The House Next Door

I think that budget estimate is missing a few zeroes.

That's pretty funny. The word "million" is present in the video's narration but somehow didn't make it into the transcript. It should be fixed online soon.

I doubt $150,000 would have covered that movie's Evian budget.

It's all well and good to say "Look how beautiful the themes are!", but Button fails utterly as entertainment. There's little, if anything, to latch onto emotionally there, because Button is such a cipher. I can't care about a movie about people I don't know or care about.

Besides, Benjamin Button didn't need to be a cipher in order to showcase the themes. He could have exercised characterizations and free will and still been seen as small in the world. Roth's non-Gump scripts all have characters defined by their actions, their hopes, their fears, their troubles. Button is defined by his disease. The problem isn't Fincher; he did the best he could. The problem is that trying to care about this movie is like trying to feel an emotional connection with a clock.

Great video (as per usual), though I must confess that I lean more towards the "obvious, precious, trite, and dull" diagnosis. I just wish the potent themes were handled by someone other than Roth, who as a writer relies far too heavily on simplistic, folksy platitudes for my liking. In spite of that it did end up moving me. I just wish it moved me a lot more.

Thank you for shooting down that "passive protagonist" bullshit. I've been taking a screenwriting course in college and that's one thing that's been really annoying me, because I find myself far more interested in using the protagonist as a vehicle with which to explore ideas that interest me than I am in sculpting a tidy arc for him.

Matt - Thank you for this wonderful video essay that is as beautiful and touching and visually memorable as the film it explores - a film which I saw in theaters three times and which I chose as Best Film of 2008. Your filmmaking is excellent - I'm really excited about the whole video-essay concept - and l love the reverse images from old films at the end. I also appreciate how you started out with the Elias Koteas sequence - that whimsically captivating reverse clock device that lends an otherworldly tone to a film about a man who is destined to experience life in a very strange way.

"But there are so many examples that it's easy to forget that there is another way of doing things—another kind of story, one that addresses the hard reality of everyday existence even as its imagery and situations reach toward the mythic, the symbolic, and the dreamlike."

Yes, this says it, and I won't be fibbing when I say that I thought of Malick as I viewed Benjamin Button for the first time and found it an achingly touching film that looks at what it's like to be different in a world that is essentially filled with the same sorts of experiences for everyone. I had no problem with Benjamin's passive role. Perhaps he feels that way because he feels somewhat alienated by his difference and he finds that his place in the world is to observe and learn about the experiences that make us what we are - rather than to act and overcome obstacles.

Thank you for this tremendously inspiring video essay about a film I love.

The movie fails not because it's cold or too technically perfect or because the main character is passive.

It fails because of it's narrative anchor: The hospital scenes and the subsequent narration.

Quite simply, the hospital scenes are a complete failure. They're incompetently written, amateurishly directed, improperly photographed, horribly acted, plus the art direction is artificial and the age make up looks like plastic. When your anchor doesn't work, then you're not anchored.

Furthermore, the movie uses Benjamin's narration from his diary as a dramatic crutch. Normally, I'm not against narration, but here, it's used instead of actual dramatization. All too often, the bulk of a scene will be voice-over explaining what's happening, then maybe a line or two of dialogue as punctuation. And that simply doesn't work.

Although I appreciate the video piece, I do believe there were many criticisms against this film beyond its passive main character. I did find Matt's discussion of the themes of the film more interesting than the way the movie presents them, often with Hallmark card-like platitudes and on-the-nose-dialogue (or excessive monologuing).

Admittedly, I did feel the passiveness of the main character was one aspect that made this movie a rather uninvolving experience. However, it's more about the execution than the idea. Having just watched "Being There" for the first time in well over a decade, you have a film that uses a passive character to reflect greater truths about the world he lives in.

I'm surprised "Being There" wasn't brought up when "Button" was released, as it was when "Gump" was. What makes "Being There" superior to "Button" or "Gump" is that the filmmakers acknowledge that what comes out of Chance's mouth are indeed platitudes.

In "Gump" or "Button", the main characters, with some help from the supporting characters, spend more time providing chicken soup for the soul through sayings rather than demonstrating any world view (even if that view is a lack of one).

As much as I love Fincher, I still never felt much of an emotional investment on his part in telling this story. (He seemed more interested in Elias Koteas' clockmaker, which I was, as well.)

I actually think, as frustrating a director as he is, David Lynch would have been the ideal director for this. The aging backwards premise would feel more than a gimmick and his movie would have been tougher and less stodgy (a quality I never would have tagged any Fincher film before "Button").

Matt: We’ve already debated this film, so I’ll try not to rehash old arguments. I’ll simply say again that I wish I felt the emotional connection to Benjamin Button that you and Hokahey experienced. Alas, save a few scenes, the film left me entirely unmoved – and I think I’d rather hate a film than to feel nothing at all.

That said, your video essay shows what you see in it, and what Fincher intended. But …

“To be young is to be ignorant of mortality, and ignorance is bliss. Benjamin was never ignorant, because he was born an ancient man … which gave him an awareness of life's temporary nature and a determination to savor the moment he’s in. Ghastly as Benjamin's condition seems, it's a hidden blessing, because it lets him be free of the curse of self-awareness, the continual looking forward and backward without appreciating life in the present tense.”

Isn’t that a contradiction? If ignorance is bliss, and if Benjamin’s condition makes ignorance impossible, then how is his reverse condition also bliss? Or, even if it is, how does that make his bliss a blessing over the norm? It seems you’re saying that Benjamin’s special outlook on life liberates him, but how can that be true if his condition makes him an all too self-aware outsider? Seems to me that the years that are happiest for Benjamin is when he meets Daisy in the middle and thus is normal. If he had his choice, he’d follow her path. Instead he keeps experiencing life because, well, what else can he do? He’s a prisoner to his condition. He’s all alone. I don’t detect happiness (liberation) in his condition.

To me, Benjamin Button is like a slide show of vacation pictures. When the images are thumbnails of my own emotions and experiences, it connects. When not, it’s like watching someone else’s slide show. The “thrill of a fast bike or a visit to a foreign land”? These images from the film are postcards at best, reminding us of emotions, maybe, but not actually conjuring them. “The pleasure of company”? Well, I’m aging normally, and if Cate Blanchett looks at me tomorrow and says “Sleep with me,” my answer will be “Absolutely,” and I promise you I’ll treasure every damn moment of the experience. That’s why Benjamin Button doesn’t compute to me. It’s powered by a character who spews fortune cookie wisdom despite the fact that he hasn’t actually lived long enough to possess such wisdom (he’s old in body, not in life experience, as the romance with Tilda Swinton does such a wonderful job of expressing). I don’t mind that he’s passive. But I don’t actually feel any unique emotion from his unique experience the way that, say, Joel and Clementine get a unique appreciation of love through their experience in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.

OK, so I guess I am getting into old arguments here, so let me close with this: Benjamin Button is more poignantly poetic with your narration than with Benjamin’s. A compliment to you. Not so much to Fincher.

I actually think, as frustrating a director as he is, David Lynch would have been the ideal director for this. The aging backwards premise would feel more than a gimmick and his movie would have been tougher and less stodgy (a quality I never would have tagged any Fincher film before "Button").Steven: Or Tim Burton. To watch Big Fish is to feel an emotional connection with a lifelong reflection that Fincher's film never finds (for me).

To Jason, Steven, Kyu -- well, pretty much everybody except Hokahey, since I'm clearly out on a limb here -- the movie works for me on a lot of levels, which I tried to articulate in the piece. Since I said my piece generally on behalf of "Button" in the piece itself, I'll try to address specific arguments in this thread.

Steven: "Admittedly, I did feel the passiveness of the main character was one aspect that made this movie a rather uninvolving experience. However, it's more about the execution than the idea. Having just watched "Being There" for the first time in well over a decade, you have a film that uses a passive character to reflect greater truths about the world he lives in.

I'm surprised "Being There" wasn't brought up when "Button" was released, as it was when "Gump" was. What makes "Being There" superior to "Button" or "Gump" is that the filmmakers acknowledge that what comes out of Chance's mouth are indeed platitudes.

In "Gump" or "Button", the main characters, with some help from the supporting characters, spend more time providing chicken soup for the soul through sayings rather than demonstrating any world view (even if that view is a lack of one)."

I probably should have included "Being There" in the piece (don't know why I didn't, since it was somewhat fresh in my mind from doing the Hal Ashby chapter of the Wes Anderson series). It's true that the bromides that pop out of Chance's mouth in "Being There" are presented as platitudes, but that's not quite the whole story. They're platitudes that do resonate with the more intelligent, self-conscious characters; the statements don't mean anything to Chance, but they prove quite illuminating to the people he encounters, many of whom are trapped in a world that is just as psychologically circumscribed as the one that Chance left behind (though larger and more pernicious). Chance speaks the truth without even meaning to. The joke in that film isn't that all the other characters are hearing a simpleton rehash catchphrases he heard on TV and interpreting them as profound; the joke is that, meaningless as the statements are to Chance, they speak to something inside the other characters that has been neglected or glossed over, something that (in a temporary or limited way) helps them get outside of themselves and think about who they actually are, what they want, and their place in the world. Yes, the juxtaposition of the emptiness of Chance's platitudes (and the automatic, reflexive way that he memorized them) does make a statement about the corrosive effect of television on the self, and the emptiness of life in the media age, and the general mediocrity of public life and public thought (which enables a cipher like chance to become a political icon). But that's not the endpoint of that movie's vision; if it were, I don't think it would be as touching and enduring; in fact if that were the main point of it, I'd consider it a rather cheap and easy potshot at straw man targets, rather than the complex and in some ways confounding movie that it is and that I feel so much affection toward.

In "Button" it's -- not quite the opposite, exactly, but something of an inversion. Benjamin's condition immediately impresses upon him that life is fleeting, that we could go at any moment for any reason and that we should appreciate the present tense while we're in it; he gains that insight because he was born old and from the minute that he came into the world, people were saying (and outright telling him) that he probably didn't have much time left. On top of that, he grew up in an old folks' home, and saw a steady procession of people coming and going, moving in one day and dying and being buried a few months or years later. The platitudes that issue from his mouth come from actual observation of the human condition, not from watching TV while shut inside a rich old man's mansion. I do get a sense of liberation from Benjamin's attitude, and I think the movie wants us to feel that about him; that's what the tent revival scene is about. When he's urged to get up out of the wheelchair and walks (unsteadily and then confidently) it's an objective correlative for what his experience (as an old/young man and as a resident of that nursing home) does to his personality.

I'll interrupt myself here and say that what most people interpret as "passive" I read as more of a Zen-like state of acceptance. "Whatever happens, happens." For some people -- and in some cultures -- this would be considered not evidence of passivity or weakness, but enlightenment, evidence that Benjamin has attained a state of mind that many people consciously spend their entire lives trying to achieve, one in which we can accept the natural progression of life, the natural order of things, the way that people slip in and out of our lives, the ways in which life is not "fair" and there's nothing we can do about it, without lamenting our lack of control over these things, our failure to get to whatever place we decided we needed to arrive at by "X" age, and so forth.

And on that note, I'll kind of veer sideways into Jason's comments:

Jason writes of my narration:

“To be young is to be ignorant of mortality, and ignorance is bliss. Benjamin was never ignorant, because he was born an ancient man … which gave him an awareness of life's temporary nature and a determination to savor the moment he’s in. Ghastly as Benjamin's condition seems, it's a hidden blessing, because it lets him be free of the curse of self-awareness, the continual looking forward and backward without appreciating life in the present tense.”Then he asks:

Isn’t that a contradiction? If ignorance is bliss, and if Benjamin’s condition makes ignorance impossible, then how is his reverse condition also bliss? Or, even if it is, how does that make his bliss a blessing over the norm? It seems you’re saying that Benjamin’s special outlook on life liberates him, but how can that be true if his condition makes him an all too self-aware outsider? Seems to me that the years that are happiest for Benjamin is when he meets Daisy in the middle and thus is normal. If he had his choice, he’d follow her path. Instead he keeps experiencing life because, well, what else can he do? He’s a prisoner to his condition. He’s all alone. I don’t detect happiness (liberation) in his condition.I don't think it's a contradiction at all. Benjamin isn't ignorant in the way that "normal" people are ignorant because the experiences and lessons he'd normally have at the end of his life were front-loaded into the first part of his life. I get a tremendous sense of liberation from Benjamin's world view, his attitude, his demeanor. It's not liberation in the "yahoo, I'm free!" sense, but something more placid and reflective and comfortable. It's the sort of attitude that certain senior citizens have when they've absorbed the joys and miseries of their lives and reached a psychological state where they can look back on their experiences not as things that happened long ago and that they're tragically never going to experience again, but as the mementos of their passage through time -- the souvenirs they brought back from the trip, as Roger Ebert so memorably puts it in this essay, which quite accidentally makes a lot of the arguments I tried to make in favor of Button, the film and the character, more eloquently than I ever could.

Matt,

Very intellectually athletic essay--enjoyed it quite a bit.

I was curious how you felt about the movie as an adaptation of the Fitzgerald story. Not to wax nostalgic here, but I read that story when I was, I don't know, twelve? and it made a huge impact on me. Have not seen this film yet, but the sense I get from your piece is that Fincher's project transcended the story--if that were possible. I've been wary of the movie, to be quite honest. Though I've enjoyed many of Fincher's movies, I have a hard time with Brad Pitt, in general, and I would have a harder time, I think, transposing his face onto my own private vision of Benjamin Button's face. That, right there, is the main 3-headed giant standing between me and the movie.

Anyhoo, curious to know your thoughts.

It’s a worldview thing: either you share the film’s philosophy and appreciate the elementally simple way it expresses it, or you find the entire contraption obvious, precious, trite, and dull.Maybe I'm unduly suspicious of either-or/all-or-nothing arguments (and I know you don't mean it quite that extremely), but I see no contradiction between finding appeal in a movie's worldview yet also bones to pick with the expression of that worldview. In Benjamin Button's case, I agree with the general assessment here in the comments that there's little that's "unabashedly enthusiastic" in how Fincher chooses to tell this story -- the already-mentioned clockmaker prologue as well as the Tilda Swinton middle passage (which for me had the self-contained aura of a timeless short story) being pretty much the only occasions when the director seems engaged with what's unfolding onscreen.

A little while back, Jason made an observation about film criticism (in the context of a different film) that serves as a good litmus test: Is the piece of criticism working harder to defend the movie than the filmmakers appear to have worked in making it? Your video essay contains observations that are far more astute than anything in Roth's self-cannibalizing script. The subject of the "passive protagonist" is also a worthy and interesting one, one I would like to see analyzed with a different movie. Rewatching the scenes from Button, all I could think about was the film's obvious inferiority to the movies it's being compared to.

Max -

I read the short story before seeing the film and it had a significant, almost disturbing impact on me - an impact I can't quite articulate here. The film does not follow the plot elements set down in the short story, but I feel it captures that strange impact effectively. Part of that impact is what I have expressed earlier about the film. The film is about Benjamin Button's "extraordinary circumstances" AND the extraordinary circumstances of the enigma that is life that leads inevitably toward death no matter whether you grow old normally or go through life in reverse. But part of Ben's extraordinary circumstances is that he is different from everyone he meets. This implants in him the calm, reserved wisdom of the person who is set apart from others by a difference he'd rather not have. Both story and film capture an uncanny, almost indescribable poignancy that is sharply touching.

Craig -

I really don't feel that Matt's excellent video is
"working harder to defend the movie than the filmmakers appear to have worked in making it." I would have been annoyed with the video essay if I had detected that. I feel there are legitimate similarities between Benjamin Button and the other films Matt cites. What's your opinion of Malick's The New World? There are critics who would argue that fans of that film are working hard to defend it. As for Benjamin Button, the film's cinematography, art direction, and musical score are just three indications of hard work.

hokahey -- I was referring mainly to the screenplay, which hews to the Gump template so deliberately and lazily it's insulting. Matt does raise an interesting point in the video about recurring themes in Roth's work, and had I felt a twinge of obsessiveness in the words and structure of Button -- rather than paint-by-numbers -- then it might have worked for me more than it did.

I need to see The New World again to adequately answer your question. To be honest, the excesses of Malick-worship often prompt in me an involuntary eye-roll; but I have no doubt watching any of Malick's films to date about the director's passion for his subjects. I don't feel that passion in Benjamin Button, though undoubtedly there were plenty of folks (Fincher included) who "worked hard" on it, in the fitting metaphorical sense of punching-the-clock.

Craig - Thanks for pointing out that you were referring mostly to the screenplay. I can see the Gump similarities - and perhaps Benjamin Button is a variation on a theme, but to me it is a much more serious, much more visually stunning version of that Gumpian history.

You note the pervading themes - and Matt specifically traces the water imagery - which makes the much-criticized Katrina element crucial to the film - but that's another argument. There are also elements of fate and serendipity that have always fascinated me.

Is the story lazy, self-copying, and trite? I read the screenplay and I have to say I really enjoyed it and found myself re-reading parts of it and relating those parts to my experiences in life. I suppose writers have been writing about death and the meaning of life for centuries - and some writers have nothing new to say. I don't know if this film says anything new about life and death, but I feel it presents the known truths about life and death in a very touching, memorable, and unique way. I guess it's just not your favorite take on the meaning of life and death. Jason mentioned Big Fish. I've seen and forgotten that film. That's a matter of taste, I suppose. For me, Benjamin Button is a very effective, very engaging take on that kind of story - and I found myself pulled into the world of the film. I've read the comments of viewers who felt distanced. I never felt that distance.