The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (2008)

Some directors use visual effects as a crutch. David Fincher uses them as a tool. I can think of no director who works so comfortably, and frequently so invisibly, with digital effects. Until you watch the DVD special features, you would have no idea that many of the key scenes in Fincher's Zodiac, including the examination of the taxi cab at the corner of Washington and Cherry, were shot on a green screen, with nearly everything except the actors and the car painted in using computers. It's the same sort of technique used to create the world of Sin City but consider how different Zodiac looks and feels than that movie.

Brad Pitt stars as the title character, who is born as a shriveled raisin of a baby, with all the ailments of a man on his deathbed, and grows physically younger as he mentally ages, so that when he finally does die some eighty years later, he looks like a cherubic newborn. Along his way from grave to the cradle, he meets and falls in love with a vivacious dancer named Daisy (Cate Blanchett), whose normal human physiology and development conspire to keep the pair apart (When they're both in their early teens, Benjamin looks like a 70-year-old man, which makes their late night rendevous under a kitchen table awfully creepy).

Fincher's films (Alien 3, Se7en, The Game, Fight Club, Panic Room, and Zodiac) would not seem to bear a good deal in common with a lengthy meditation on mortality. But I look over that list and see what a filmmography primarily concerned with fear of the various terrors that hide in the dark corners of alleys or spaceships or even our own personalities. Benjamin Button, while certainly the most sedate film to bear Fincher's directorial signature, is still about that same fear, only this time he doesn't disguise it in the form of a slimy alien or serial killer.

The movie spans most of the twentieth century. No matter what time period Benjamin and Daisy cross paths in, one image repeats in Fincher's frame: light bulbs. The number of times the movie places the two characters into composition with bright, unshaded lights are too numerous to count. From a directorial perspective, the sharp direct light casts deep shadows which are visually striking and likely also a helpful tool when trying to mask the subtle but elaborate visual effects playing out across Pitt and Blanchett's faces. But I wondered if there was a more symbollic meaning, and according to this dream dictionary, a light bulb in dream logic "suggests that you are ready to accept and/or face reality." In the context of Benjamin Button I wonder if they could serve as a visual reminder of the fact that the characters are having a hard time doing exactly that. It's something worth exploring on a second viewing.

A few days ago, my Termite Art partner R. Emmet Sweeney posted his Best of '08 List, which includes The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. Sweeney praises Fincher because "his talent for subordinating digital gimmickry to the demands of story and character is unparalleled." As my earlier comments would suggest, I agree, although you will note Benjamin Button didn't show up on my own top ten. Though I was never less than completely engrossed by the picture, I don't know that the movie always succeeds: Fincher's technique is so workmanlike that it infuses Benjamin Button with a buttoned-up atmosphere that's sometimes counter to what is essentially a tragic love story. Moments of true emotional release, of genuine passion, even when Benjamin and Daisy both "meet at the middle" of their respective journeys, are few and far between. Maybe Sweeney can respond with his own lengthier piece on the subject to explain what I missed in that department. Regardless, this is a movie I would easily recommend. The proper word to describe the movie is right there in the title; it does indeed weave a curious spell.

Babel (2006)

I'm gonna put myself out on a limb right now and say Babel is going to win the Academy Award for Best Picture. Not because I like it, or because I think it's any good. But because it's exactly like Crash, and that won Best Picture and hell what worked before shall work again. I'd rank it fifth amongst the Oscar nominees (behind The Departed, The Queen, Letters From Iwo Jima, and Little Miss Sunshine in that order) and about one hundred and twentieth out of the one hundred and fifty or so movies released in 2006 I saw last year. But hey I don't get a vote.

Babel is a movie for people who want to feel bad at movies. Escapism is a common term when describing movies. People go to the movies to escape. Conversely, one goes to Babel to feel bad; to feel guilty about being happy or feeling love or trying to conduct your life as if it means something more than horror and sorrow. Babel is the opposite of escapism: it is miserism.

Note I said director Alejandro González Iñárritu wants us to feel bad; I don't think Iñárritu necessarily wants us to think about feeling bad or the horrific tragedies that befall just about every single character in the movie because if we did we'd probably realize how utterly full of shit the story is. There are four main stories: in the first two boys in Morocco horse around with their father's new rifle and shoot a bus; in the second, a Mexican nanny takes her charges from San Diego to her home south of the border for her son's wedding then loses them crossing back over the border; in the third, Cate Blanchett gets shot by the Moroccan kids, spends two hours bleeding in a Moroccan village while Brad Pitt yells at the rest of the tour group he's with; in the fourth, a deaf and mute teenager tries very hard to have sex with every male on the island of Japan. The first and third stories very obviously connect. The second story is connected because the two children in it are Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett's (meaning that in one week Pitt's wife gets shot and his children get lost in the Mexican desert, meaning he has the worst week in history of the world, meaning somewhere Jennifer Aniston is smiling). The fourth story does not connect at all, except that the horny Japanese girl's father is a game hunter and he gave his rifle to his Moroccan tour guide as a token of appreciation, and that rifle is the one that shoots Cate Blanchett. In other words, the fourth story does not connect.

There isn't a single joke in the movie (then again, there isn't a single joke in Iñárritu's entire filmmography) and things are so unrelentingly grim that eventually it becomes hopeless to care about the characters because a)we know absolutely nothing about them beyond the fact that they are here to suffer for us and b)they're only going to suffer anyway regardless of how we feel. It becomes a good deal more interesting to actively root against the characters — man was I ever hoping those whiny kids lost in desert would stay lost.

Still, there is much to learn from the pervasive negativism prescribed by Iñárritu and co-writer Guillermo Arriaga (the pair have made better films than this, though they're all about this cheery). Here's a sampling of what Babel teaches us:

Don't guy a gun. Don't shoot a gun. Don't leave your children with a babysitter. Don't be a tourist. Don't go to your son's wedding. Don't go to Morocco. Don't live in Japan. Don't be deaf. Don't lie to the police. Don't not wear underwear. Don't stick your dentist's fingers in your bathing suit area. Don't have children. Don't drink alcohol. Don't go hunting and then give your rifle to your tour guide. Don't cross national borders without letters of permission. Don't be related or connected to Brad Pitt in any way. Don't get lost in the desert without a bright red sash you can fling about for maximum symbolic value. Don't present yourself naked to helpful police officers. And, seriously people, don't buy a gun and shoot it and shit. Just don't.

In other words, don't do anything. If you are the slightest bit agoraphobic: do not see this movie.

Look, I'm all for a filmmaker presenting the world in a harsh light, or portraying the dark, and horrible, and frustrating things about the world. I practically prefer it. I don't need escapism all the time. But I need something to break up the monotony.