Suspend your disbelief.
These are the questions Benjamin and Daisy have to deal with: How can we continue to be together if everyone sees you as a pedophile? Can romantic love survive if one must change the other’s diapers? (But doesn’t this happen to aged couples all the time?) Note to filmmakers: These are not romantic issues.
There’s really only one romantic issue: How will I live without you? The great movie romances answer this in different ways. “You’ll be brave and inspire your husband in the fight for freedom, which is more important than our happiness.†“I will betray all my friends because life means nothing to me without you.†“I don’t intend to, I’ll get you back, tomorrow is another day.†Or simply, “I won’t.†The Curious Case of Benjamin Button is curious indeed: it forgets that true love is itself a suspension of disbelief.
Suspend your disbelief, a review of The Curious Case of Benjamin Button in Emotional Weather Report, today in the Star.
Answers to questions you might be asking, unless you wandered onto this site purely by accident >>>
January 16th, 2009 at 03:17
While the film is visually gorgeous (especially Blanchett’s luminous complexion in the early ballerina scenes), it failed to move me overall. While I marveled at the technical and make-up wizardry in the finely-calibrated backwards-aging of Brad Pitt, I was a bit let down by his muted acting all throughout. As a child trapped in a decrepit man’s body, shouldn’t he have exhibited more of the gleefulness and impishness of a kid in his facial expressions? Shouldn’t a child’s immaturity have informed his emotional responses at that stage? Instead, he has this bemused, somewhat wistful, overall placid expression that seems dissonant with a child’s /young man’s persona (example, the brothel scene just before the tugboat captain introduces him to the prostitute). At the time of the brief affair with the British trade minister’s wife in Russia, (which makes him about 20+ chronologically and 50-60 physically), that same sedate and enigmatic countenance had me thinking: this is the first adult female with whom he has a real connection and yet where’s the passion? Perhaps he is holding out because he has his heart set on Daisy? And yet, when they finally meet in the middle of their lives, one gets the sense Pitt and Blanchett play it as though gingerly tiptoeing around the concept of a full-on romance, trying hard but not quite surrendering to it. I was most emotionally engaged only towards the end when the decision to leave wife and young daughter is made, and later when Daisy assumes a maternal role toward Benjamin – that scene with the baby dying in her arms is a winner. The inevitability lends it an authenticity and poignancy. At film’s end, I thought Babel is where both these actors shine; Pitt, especially, is so raw and exposed in that movie, I thought, wow, he has such gravitas (and very sexy to boot) when there is no artifice to the panic and anxiety and desperation that registers on his face. In Benjamin Button, I get the sense he overstudied the role.
January 16th, 2009 at 22:07
Off topic, you might want to watch this: the Alliance Francaise de Manille is screening Francois Truffaut, une autobiographie, a documentary by Anne Andreu on Jan. 21, 8:30 pm.
January 16th, 2009 at 23:10
“You’ll be brave and inspire your husband in the fight for freedom, which is more important than our happiness.†— Casablanca
“I will betray all my friends because life means nothing to me without you.†— ??
“I don’t intend to, I’ll get you back, tomorrow is another day.†— Gone with the Wind
Help, please.