David Fincher’s The Curious Case of Benjamin Button runs 166 minutes, and it spends nearly all of them asking you to feel something about time. It mostly earns the ask.
Trailer, via TrailersPlaygroundHD.
A Baby Born Old in New Orleans
The premise comes from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s 1922 short story, adapted here by Eric Roth and Robin Swicord. On the evening of November 11, 1918, a boy is born with the physiology and maladies of an elderly man. His mother dies in childbirth. His father, the wealthy manufacturer Thomas Button, leaves him on the porch of a New Orleans nursing home.
Queenie, the caretaker who raises him, names him Benjamin. He ages in reverse: his mind moves forward while his body runs backward, from wheelchair to crutches to walking.
Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett
Brad Pitt plays Benjamin, and Cate Blanchett plays Daisy Fuller, the child he meets on Thanksgiving 1930 when she is seven and he is something stranger. She grows up to dance in New York. He sails on the tugboat Chelsea under Captain Mike, has an affair in Murmansk in 1941 with Elizabeth Abbott, and sends Daisy postcards from the road.
Life isn’t measured in minutes, but in moments.
That tagline is the whole thesis, and Fincher mostly resists the temptation to underline it.
The supporting cast does real work:
- Taraji P. Henson as Queenie
- Tilda Swinton as Elizabeth Abbott
- Julia Ormond as Caroline Fuller
- Mahershala Ali as Tizzy Weathers
- Jared Harris as Captain Mike
The Clock That Runs Backward
The film frames Benjamin’s story inside Daisy’s deathbed in a New Orleans hospital in August 2005, where she asks her daughter Caroline to read from his diary. It also gives us Mr. Gateau, the blind clockmaker hired in 1918 to build a clock for a train station — one that ran backwards, a memorial for the sons lost in World War I.
That clock is the film’s best idea. It says what the movie is about without a character explaining it.
A 13-Oscar Nomination Haul
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button drew a leading 13 Academy Award nominations at the 81st Academy Awards, including Best Picture. It grossed $336 million against its $150–167 million budget, and it drew praise for its cast.
The production history is its own long haul. Producer Ray Stark bought the rights in the mid-1980s with Universal backing, sold them to Kathleen Kennedy and Frank Marshall in the 1990s, and the project moved to Paramount. It did not enter production until Fincher and Pitt signed on in 2005. Photography began in November 2006 and wrapped in September 2007. Digital Domain handled the visual effects, particularly the metamorphosis of Pitt’s character.
What Actually Holds Up
The digital aging is the part most likely to date, and it does. What holds is the middle stretch — Benjamin and Daisy meeting at the right age in the wrong directions. That is where the film stops being a stunt.
The framing device is the weak link. Daisy on her deathbed gives the story a narrator it does not need, and the film takes 166 minutes to say what Gateau’s clock says in one shot.
Still, the performances carry it, and the central idea is strong enough to survive the length.
Get the Notebook.
The day's best stories and every fresh verdict, in plain English, in your inbox by seven. One email a day, no more.
