The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (2008)
Directed by David Fincher
Born under unusual circumstances, Benjamin Button springs into being as an elderly man in a New Orleans nursing home and ages in reverse. Twelve years after his birth, he meets Daisy, a child who flits in and out of his life as she grows up to be a dancer. Though he has all sorts of unusual adventures over the course of his life, it is his relationship with Daisy, and the hope that they will come together at the right time, that drives Benjamin forward.
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What critics say influenced The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
In " Australia ," the romance between Nicole Kidman and Hugh Jackman felt obvious, strenuous and unconvincing, on hand for the sole reason that every film trying to ape the style of "Gone with the Wind" needs one.
It is hard to resist the charming appeal of classic storytelling in this dramatic epic that ranks right up there with "Gone with the Wind," "Lawrence of Arabia" and "Titanic."
A few years back, he tried to imitate Gump's length and feel with the equally obnoxious The Curious Case of Benjamin Button .
Perhaps obviously, the film's structure owes a great debt to screenwriter Roth, who similarly (if more conspicuously) chronicled pop culture in Forrest Gump.
Closer in spirit to the Roth-scripted Forrest Gump , Benjamin Button is to the first half of the 20th century what Gump was to the second—a panorama of the American experience as seen from the perspective of a wide-eyed Candide.
If there's a Forrest Gump quality to the movie, that's unsurprising, considering that the screenwriter, Eric Roth, was responsible for both scripts.
Directed by David Fincher (Zodiac, Fight Club), whose command of the medium continues to amaze, the film has some of the Everyman appeal of Forrest Gump, screenwriter Eric Roth's earlier work.
Director David Fincher has turned out an overlong, Forrest Gumpian exercise in mannered whimsy.
In other words, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button is essentially a grand melodrama with some wonderful flights of Magical Realism, that frequently evoke films such as Tim Burton’s Big Fish .
Fans of Tim Burton ’s “ Big Fish ” should get in line right now.
It's frankly all a bit too much, without the whimsy of something like Big Fish (2003), or the wit of Fitzgerald.
Or if the story weren’t so willfully cluttered, approaching even Tim Burton’s Big Fish for Southern gothic bric-a-brac, perhaps Fincher could have stopped time a few times more, making The Curious Case of Benjamin Button more worthy of yours.
This is a movie cut from the same cloth as Tim Burton’s Edward Scissorhands (1990) and Burton’s Big Fish (2005)—two movies guaranteed to choke me up at certain key moments.
Even the most alive segment of the film, a montage of the intervening of fate, will have astute viewers harkening back to Paul Thomas Anderson's magnificent "this...cannot be that" prologue to Magnolia and giving no credit to Fincher for expanding upon that idea in any meaningful way or teasing us that his flair for the theatrics will make another appearance.
It also occasionally diverges into some great sequences depicting the cruelties of fate and irony, in a way that is not dissimilar to Paul Thomas Anderson’s Magnolia .
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However, much like David Lean’s Doctor Zhivago, the film takes its time exploring the emotional experiences of its characters and ultimately allowing love to take its time instead of being a force one quickly jumps into.
With the Resnais of Je t'aime, je t'aime at the wheel, this could have been a profoundly affecting rumination on being and dying and impermanence; with Fincher excreting goo over digital canvases, it's a mammoth chunk of marzipan.
If it moves backward through a story (Harold Pinter's " Betrayal "), its scenes reflect a chronology seen out of order.
Why Pitt chooses to play Benjamin--already a child trapped in Hume Cronyn's body--as slow and wistful is beyond me, yet between the elaborate fright makeup aging him for the first half of the film (and turning Cate Blanchett into David Bowie's dying vampire from The Hunger in the second) and a performance swaddled beneath a syrupy Loooziana accent, find a simpering characterization of a precious naïf gifted with an air of beatific benevolence.
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It is hard to resist the charming appeal of classic storytelling in this dramatic epic that ranks right up there with "Gone with the Wind," "Lawrence of Arabia" and "Titanic."
This is a movie cut from the same cloth as Tim Burton’s Edward Scissorhands (1990) and Burton’s Big Fish (2005)—two movies guaranteed to choke me up at certain key moments.