The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, round 2.

"David Fincher would seem, in terms of temperament, an unlikely directorial choice for The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, an era-spanning epic whose sweeping, poignant romance doesn't seem a natural fit for a digital-era auteur whose films are generally typified by cool, sleek, exacting meticulousness," writes Nick Schager in Slant. "And yet that measured, distant disposition is, in fact, what prevents his latest from sliding into the mawkishness for which it so often seems destined."

Paul Matwychuk: "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button tells an incredible story, and yet I found myself oddly unmoved by any of it, held at arm's length by David Fincher's surprisingly impersonal direction, the overly episodic, narration-heavy script, the fussed-over production design, an opaque central character, and a tiresome framing story set, bewilderingly, in a New Orleans hospital in the hours before Hurricane Katrina. To steal a metaphor from Mad Men, the film is a gold violin: it's beautiful, but it doesn't make any music."

Updated through 12/26.

"For a melodrama concerned with emotional pain, this fairy tale favors formal trickery over human connection to a fault," agrees David Fear in Time Out New York.

Brad Pitt "isn't bad (his noncommittal performance might even appeal to some people, who can project on him what they will), but he lets opportunities slide that other, physically inventive performers would kill for," writes David Edelstein in New York. "It's too bad that I can barely remember the movie after only a week."

"Last year it felt as if I was the only person in the world that disliked Zodiac, and now I feel like the only person in the world - at least in my critical circle - willing to rally behind the flawed but enthralling The Curious Case of Benjamin Button," blogs Ed Gonzalez.

The original story is "a snarky little tale about a man born old who ages backward - that [F Scott] Fitzgerald whipped out, probably mainly for the cash," writes Robert Koehler in Variety. "To build a Movie as Big as the Ritz out of such a trifle is only part of the reason why the development of Benjamin Button consumed two decades and involved at least two screenwriters' best efforts, more than a few directors and the patience of producers Kathleen Kennedy and Frank Marshall, as well as former Paramount topper Sherry Lansing, for whom this might represent her last major legacy to the studio she oversaw."

"Although nearly every major Hollywood movie of this size and budget is still made on film, Button, except for some high-speed and underwater sequences, was shot digitally on high-definition Thomson Viper cameras directly to hard drive, without ever touching tape, then captured into Final Cut Pro for editing." Joe Cellini talks tech with Fincher for Apple. Via Movie City News.

The Los Angeles Times profiles Fincher.

Jane Housham offers a quick take on Fitzgerald's story in the Guardian.

Earlier: Round 1.

Update: "In something like the way Fincher's Zodiac, too, was defensibly overlong in order to convey the procedural tedium of investigative police work, this film also uses time as a narrative tool, if only to steep us in wistful awareness of its irrevocable passage," writes Jonathan Kiefer. "It is at once more affecting than its source material and more affected."

Updates, 12/23: "Screenwriter Eric Roth is no doubt hoping that you won't notice how many of his ideas from Forrest Gump have made it into his adaptation," writes Alonso Duralde at MSNBC. "And even fans of that earlier film may find themselves overburdened; Gump director Robert Zemeckis isn't exactly known for his light touch, but next to Button man David Fincher, he's practically Ernst Lubitsch."

In Slate, Juliet Lapidos considers Fitzgerald's decision to send Benjamin Button to Harvard.

"This technically dazzling, decades-spanning fable is a more tenderhearted reflection on humanity than Fincher has allowed himself before," writes Dennis Harvey at SF360. "Whether it leaves you enchanted or indifferent may prove a matter of taste. But it's a fascinating and accomplished gamble that again asserts Fincher as a major talent whose limits are still unknown."

"Rendered with make-up and motion-capture technology, the man-child Benjamin is a technical and expressive miracle. (Between him and WALL•E, two of the most affecting movie characters of the past year were CG creations.)" Elbert Ventura in Reverse Shot: "The premise also makes us more attuned to the development of personality. As he grows older, Benjamin develops an appealing wryness and wary alertness, even as he retains a cautious detachment bred by years of being different. Passive yet affecting, Pitt's performance may be his best non-comic turn yet.... The movie itself is a curious case: What to make of a movie of equal parts beauty and banality, imagination and hokum? Fincher's captivating spell lingers after the movie's done—but the disappointment of what could have been lingers longer."

Updates, 12/24: "[W]here Gump actively trivialized history," writes Scott Foundas in the Voice, "Benjamin Button effectively ignores it: Although Benjamin briefly exchanges fire with a German submarine during World War II, and Hurricane Katrina makes a cameo toward the end, this movie about a white baby raised by a black adoptive mother during the inglorious years of the Jim Crow South never so much as addresses race once.... It was just last year that Fincher delivered a great film, also three hours, on the subject of time. But whereas in Zodiac the passing years wrap around the characters like a vise, catching them up obsessively in a single, distended moment, in Benjamin Button the ravages of time are trumped by a kind of eternal, undying love that mere physics is at a loss to contain. And Fincher, try as he might, scarcely seems able to buy into Roth's brand of Harlequin-romance hokum."

"You make allowances for the odd Gumpy screenplayism because of Fincher's intensity, the exquisite production design, and the film's tidal tugs," writes Nicolas Rapold in the L Magazine: "besides the imperfections of love, there's the reversal of roles with loved ones over the years, the counterpoints with youthful America (across two postwars), even Pitt's own flickering star. Bonus: ideal as a double feature with Coppola's Youth Without Youth."

"At its best, it is evocative and affecting," writes the New Republic's Christopher Orr; "at its worst, an exercise in sentimental portraiture - and the line between the two tendencies is not always a clear one."

"This vision of two lives criss-crossing as they ebb finally achieves a profundity the rest of the movie strains for, but it comes about two hours and 25 minutes too late," finds Dana Stevens in Slate.

"May I be permitted to retitle The Curious Case of Benjamin Button as The Mystifying Multimillion-Dollar A-Listing Exercise of Destroying an Intriguing if Minor F Scott Fitzgerald Short Story with Oscar-Caliber Sentimentality?" asks Kimberly Chun in the San Francisco Bay Guardian.

Updates, 12/25: "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, more than two and a half hours long, sighs with longing and simmers with intrigue while investigating the philosophical conundrums and emotional paradoxes of its protagonist's condition in a spirit that owes more to Jorge Luis Borges than to Fitzgerald," writes AO Scott in the New York Times. "And the puzzles it invites us to contemplate - in consistently interesting, if not always dramatically satisfying ways - are deep and imposing, concerning the passage of time, the elusiveness of experience and the Janus-faced nature of love."

"Maybe what's most affecting in Benjamin Button has less to do with the story or the acting than with watching a filmmaker stretch in a new direction, trying things he isn't fully comfortable with and doesn't exactly know how to pull off," writes Stephanie Zacharek in Salon. "Nothing in Benjamin Button happens casually or without a reason. And maybe that's why, even though it offers us much to marvel over, it sparks little magic: The effect, ultimately, is one of applied whimsy."

"[W]hen all the dazzling visuals have subsided, when audiences are left with the movie's tagline ringing mawkishly in their ears and puzzled thoughts about what they just saw, they might be forgiven for concluding that they didn't see much of anything," writes Ann Hornaday in the Washington Post.

"Zen gives us the parable of the master who points to the moon, and the student who looks at the master's finger," writes James Rocchi in Cinematical. "Fincher, Roth, Pitt and Blanchett have all, in their way, made a film of true sincerity and (ironically enough in light of its technical achievements) real simplicity; resting your gaze on the film, without directing it onto the things it encourages you to look at, seems like staring at the pointing finger."

"At times, particularly in the film's unavoidably heart-tugging final hour, Fincher's visual mastery and Pitt's charisma almost compensate for a gimmick in search of a meaning," writes Keith Phipps at the AV Club.

"Though Hollywood suits have been trying to make it for decades," notes Kenneth Turan in the Los Angeles Times, "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button is not a project that cries out to be filmed. Now that it's finally been turned into a major motion picture, complete with megawatt stars Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett, you have to wonder why everyone bothered."

Updates, 12/26: "The movie's premise devalues any relationship, makes futile any friendship or romance, and spits, not into the face of destiny, but backward into the maw of time," argues Roger Ebert in the Chicago Sun-Times. "According to the oddsmakers at Movie City News, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button is third among the top five favorites for best picture. It may very well win. It expends Oscar-worthy talents on an off-putting gimmick. I can't imagine many people wanting to see the movie twice. There was another film this year that isn't in the 'top five,' or listed among the front-runners at all, and it's a profound consideration of the process of living and aging. That's Charlie Kaufman's Synecdoche, New York. It will be viewed and valued decades from now. You mark my words."

"I suspect I already prefer it to all of Fincher's other films, with the possible exception of Se7en," writes Jonathan Rosenbaum. "It took me a while to warm to the weird premise and some of the grotesqueries it involves, but I think part of what impresses me is how nervy it is in playing out the poetry of the conceit for all that it's worth and letting all the social-historical elements - from two world wars to Hurricane Katrina (and not overlooking the degree to which it sidesteps all the racial issues) - take a back seat to the love story."

"The charge commonly leveled against Fincher (especially with last year's almost sociopathically chilly Zodiac) is that he lacks heart," writes Paul Constant in the Stranger. "This isn't a capital crime for a director, of course: Stanley Kubrick did just fine without any messy sentimentality getting in the way. Benjamin Button feels as though Fincher is swaddling himself in sentimentality and homespun wisdom to prove his humanity. It's an awkward, unconvincing fit."

"Pitt is the film's calm center, and he brings more nuance than one might think possible to a character living an unimaginable life," writes Andy Klein in the LA CityBeat. "Blanchett is perfect as always, despite the thanklessness of the role."

Reed Johnson profiles Pitt for the LAT.

Posted by dwhudson at December 22, 2008 2:12 AM