‘Benjamin Button’ Lives on Strong Performances
-----‘The Curious Case of Benjamin Button’ is one of those films that often resembles a biopic. It’s also a hybrid of a few films before it, most notably ‘The Notebook,’ ‘Forrest Gump,’ and ‘Big Fish.’ It starts out strong due to excellent performances from the supporting cast, and the lesser third act is still salvaged a bit mostly due to Brad Pitt’s screen presence. Unfortunately, with the exception of Brad, the third act seemed a bit cliché’ and dutiful to me. It had its moments but got weighed down by convention a bit, feeling somewhat anticlimactic and ultimately depressing at times. However, it is still a solid film thanks to, as I previously stated, the strong performances.
-----‘Benjamin Button’ starts in a modern day New Orleans’ hospital. An old lady has her daughter, a young woman, read from the diary of one Benjamin Button. The diary starts with the birth of our protagonist on the day the First World War ended. So begins his backward life across many decades. Found on the doorstep of a senior citizen (or rather an assisted living) home, he is raised as a son by a black woman named Queenie, played brilliantly and authentically by Taraji Henson. As he ages...or rather the opposite, Benjamin starts gaining a bank of knowledge by way of the many old people living in the home and their stories. As time goes by, he eventually sets off from home seeking to make his own way.
-----Of the many fine performances, two stick out as some of the best of the year. Taraji Henson is genuine and true as Benjamin’s mother figure Queenie. But an even finer performance comes from previously unmentioned actor, Jared Harris as Captain Mike. Weaving a fine balance between friendly and rough, eccentric and patriotic, he expertly crafts a character we can relate to and also root for. It’s a shame he’s primarily only in the first act because he is excellent. His line delivery always sounds true to character and his morals and motivation carry many layers, some evident and some hidden. It was a classic performance that really brought the movie home for me.
-----The cinematography is a nice balance as it shifts continually from the 30s all the way to modern times. The effects are spectacular, yet subtle. They’re not in your face, and they shouldn’t be. They nicely blend aspects of Brad Pitt into all versions of the character, whether he is an old man or a young child. Unfortunately the film occasionally felt bumpy to me as far as time period transitions went. It would seem like there was an hour in the thirties, and then suddenly it was the sixties for five minutes, then the eighties for an hour, and sometimes it just felt off to me. It seemed like he was old for 70% of the film, in the middle for 25% and then his thirties, twenties, and younger went by in the last 5%. While I would have preferred either a focus or a balance between the stages of his life, the film still keeps pace fairly well. I did not like the hurricane Katrina subplot, because there was about fifteen minutes building it up for what seemed to become trivial reasons in the scope of the film’s plot. I also felt like the daughter reading to her mother was fine (if a little cliché), but I never felt connected to the daughter. She seemed irrelevant in my eyes and I cared little for her, so there was ultimately no sense of consolation and as an effect of that I didn’t buy the closure from the old woman’s standpoint. Whereas with a film like ‘Big Fish,’ the son of the protagonist is developed enough to make you feel connected to him so that the protagonists’ closure is believable and therefore succeeds in being closure for the audience as well.
-----‘Benjamin Button,’ despite what I consider its’ few misgivings, such as the conventional and somewhat depressing ending, still has enough strong character moments to make it a quality film. There is an ending scene that wraps things up for our protagonist quite nicely and there’s even some good humor to be found throughout the story. While I didn’t love it as much as I did ‘Big Fish,’ it still affectively competes with ‘Forrest Gump’ and easily surpasses ‘The Notebook.’
-----Oscar Watch: The familiarity with Best Picture Nominee ‘Big Fish’ and Best Picture Winner ‘Forrest Gump’ can only bode well for this film. While it will probably lose to ‘Slumdog Millionaire’ or one of the other potential Oscar juggernauts, it will still probably receive a good number of nominations. Look for a Best Actor Nomination for Brad Pitt, and hopefully a Best Supporting Actor Nomination for Jared Harris, and maybe a Best Supporting Actress Nomination for Taraji Henson, though the latter is more of a stretch. Jared Harris may have won too, if not for Heath Ledger’s Joker.
