The Curious Case Of David Fincher

Posted on 01.07.09 by Hans Van Harken

I saw The Curious Case Of Benjamin Button on Christmas Day. And let me say this first, the trailers have been amazing. That first easer trailer attached to the horrible Indiana Jones 4 was one of the best, if not the best, of trailers my eyes have seen. It had this perfect mixture of creepy, beautiful, and a surreal and believable magic to it. The Concept of being born young and growing young seemed genius.

It dealt with a concept I've had in mind for a long time. In that life is an arch when it comes to a physical stand point. When you are an infant, you are dependent, frail, fragile, and can't walk. You grow up to middle age and from then on it's back downhill to the same, or very similar stage when you're old. Now what this 'growing young' concept does it display the similarities of that cycle but propose the idea of an immature old man, and a mature young boy, and how everyone else would deal with this persona. Would it be something too odd to explain to people constantly enough so that this person would be on the move all his life? How would this effect a person's life?

I made the mistake I normally don't do of setting an expectation before I watch the movie. But this movie was a Love story, and not a Life story. Plot 'A' was his love for this woman, and the 'B' Plot was his life. I am not sure if that is necessarily a mistake but 1: I didn't expect David Fincher to turn this concept into a Love plot. And 2: I, personally, believe there was so much more to explore with the idea this movie proposed. This movie had the mistake of trying to do everything, while mainly focusing on the love story, but at the same time not developing Benjamin Button's character. It seemed they were too caught up with his physical defect to actually put some attention to who Benjamin was inside.

Benjamin Button's character is very stale, honestly. He is the same person inside, from the moment he's born to the day he dies, his body growing counter clockwise around his stationary self. That was a bit irritating. It is very apparent that the screenwriter also wrote "Forest Gump" because he shared the 'simple man' qualities, except less interesting, because his body is interesting enough to worry about what he's like.

Lot's of people complain about the Length of the film. I don't mind the length, it's the content. The story was a bit too clunky and faint. It seemed like it wanted to be one thing the first 10 minutes then something else the next 15 minutes then another thing the next 2 minutes... I wasn't sure what to think of it. And, as much as i thought of it the best connection I could think of with Benjamin's life and the backwards clock made by the blind clock maker, is just the concept of destiny, chance, and coincidence that the movie briefly touched upon just before his love of his life was struck by a car. (which i thought was a marvelous scene). But besides that I had no idea how those two stories are linked.

At first, the ending seemed anticlimactic the movie just kind of slowly ended. There was no climax in fact the ending was a montage and then a final shot of the backwards clock starting up again as it's being flooded (I try to ignore that last shot because i can't make any sense of it). At first I didn't like that ending, it really really bothered me. But after giving it some thought I kind of realized, if this movie was a life movie more than a love movie somehow, It made me realize it's not important how you die, it's important what you did in your life. And maybe this movie's finale gave a bad impression, but this movie has content interesting enough to make me like it. And this is why the movie to me was disappointing but not a bad movie.

And this weekend I'm going to give it another go and watch it a second time, now that I know what to expect and engage myself into the story as it is and give it a second try.

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