The Curious Case of THE CURIOUS CASE OF BENJAMIN BUTTON
Paramount/WBBreaking a six-year-long hiatus from feature directorial work, David Fincher has recently returned with Mank, a lush and stylized peek under the bonnet of the Golden Age Hollywood penned by his late father, Jack Fincher. Understandably, the film’s subject matter combined with an overall prestige tone surrounding its release have reignited the long-gestating discussion regarding the notion of Fincher’s relationship with The Academy Awards, which is but one of many reasons to dust off a completely different conversation about one of David Fincher’s most overlooked films.
Released in 2008 to a strong critical response, The Curious Case Of Benjamin Button was the first time David Fincher brushed shoulders with the Oscars. The film led the race with thirteen nominations and – at least on paper – would have been a shoo-in for top awards, but it lost to Danny Boyle’s Slumdog Millionaire. Consequently, it has quickly fallen by the wayside of the collective consciousness in the world of film. Even though David Fincher remains a darling among fledgling cinephiles, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button has developed a bit of a reputation as a barely watchable dud and hence doesn’t get taken off the shelf anywhere near as often as Fight Club, Seven, or The Social Network. And it is a real shame because – the film’s own shortcomings notwithstanding – it is well worth revisiting, reappraising and perhaps even admiring.
However, what is most interesting about this film may not directly pertain to its overall quality as an overlooked masterpiece; far from it. Although it is extremely competently directed and populated with formidable performances from Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button has been consistently criticised at the time of its release – and even now – for being conceptually flawed and written in such a way that the effortlessness and chemistry between Pitt and Blanchett could only be leveraged for a few fleeting minutes when their characters ‘met in temporal terms’; when both were more or less the same age as the actors who portrayed them. Otherwise, they would be covered by tonnes of (Oscar-winning) makeup or de-aging CGI effects that constituted an insurmountable obstacle for most viewers to overcome and connect with their utterly tragic and heart-rending love story.
While this is a genuinely valid piece of criticism many reviewers hanged their tirades upon, it doesn’t paint a full picture of how and why The Curious Case of Benjamin Button came to be what it is and look the way it does. In fact, it might be all too easy to pass the buck of blame onto the screenwriter, Eric Roth, whose resume is mostly rock solid and includes Forrest Gump, The Insider, and Munich. It is most likely true that the entire central storyline keeping this film together has been invented by Roth and nested right at the heart of the story, but arguably, the film would not have been made at all without it. And that’s because the original short story penned by F. Scott Fitzgerald was completely unadaptable as it was.
One of the most popular explanations why The Curious Case of Benjamin Button has been passed around Hollywood for nearly three decades, with a laundry list of filmmakers, screenwriters, producers and stars attached to it for varying periods of time, involved the potential technical problems that would likely arise when trying to portray a man aging backwards with even a modicum of believability. While it is most certainly true these technical limitations have been overcome relatively recently and the finished film managed to remain graceful in that regard despite being a de facto pioneer in the field of de-aging, it is equally possible that Fitzgerald’s story was being passed around like a hot potato because nobody could turn it into a story worth telling without re-engineering its narrative. As anyone who actually read the novella would testify, even the author wasn’t particularly interested in fleshing out its main characters, let alone using the story to say something meaningful or enduring. In all seriousness, as it was released in 1922, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button was nothing but a curiosity and a distant ancestor to Rod Serling’s The Twilight Zone. The story was squarely focused on exploring the central conceit of a man being born old (not just wrinkled but old, mouthy and grumpy) and aging in reverse. Fitzgerald did not care about giving Benjamin a backbone because all he wanted to express was already baked into the premise of not fitting in on the basis of age and maybe underscoring the so-called ‘middle age’ as the pinnacle of a man’s physical and mental ability.
In the book, Benjamin never meets Daisy. He marries Hildegarde Moncrief and only because he looks like an older man, which is much to Hildegarde’s taste. In fact, the author doesn’t ever spend too much time on their relationship because it seems more important to him to devise subsequent mini-scenarios where Benjamin’s ‘external’ age would be experimented with: i.e. when nobody believes he is a decorated war hero because he looks like a teenage prankster or when he is refused admission to Yale because he looks like an old man. His odd journey backwards through the forward-moving time is not punctuated by anything nor tethered to anyone, which only serves to underscore just how well this story ended up transcribed into the film. It turns out that Eric Roth had no other choice but to extract the central gimmick of the narrative that defines and distinguishes The Curious Case of Benjamin Button from literally any other story written on a napkin by a creative writing major and gave it a soul – the central romance that anchors Benjamin’s adventures in some kind of elevated reality and endears him to the viewer by virtue of fundamental familiarity.
All of a sudden, this simple storytelling trick – however adventurous or defiling to the original text it might be – turned a potentially unadaptable disaster-waiting-to-happen into a fairy tale about two people who are clearly meant for one another but only able to be together for a brief moment when their trajectories cross over. Granted, the Fincher-directed adaptation is not perfect, but it surely does not deserve to be forgotten or dismissed as a failed instance of awards bait. Thanks to Eric Roth’s inventions, this otherwise mundane and downright indigestible short story became a romance to remember. It wasn’t the technological advancements in filmmaking craft that made this adaptation possible. Without a good script, it would surely still be languishing in the depths of development hell.
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button is undoubtedly a cinematic oddity, but it is much more interesting than the vast majority of film lovers give it credit for. Not only is it an example of perfectionist filmmaking, effortless acting and ground-breaking special effects that enabled this outlandish narrative concept, but it is predominantly a proof that occasionally a cinematic treatment can improve its literary source material. And if F. Scott Fitzgerald was alive today, he would most certainly be both happy and somewhat jealous to find that somebody else – a screenwriter no less – was able to breathe life into his empty shell of a story and turned a rushed story about a man whom nobody ever took seriously or paid attention to into a stirring romance that most people can fundamentally relate to. After all, everyone has ‘the one that got away’ – a love unrequited, a hope unfulfilled.
