Tonight’s Silver Medallion Tribute to David Fincher at the Telluride Film Festival closed with a screening of 20 minutes of Fincher’s much-anticipated new film, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, starring Brad Pitt as a baby born old who reverse-ages over eight decades. Fincher called the footage “a series of scenelets,” meaning that, unlike the single reel of There Will Be Blood shown at last year’s tribute to Daniel Day-Lewis, this reel was cut together to give us a teasing glimpse of the wider narrative and scope of the film.
First impression: it’s impressive. It’s absolutely gorgeous, for starters. Coming as it did after a show reel featuring excerpts from Fincher’s music videos and adverts (both cut into a montage set to “How Soon is Now?” by The Smiths, weirdly and unadvisedly divorcing both pop and product promos from what they were made to promote) and each of his features aside from Alien³, it’s clear that Fincher has moved beyond the cool blacks and blues with florescent highlights that have thus far defined his visual style. It’s a period epic, so the broader visual palette makes sense, but it came as a relief that, within all this beauty, the effects used to transform Pitt first into an 80-year-old man and then backwards into a child felt of a piece and not overwhelmingly effect-y.
Also exciting: though the reel gives every hint that Button is a proper epic tearjerker about love and pain and time and blah blah blah, it’s also infused with the dry, quippy sense of humor that cuts through the darkest swatches of Fincher’s filmography. This is, after all, the man who says he wanted to make Fight Club because he thought the book was “hilarious [and] ridiculous. But I’m an asshole.”
A detailed run-down of the clip follows after the jump. Not having seen the full film, I can’t say for sure whether or not there are spoilers, so I suppose if you want to know absolutely nothing, don’t click.
We open on an aged Cate Blanchett in a hospital bed. Her 30-something daughter is sitting by her side, reading aloud from a book. It’s someone’s will. She reads, “All I have is my story, and I’m writing it while I still remember it.”
Brad Pitt’s voice takes over as we fade to an end-of-WWI party on the streets of New Orleans. A man runs up the stairs of a mansion, where a doctor and a number of servants tend to a woman covered in a bloody sheet. She’s just given birth and she’s dying. The man runs to her side, and she cries, “Promise me he’ll have a place.” Pitt’s VO: “She gave her life for me, and for that I am forever grateful.”
The baby is crying, and the dad approaches the cradle. He looks down at the baby and gags. We don’t see anything. He grabs the baby, wrapped in a blanket, and runs down the stairs and out the door as the other people in the room call after him. He approaches the back steps of another house, places the baby on a bottom step, sticks a wad of money under the blanket, and sneaks off. A black man and woman walk out the back door of the house and start flirting. The man, walking backwards down the steps, leads the woman by the hand. They trip over the baby. We get a quick close-up of what’s in the blanket: it’s normal baby-sized, but with grotesquely wrinkled skin. “The Lord done something awful here,” the man says, and books it.
The woman takes the baby inside the house, which appears to be a retirement home where she works. A doctor examines the baby and says, “Shows all the deterioration of a man on the way to the grave.” The woman lies and says the baby was her sister’s, and that the sister had an infection and “the baby got the worst of it. He came out white.” The doctor tells the woman–named Queenie–that “some babies aren’t meant to survive.” She says this baby is a miracle, and takes it into the parlor to introduce it to the old folks. An older white woman says she knows how to cure any baby, and comes over to take a look. “he looks just like my ex-husband,” she says.
Queenie takes the baby, now aged to what appears to be a very old, wheelchair-bound man, to revival service in a tent. At this point, Benjamin doesn’t quite look like Brad Pitt underneath the prosthetic wrinkles, liver spots, etc, but some of Pitt’s mannerisms shine through, and in close-ups, you can’t mistake his eyes. The preacher asks him how old he is. He croaks, “Seven, but I look a lot older.” The preacher does his cast-the-devil-out thing and tells Benjamin to get up and walk. He stands out of his wheelchair, and falls down.
Cut to Benjamin, looking a bit younger but still very much an old man, at the steer of a ship. A drunk sailor asks, “You been on this earth so many years, and you never had a woman?” They go to a brothel. Girls are lined up on the stairs, whispering about how they don’t like the looks of the old guy. A redhead offers to take Benjamin upstairs. Cut to her moaning–Benjamin’s apparently enjoying some kind of beginner’s luck––and cracking, “What are you, Dick Tracy or something?” As he walks out, his voiceover informs us that this is where he learned the value of having an income. As he disappears into the night, his father pops into the frame––he’s seen his son.
Cut to Cate Blanchett, younged-up, at a ballet audition. She has red hair, too, but she’s not the hooker. Still, if it was explained in this reel how she and Benjamin know each other, I missed it.
Cut to Benjamin and his drunk friend, back on the boat, in a blizzard. Benjamin is looking younger, and the drunk asks him what his secret is. Benjamin says, “Well, you do drink an awful lot.”
Cut back to aged Cate in her bed. Her daughter has found a postcard from Benjamin, and is asking if her mom was in love with him. Cut to young Cate, reading the postcard.
Now Tilda Swinton, in a black fur coat, is waiting in the deserted dining room of wherever Benjamin is staying. She’s a redhead, too, which by this point means we know she’s going to take a liking to Benjamin. He comes downstairs in a bathrobe over pajamas–he looks about 60 now, is unmistakenly Brad Pitt, just silver foxed-up quite a bit. TIlda teaches him about caviar and vodka. Tilda tells him she tried to swim the English Channel when she was young, but failed, and never ended up doing anything with her life. He touches her hand on the table, and she leans in to kiss him. A clock strikes. “I’m afraid of the witching hour,” she says, and runs off. “it was the first time a woman ever kissed me,” says V.O. Benjamin. “It’s something you never forget.”
On the ship, at night. “The war finally caught up with us,” V.O. Benjamin says. A wide shot of the sea, full of black blobs–bodies.
“It was May 1945. I was 26 years old. I came home.” Benjamin returns to Queenie’s house. She’s delighted to see him; her daughter doesn’t recognize him. Queenie tells him they’re gonna find him a wife and a job.
Cate Blanchett is suddenly outside. Benjamin greets her, but she doesn’t recognize him. Then she does.
They go for a walk in the moonlight, and Cate’s going on and on about how wild her life is up in New York. She tells Benjamin she’s leaving the next day. She takes off her shoes, then her coat. She starts dancing for him, her body (or her double’s body) silhouetted against a cloud of steam. If it wasn’t obvious that this was a seduction, she then asks him if he’s ever read D. H. Lawrence. She coos, “He was banned, for using words like ‘making love.’” As she continues to babble and contort her body, Benjamin just watches from afar. “In our company,” she says, “We have to trust each other. Sex is part of it.”
She starts telling him about how a lesbian dancer made the moves on her. He says he’s not surprised that people find her attractive. She literally crawls over to him, pauses with her face an inch away from his as if waiting for him to make the move, and then kisses her anyway. He tells her he’ll disappoint her. She tells him she’s been with plenty of older dudes. She tries again. “Not tonight, is all,” he says, more firmly. She collects her things and walks off.
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