Not Best Picture: The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
You’ve already heard my complaints about Ben Button, so it’s really no surprise that I don’t think it deserves to win Best Picture. I’ve already called this movie an “emotional molestation,” the kind of movie that forces you into a corner where you either have to abandon the movie, or give in to the blatantly obvious emotional play that it seeks to accomplish. Sure, there’s some heart to this movie, but it wastes the conceit by shutting you out of Button’s mind, giving you absolutely nothing to project onto him and no guidance as to how the events in Button’s life are supposed to feel to us, the viewers. The whole movie is about the lack of connection with any of the characters, which some may say is the point being that Button is so disconnected from everyone around him due to his condition. But this movie is, at its heart, a love story, and it tries to sell the love story by pushing sympathy for characters you never connect with. The emotion you feel rings out because it’s familiar territory, a pavlovian response to certain cinematic markers that you’ve seen hundreds of times before, not from anything organic in the movie itself.
Maybe this coldness comes from the meticulous style of Fincher, who definitely paints the movie in such a stunning visual style, you’re almost tempted to give it a pass. The movie is a joy to behold in almost every scene. The moment where Button sits on the deck over the water and the camera splits the sun ray around his head is the kind of shot that directors search their whole lifetimes for, and watching it on the big screen kinda takes your breath away. But I’m not content in watching a movie simply because it looks fantastic (*cough* ATONEMENT). Because of the inherent problems with the script and performances, the visual stylings border on self-indulgence, as the scenery really serves no purpose other than creating an impressive visual feat. I’d say that maybe the point was to create a warm beauty to juxtapose with the cold fashion of the story, but I highly doubt Eric Roth (writer of Forrest Gump) would ever create something so cold on purpose. Instead, the coldness and disconnect in the screenplay leads me to think that it’s a failed effort at creating something emotionally meaningful, a fact that Fincher’s handiwork only seeks to reinforce through contrast.
In the end, Benjamin Button is the kind of movie that deserves recognition of the highest caliber, because it is an accomplishment, faults aside. But as for being representative of the best of the year, it falls short of the bar it sets for itself and everything it had going for it. Oh, and it will never win because David Fincher is an asshole.
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