The suspension of disbelief at the movies is a delicate matter. The first hurdle is convincing the audience that the person onscreen is not an actor but a character. This is especially difficult in the age of unrelenting media coverage. How can you forget who that is when you know where he lives, what he thinks about global issues, where his partner’s tattoos are, and the names of their six children?
In The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, the new film from David Fincher (Fight Club, Zodiac), the first suspension of disbelief is achieved using makeup and digital effects. Adapted from a story by F. Scott Fitzgerald (The Great Gatsby), Benjamin Button is about a man who is born old and ages (dis-ages?) in reverse. Hence we first see him as a wizened baby whose organs are failing, then as a white-haired rheumatic child, a creaky adolescent, and finally, emerging from the mists of plot and special effects, as Brad Pitt. It doesn’t stop there, as we are treated to a retrospective of Pitt’s looks: Seven, Meet Joe Black, Legends of the Fall, all the way back to the first impression of Pitt on our retinae, Thelma and Louise.
Wait a minute. If he ages backwards, why is he born an infant and not an old man? We know people shrink with age and osteoporosis, but they don’t shrink that much. The filmmakers may have wanted to head off our incredulity — How can an 80-pound man pass through the birth canal? — but in doing so they have weakened their case. Their job is to make us believe that the fantastic premise is possible, but they don’t seem to believe it themselves. (In Fitzgerald’s story, the anomaly is dealt with quickly and humorously.)
The second hurdle is to create an environment in which such a fantastic premise might occur. However, the movie opens with a real-life event, Hurricane Katrina. As the storm approaches, a woman sits by her dying mother’s hospital bed, reading to her from the diary of one Benjamin Button (like the nurse reading to the English Patient). How do you introduce the thermodynamic anomaly in a real-world setting?
Daisy the dying woman (Cate Blanchett) tells the story of a clockmaker who constructs a clock that runs backwards, in the hope that his son and all those who died in World War I might come back. It’s a stirring tale, told in period flashback, and it might’ve set up the plot nicely. But then Fincher and screenwriter Eric Roth proceed to show us Benjamin being born on the day WWI ended. Amid the celebrations, his bewildered father abandons him on the steps of an old folks’ home in New Orleans.
This early there’s a clash between reality and fantasy. There’s more. Benjamin is adopted by the black woman who runs the home, and brought up among the aged residents. Everyone comments on Benjamin’s weird condition, but no one finds the case worthy of a medical report. He grows up (or down) in the South, in the pre-civil rights era, and no one remarks on his being a white person with black parents. True, New
Orleans was more liberal than the rest of the American South, but why have a black adoptive mother if the issue of ethnicity is not addressed at all? Is this because now that Barack Obama has been elected president, color is no longer supposed to be an issue? Or is this part of the fantasy for which our disbelief should’ve been suspended?
The adaptation takes the story’s premise and the protagonist’s name, but not its comic tone. Fincher and Roth have taken a droll little tale and blown it up into a romantic epic set against the backdrop of recent American history. The result is a classed-up Forrest Gump with golden cinematography in which the major events of the 20th century function merely as chronological signposts. In old movies this was achieved by showing the pages of a calendar flying off; in this case there is a large budget to spend. The movie not only ignores history, it uses history as a watch.
Benjamin manages to avoid any engagement with history, except for one encounter with a U-boat that disposes of several characters so the hero can ruminate on the transience of earthly existence yet again.
This is probably fitting given the character’s incredible circumstances, but what is the point of bringing up history only to ignore it? Why bring up real-world events at all when they interfere with the suspension of disbelief? By the way, Eric Roth also wrote the screenplay of Forrest Gump. That explains so much.
The third hurdle is to make the audience believe in the characters. Pitt and Blanchett, playing the lovers who meet in the middle of their contradictory chronologies, work hard but do not convince us that their love will stand this particularly cruel test of time. There’s no emotional wrench when they’re torn apart, basically because they aren’t, really; one of them just decides to be pragmatic. It’s the worst place on earth to be pragmatic: in a romantic epic.
These are the questions Benjamin and Daisy have to deal with: How can we continue to be together if everyone sees you as a pedophile? Can romantic love survive if one must change the other’s diapers? (But doesn’t this happen to aged couples all the time?) Note to filmmakers: These are not romantic issues.
There’s really only one romantic issue: How will I live without you? The great movie romances answer this in different ways. “You’ll be brave and inspire your husband in the fight for freedom, which is more important than our happiness.” “I will betray all my friends because life means nothing to me without you.” “I don’t intend to, I’ll get you back, tomorrow is another day.” Or simply, “I won’t.”
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button is curious indeed: it forgets that true love is itself a suspension of disbelief.
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