogs???? Curse that illness! And curse all those horrid politicians who take away our furry friends.
• Kudos to Anderson for an absurdly awesome voice cast on this thing including Ken Wantanabe, Bryan Cranston, Ed Norton, Bill Murray, Jeff Goldblum, Scarlett Johanssen and Tilda Swinton.

4.) Osteogenesis Imperfecta – Unbreakable/Glass

• M. Night Shyamalan gets kicked a little too much around these parts. I wouldn’t say I’m the kind of fan that would say he’s fault-less, The Village’s “surprise” was easily spotted in the first twenty minutes and The Happening is shockingly bad. But he has had some pretty great stuff in his movies too.
• In his “comic book” trilogy of Unbreakable, Split and Glass, we get some very cool takes on super heroes and super villains, and while James McAvoy’s multi-personalities steal most of the thunder, it’s Samuel L. Jackson’s Mr. Glass that proves to be more memorable – and more heartbreaking.
• The main reason: Jackson’s character has a terrible disease called Osteogenesis Imperfecta that makes his bones SUPER brittle. You want to talk awful? Watch the sequence of him fall down the escalator in Glass?
• Even worse? Watch one of Shyamalan’s most disturbing sequences – the deleted scene from Unbreakable that was included in Glass where the villain as a little boy gets on a bumpy spinning carnival ride and ends up horrifically injured.
• Rarely does a condition in a movie illicit both sympathy and an excessive amount of cringe-inducing fear, but Shyamalan makes serious hay with the idea and creates – with an exceptionally memorable performance from Jackson – a terrific villain that you actually care about (a true rarity.)

3.) Motoba – Outbreak

• Wolfgang Petersen – director several hits including Air Force One, The Perfect Storm and In the Line of Fire… and, ahem, The Neverending Story – was at the helm for this 1995 cautionary tale about a communicable disease that enters the good ol US of A in the lungs of a poached monkey and before you can say “Gesundheit,” people’s organs are hemorrhaging and Morgan Freeman is called in to keep things quarantined.
• This thing has more stars than the night sky: in addition to Freeman, you get Donald Sutherland, Dustin Hoffman, Rene Russo, Cuba Gooding Jr., JT Walsh, Patrick Dempsey and a before-he-was-an-a-hold Kevin Spacey. 
• This was a crazy big hit back in 1995, and it remains an exciting thriller due less to that cast than one might expect. In fact, the real star of the movie is the ebola-like virus at its center. Seriously, there’s little that’s as scary as an airborne virus that makes you bleed out from your eyes and has no cure.
• Co-written by former medical doctor named Laurence Dworet, the movie does a pretty excellent job setting the stakes that this thing is 1) deadly and 2) MUST NOT GET INTO THE POPULATION. Petersen does a terrific job with a ton of action caught with dollying and steadicam shots, and it’s still a hoot all these years later as during the pandemic it managed to climb up to the Number 4 most-streamed movie on Netflix
• This is an obvious pick, but I had to have at least one of the big virus movies, and while The Stand’s Captain Trips pre-dates Outbreak, the Motoba virus was scarier and no hand of God was coming out of the sky to save us. Just… Dustin Hoffman.
• Also? Gyneth Paltow wasn’t in this one, so it’s better than Contagion too.

2.) Shit Weasels – Dreamcatcher

• People hate this movie, but man… I don’t know. I kind of love it for the batshit weirdness it unleashes.
• Directed by the esteemed Lawrence Kasden – best known as director of The Big Chill and as screenwriter for The Empire Strikes Back – and written by none-other than The Princess Bride-scribe William Goldman, this Stephen King adaptation is, on its surface, a lot like Outbreak in that it’s all about a really horrific virus and the efforts to contain it led by, you guessed it, Morgan Freeman!
• Only this time, instead of a simian-originated virus that just makes you bleed out your eyes, the inhaled spores are alien in origin and cause you to… shit… decent-sized weasel-like aliens. 
• Seriously, you’ve not known horror until you see Jason Lee trying to battle the urge to pick up a clean toothpick off a shit- and blood-stained floor while he’s sitting on a closed toiler lid under which is a thrashing shit-weasel. It’s… disturbing and fucking hilarious.
• But is there a worse way to go? The cinema has given us many, many ways to die, but blast-shitting a murderous alien weasel out of your ass has got to be the all-time cake taker.

1.) Childless – Children of Men

• Can you imagine a world with no children laughing? Is there actually any thought worse than that?
• Alfonso Cuaron’s “Children of Men” from 2006 may be one of cinema’s very best and it has sat in my top ten movies of all time since its release.
• Let’s face it – it doesn’t get more harrowing or dystopian than the inability for the human race to have children.
• But do to some sort of mass disease or condition that’s never really explains, that’s exactly what happens in this virtuoso film from one of the most exciting directors working in cinema.
• Seriously, is there any bigger game changer than the infertility of all women?
• This movie is heartbreaking in so many ways, whether you’re talking about the central premise, the loss the lead character and his revolutionary wife are dealing with, or the desperation of all involved to survive in a hopeless, dying world.
• But damn, how about that firefight sequence that ends with both sides ceasing fire when they see Kee and her baby? It’s a standout moment in a film absolutely brimming with them.
• A movie about a world with no children – that death of the youngest person alive was brutal a touch – but it ends with the sound of a child’s laughter which drives all of it home so much more.

After so much grimness with all of this disease and death and sadness, I decided I… didn’t want to change a damn thing in terms of mood. In fact, if anything, I’m doubling down with this week’s staff pick.

Staff Pick – Don’t Look Up (2021)

• I LOVE end of the world movies. Big or small. They are 100% my jam. “Greenland?” Hell Yeah. “She Dies Tomorrow?” Why not? Heck, I even liked “Moonfall.”
• But what I’m often disappointed by with apocalyptic fare is that they throw the hand-break on almost all the time and stop short of the hopeless cataclysm I so desire.
• Think about it – “Deep Impact” ends up not having a planet killing asteroid. “2012” essentially has a Jonah’s Ark finish. And almost every zombie movie ends with survivors.
• That’s partially why I have to give to Adam McKay for “Don’t Look Up.” While so many people are arguing about whether it’s funny enough – it is – whether it’s too heavy handed – it is – and whether or not the cast choices are on point – for sure they are – I’m sitting over here thinking “Hell Yes” because the movie commits to the hardest thing any movie can commit to: killing the entire planet.
• Good on you, Don’t Look Up. You get the best performance I have ever seen from Leonardo DiCaprio – who brilliantly plays against type – and you let Jennifer Lawrence have some fun being edgy, awkward and kissing Timothy Chalamet.
• Hell you even give us Tyler Perry and Cate Blanchett as shockingly realistic network morning show hosts that make Reese Witherspoon and Jennifer Aniston look like the pretenders they are.
• Plus, the always wonderful Melanie Linskey has a small role with a few terrific moments, which is something cinema has been far too short in supply of. (Luckily, she leads the cast on Showtime’s Yellowjackets, so my Jones is met.)
• And yeah, it’s fun to laugh at the end of the world because I’m not sure there’s ever been a movie that better captures the realistic nature of what the end would look like. We wouldn’t be saved by Bruce Willis! Hell no, we’d all die arguing about who’s right and who’s wrong, never once realizing that all of it matters exactly as much as a squirt of piss at the end of the day.
• Good on you, Don’t Look Up. And Good on all the A-listers involved. It takes balls to be THIS nihilistic.

Next time on Filmjitsu – I am a Ghost (2013)

Mike, when you brought me into the Filmjitsu fold, you warned me against going too obscure with my picks because who other than me would watch a movie made for a buck fifty that’s been seen by eleven people? It was a fair point, but recently I stumbled across a rather quirky flick that begged me to go against your wishes. And while this flick is only 75 minutes long, I actually asked you to watch another movie beforehand, a bit of a two-fer that I think will, at the very least, make for some interesting conversation. Next week’s movie is the 2013 curio by Filipino-American director H.P. Mendoza called “I am a Ghost,” and as homework I requested that you also take in 2017’s critically-lauded “A Ghost Story,” a low-budget passion project by director David Lowry. “I am a Ghost” is described as a horror film about a ghost who haunts her own Victorian house every day wondering why she cannot leave. After watching “A Ghost Story”, made on the cheap by an A-list director for 100,000 bucks, I’m going to be very, very curious what you think of “I am a Ghost,” which was made for $10,000. It’s available to stream on Shudder and Tubi, in case anyone else wants to catch it before listening to Mike’s thoughts.