The Curious Case of Benjamin Button is part of twentieth anniversary tribute to Reverse Shot at MoMI
THE CURIOUS CASE OF BENJAMIN BUTTON (David Fincher, 2008)
Museum of the Moving Image
35th Ave. at 36th St., Astoria
Friday, November 3, 6:30, and Sunday, November 5, 1:00
Series continues through November 26
718-777-6800
www.movingimage.us
reverseshot.org
Museum of the Moving Image is honoring the twentieth anniversary of the film publication Reverse Shot, which has been its in-house journal since 2014, with a two-month retrospective of twenty-first-century works touted by what was originally a stapled zine.
Among the films that have already been screened in “Reverse Shot at 20: Selections from a Century” are Julia Reichert and Steven Bognar’s A Lion in the House, Joel Anderson’s Lake Mungo, Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Pulse, and M. Night Shyamalan’s The Village. On November 3 and 5, MoMI will present David Fincher’s The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, which fits in well with the name of the journal, Reverse Shot, considering what happens to the title character.
Based on the short story by F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button is an unusual love story for the ages. As Benjamin (Brad Pitt) grows younger, everyone around him gets older, creating fascinating intersections among various characters, but primarily with Daisy Fuller (Cate Blanchett). It’s August 2005 in New Orleans, as Hurricane Katrina approaches. In her hospital room, an elderly, dying woman (an unrecognizable Blanchett) gives her daughter, Caroline (Julia Ormond), a diary that she begins reading out loud. It was written by a man named Benjamin Button, who was born an old man in 1918 and tells his life story as the years pass by and he ages backward, sort of a reverse Jack Crabb (Dustin Hoffman) in the great Little Big Man (Arthur Penn, 1970), with a bit of the overrated Forrest Gump (Robert Zemeckis, 1994) thrown in as well.
The film lags a bit as Benjamin and Daisy approach similar ages — actually, the closer they get to their actor selves — but the beginning is marvelous, with Fincher working magic as Pitt plays a tiny, withered old man, and the ending is heart-wrenching. Fincher (Fight Club, Zodiac) and screenwriter Eric Roth (Forrest Gump, Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close) wisely choose not to turn Benjamin into a human oddity that confounds the medical profession; instead, he just goes about his life, trying to do the best he can with a positive outlook and a lust for living. Alexandre Desplat’s score is among the best of the year, supported by a soundtrack filled with New Orleans jazz. The cast also includes Tilda Swinton as a diplomat’s wife who takes a romantic interest in Benjamin, Jared Harris as the randy captain of a tugboat who teaches Benjamin about the sea (and booze and sex), Taraji P. Henson as Queenie, the woman who raises the baby Benjamin after he is abandoned by his father (Jason Flemyng), and Mahershala Ali as Queenie’s husband, Tizzy.
In Reverse Shot, Andrew Chan wrote, “The unexpected harmony of extravagant price tag and minor-key mood is just the most obvious reason this film stands as an anomaly in the landscape of contemporary Hollywood cinema. . . . This is a masterpiece through and through, and not only the best thing I’ve seen come out of Hollywood in years, but also a film that deserves to stand proudly beside the work of contemporary masters Terence Davies and Wong Kar-wai in its evocation of what it feels like to be caught in the middle of time as it endlessly, imperceptibly slips away.”
“Reverse Shot at 20: Selections from a Century” continues through November 26 with such other gems as Maren Ade’s Toni Erdmann, Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life, Claire Denis’s 35 Shots of Rum, and Richard Linklater’s Before Sunset / Before Midnight / Before Sunrise trilogy.
[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]