The Curious Case Of Benjamin Button

The Curious Case Of Benjamin Button

Being a fan of David Fincher's work, and knowing how often his collaborations with Brad Pitt result in amazing films (such as Se7en and Fight Club), I couldn't help but be excited by his newest film, The Curious Case Of Benjamin Button. I'd read the F. Scott Fitzgerald short story some time prior to seeing the film, and was expecting something that would be ultimately heartbreaking. Instead, I was extremely unfulfilled with the entire 2-and-a-half hour ordeal.
Granted, the film did have moments of sublime beauty, which I shall relate a bit later. Fincher's eye for detail resulted in some amazingly accurate period set-ups (Apparently Levi's jeans supplied the vintage apparel for the characters in many of the pre-WW2 scenes), and his visual composition was often amazing (Daisy's dance routine in a fog-drenched gazebo was beautiful, as was Benjamin's walkin Moscow with Tilda Swinton's Elizabeth Abbott; the entire U-Boat attack), but the emotional cues were off for me.
Taraji P. Henson's Queenie was the doting mother-figure was the one constant emotional lynchpin to the film, never straying from her adoptive son, but rarely allowing more depth other than to lay words of wisdom on Benjamin, words that sound vaguely similar to writer Eric Roth's former Forrest Gump. Jason Flemyng, as Benjamin's father, Thomas, upon seeing his elderly newborn son, immediately rushes off to get rid of the boy, at first contemplating drowning him befroe dropping him off at the nursing home run by Queenie and her beau. In a film this long and lovingly detailed, Benjamin's origin feels unneccessarily rushed (and no one at all questions the fact that he ages backwards...I know that it's a matter of suspension of disbelief...but no one questions it). Eric Roth wrote a meandering script, one which offered situations without motivation, characters without context, conceits without meaning, and during one sequence, he wrote a five-minute monologue featuring about five characters who never reappear in the story but who exist solely so he could write a meandering description of how a major character was hit by a car. Why not just explain it? Get to the point.
The romantic story between Benjamin and Daisy worked well enough...but for some reason it just didn't click for me. These were two people who, for lack of a better context, met in media res in terms of their lives: Benjamin ages backwards and meets Daisy when she is a small girl and he is (physically) about 85 or so. By the time they're in their mid 30's, its logical for them to finally get together and live out their romantic lives.
But what of it? Sure, stories about people waiting years to be with whom they wish occur to millions of people every single day (hell, I know that feeling from experience), but in a movie the connections should mean something. When Benjamin meets Elizabeth and begins an affair with her in Moscow, he learns about loving. And then...they keep meeting up and having an affair. And she talks about almost swimming across the English Channel. And then...she just kinda leaves the movie. And she doesn't come back until the very very end when we see her, as an elderly lady, having just swum the English Channel. Did she do it because Benjamin inspired her? We don't really seem to know, and by the time she actually did swim across, his story was already over. The emotion wasn't there for me: a character is told for the first time that Benjamin is her father, and we receive about 2 minutes of her coping with that shocking revelation...and then it is never brought up again.
The scenes that held the most emotional weight for me were any featuring Queenie, and every single one featuring Captin Mike, the tattooed tugboat captain who becomes Banjamin's surrogate mentor. His was a presence that stuck with me primarily because it felt real. Capt. Mike is the cynic, the realist, seeing life as it is.When his fate unfolds, it's the only truly poignant moment in the film for me, but even then it's ruined by a CGI hummingbird that appears with little context.
And at the end of the film that's what I felt was missing: context. A point. What's the point in making a character age backwards if little to nothing is done with the conceit, and if none of the characters even really acknowledges the phenomena? Sure, watching Benjamin grow younger and more sharp as he watches those around him grow old and pass on is emotional stuff, but it could be just as emotional if he were to age normally as well.
Normally, Fincher is adept at manipulating emotions without making it ever feel like he is, and even his most heady and meticulous works offer insight to contemporary issues (even his period piece prior to this one, Zodiac). But Benjamin Button just didn't supply the weight I was hoping for after reading the story (not to say the short story was untouchably perfect...far from it. The themes therein are slightly dated, and even Fitzgerald ignores the conceit of a man ageing backwards in the middle section; as a reader of the story but not a disciple of it, I was fine with updating the timeframe and adding to the story). The short story ended with such a heartbreaking conclusion: a man lived a life, fought a war, and loved a woman whom he watched die of old age, and then, as he gets younger and younger, couldn't get the respect from others he'd earned, nor could he even remember his real age, nor his entire life for that matter).
Claudio Miranda's cinemaography, though, was lush and gorgeous; he employed a wide range of earthen tones to create an overly warm enviornment for the story, and the production design for 1920's New Orleans was meticulously detailed. Fincher's flawless design of Benjamin integrated Brad Pitt's likeness seamlessly onto the actors who portrayed the character at various points in history, pushing the visual effects in that regard to its limits (until James Cameron's Avatar premieres), but the special effects during other scenes (most notably the U-boat attack) seemed typical by comparison. In fact, there was a point in the film where Benjamin appears and Brad Pitt is actually younger than he was in Thelma and Louise, his first film. Watching a movie star age in real time over the past twenty years or so becomes so much more complex when you see him as he was and how he is currently within the same film.
This isn't one of Fincher's best films (Panic Room is still my least favorite of his), but it is ambitious. I can give it that much. With a meandering script, a cold-molasses-slow pacing, and an emotional center that doesn't even appear until the third act, it is a chore to sit through. It's not every day a director pushes the limits of his own technical abilities (especially a director as meticulous as Mr. Fincher), but even then the film should have a strong, interesting story. Perhaps it is telling that a film without an interesting story could still be nominated for 12 Oscars.
The concept of the film was interesting enough to get me to the theatre (as well as the inclusion of Mr. Fincher as director), but I still feel it could have been so much more than what the sum of its part gave me. Come for the production design and Brad Pitt face-deageing, but don't expect to be sucked in by the story.

No more hummingbirds. Please.

Joker

Joker written by Brian Azzarello, art by Lee Bermejo



I'd almost forgotten that this one-shot graphic novel was written, though I'd read about it on Batman-On-Film a few months back (the interview is interesting in that it predates the production of The Dark Knight, but Bermejo's design ideas for both the Joker and Two-Face are clearly reflected in the design of both those characters in that film). I read a few pages while waiting for class earlier this week and immediately picked it up to finish later.
Bermejo's work never fails to captivate me. Azzarello is hit-or-miss for me: I loved Lex Luthor, but thought the Superman: For Tomorrow storylines were too overtly symbolic, although Jim Lee's art in that series really complemented Azzarello's writing. that said, if Bermejo and Azzarello were to do nothing more but collaborate for the rest of their careers, I'd be quite happy with that. The art is beautiful. I'd read the previous Azzarello/Bermejo collaboration, Lex Luthor: Man Of Steel, and Bermejo's art was absolutely beautiful. He utilizes lots of sharp edges, where nothing looks fluid or organic, but looks as if it were pieced together from straight edges. At other moments, usually of emotionally moments or turning points in a story or a scene, Bermejo paints those frames, making them beautifully dynamic.
The story is told from the perspective of Jonny Frost, a low-level criminal who dreams of making it big, of being as recognized and feared and respected as The Joker. He is charged with picking up the Joker at Arkham Asylum, where he is being released (the reason is never explained, nor does it matter. His response to Croc when asked how he got released is almost exactly as Heath Ledger would have played it). While driving the Joker around, he comes to admire the Clown Prince of Crime, getting himself closer and closer to the villain, and finally realizing just how detached the Joker truly is from reality, sanity, and anything resembling humanity. By that time however, there's really no way out for him.
By telling the story from the point of view of someone closer to the Joker, but not neccessarily as twisted as some of the other rogues, we're able to really understand the Joker as a force more than as a person; Jonny is one of us, a "normal" person on the outside who slowly gets sucked in. Not once is it truly explained how he got out of the Asylum, what his intentions are, or why he kills certain people (and he certianly does kill some people in this: a bunch of slashings, numerous shootings, a broken bottle in the face, shooting a jaw off, and even flaying a henchman in a strip bar). His relationship to other rogues is explored (his interaction with Two-Face is pretty well played and works well in explaining why Two-Face never "just" kills Joker), and his ultimate relationship to Batman, which is summed up in three words and about five pages at the end, is the perfect epilogue.
The story is an exploration of the Joker's relationships: to his henchmen, to Harley Quinn (who is very much the Bonnie to his Clyde), to his fellow rogues, to Batman, and, more importantly, to Gotham City itself. The Joker and Gotham City form a bond that is stronger and more permanent than the bond between Joker and Batman. As Frost says in the last few pages, Joker is a disease, a disease that existed long before Gotham, the city infected. Joker represents not the evil inherent in man, but the insanity that dwells in the world. An urban madness made manifest in white, and red, and green, and purple.
This is a Joker more twisted, dark, and depraved than any previous incanation that I've read. Few times are his actual killings shown, merely the aftermath: but it's the aftermath that is shocking. His treatment of everyone (including Jonny, and especially Jonny's wife) show just how gone Joker is as a person. This is one of the seminal Joker stories, just as "The Joker's Five-Way Revenge", The Killing Joke, A Death In The Family, Arkham Asylum, or his first two appearances are. Hell, even "The Clown At Midnight" merely comes close to how dark the character can be when put in the hands of a capable writer.
And Azzarello is an incredibly capable writer (aside from, once again, what I feel is the clunky, overtly-symbolic Superman: For Tomorrow). There are instances of inspired subtlety in the narration: Joker's advice given to Jonny throughout; his recollection of a fellow inmate who believed he could drive around the world in a single day; his confrontation with the Batman; all of it is beautifully handled. Jonny, as a character, is given a cursory backstory: his wife has divorced him, he has a son, and he just recently got released from jail. A brief mentioning of a camping trip and a toad he had as a pet round out his backstory. The past, in this case, doesn't matter. What matters is the moment, and what the Joker does with it is the story. Azzarello manages to say much, much more in four words than I can manage to write here.
And what Azzarello does so perfectly is mold the Joker into both clown and psycho, thus completing a transition from the character's first appearance as a murderous thief, through his harmless phase as a jester during the 1950's, and leading right into the persona we now recognize: pitch-black humor, insane tendencies, and murderous rampages. Only now he appears much more real, much more potent. Much more like the evil incarnate as he is usually described.
As stated earlier, Bermejo's work and designs are beautiful and inspired. The Joker wears his Glascow smile and wrinkled, cobbled-together attire like a uniform (the only purple in his suit is his pants), and his red lips are now the result of his constantly chewing and sucking on his mouth. Other characters are presented in a more realistic light as well, especially the otherwise-fantastic-looking Killer Croc, who here looks exactly like a large man with a skin condition rather than and actual reptilian creature. The Penguin, already a realistic character, is expanded upon not on his look, but in his demeanor: much more of a power player, businesslike, and utterly afraid of the Joker. The Riddler's appearance is the most surprising: the character is visibly based on Johnny Depp, but his physical traits (which I won't describe here) were a surprise. And the less I say about Harley Quinn, the better (trust me, you won't forget her).
Bermejo's art is at once crisp and clean, and grittily real. The colors meld together in a barrage of greys, browns, and reds, and his rendering of faces is something I wish I were able to reproduce on my own. And I will tell you this, never before has an artist drawn so perfectly the point-of-view of a drunk character.
And that first image of the Joker walking out of Arkham...man I wish I could frame that.

Anyway, I suppose that's all I can mention. The book is an interesting read, but extremely dark, once again reminding me how dark a character Batman can be, how violent his universe is (seriously, who in God's Name would live in Gotham City?), and just how pefect a villain the Joker is.
You might want to wait until this gets into paperback before picking it up, though, but it is worth a purchase if you ever get around to it.
And when you do get around to it, you just might need a shower afterwards...