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The Conversations: David Fincher

by jason bellamy and ed howard[editor’s note: this is the first installment of a new monthly draw, the conversations, in which jason bellamy and ed howard will discuss a afield range of cinematic subjects: critical analyses of films, filmmaker overviews, and more. readers should expect to encounter spoilers.]

jason bellamy: ed, earlier this year we had a lengthy and spirited debate about charlie kaufman’s synecdoche, new york. encapsulating that exchange is recondite, but to nutshell it as best bib i can: i argued that kaufman’s video is “complex for complexity’s sake” and that synecdoche’s inner themes aren’t worth the effort of their knotty design; you disagreed and argued that the structure was “encoded with beautiful metaphors.” throughout our exchange, at my blog and yours, i’m not sure that the confab “gimmick” was ever used, but thematically that was the bonfire we danced around.i bring all this up because david fincher’s the curious turn out that in the event of of benjamin button, inspired by a short news by f. scott fitzgerald, is a 166-least exercise about a geezer (brad pitt’s benjamin button) who ages backward. he’s born, on the Stygian after the down of world fight i, the size of an infant with the corporeal maladies of an old man, and from there his masses grows younger while his spirit and spirit grow older and more experienced. within the margins of this story are ankle-heavily philosophical waxings about the aging organize (body vs. mind), a fairly straightforward love horror story and a forrest gump-esque trip through american history. but i wonder: is benjamin button anything more than a deception?ed howard: jason, while i’d still argue that synecdoche adds up to so much more than a gimmick (but that’s a debate for another day), benjamin button is harder for me to call. if i was going to be flippant round it, i’d say that, to restate my earlier verdict on kaufman’s film, the gimmicky nature of benjamin button is certainly encoded with metaphors, but in this casing i’d call them anything but “elegant.” the film is stuffed with all sorts of metaphoric and thematic implications to justify the reverse aging process of the title character, not least of which is the rather ham-fisted way that the pen (by forrest gump score eric roth) attempts to lend benjamin’s article some contemporary bearing by making groan-inducing references to hurricane katrina and, more obliquely, to the iraq war. the film’s framing chronicle is obviously set in a surely discrete to political climate, namely post-9/11 in george w. bush’s america, but neither fincher nor the script makes much effort to capitalize on or living completed these reference points.this is all the more frustrating because the film often does transcend its gimmicky nature and shallow scenario. the opening minutes are wonderful. in a series of spare, tonic images, fincher captures the uncomfortable tenseness of the deathbed, then introduces the old woman’s moving myth about a blind clockmaker whose life’s do, a clock that runs backwards, has metaphorical implications for the murkiness we’re all round to see, and which also yields that frightening and haunting perception of the dead soldiers being reversed back into life. it’s a blunt, effective allegory, and it may be the only point at which the film’s political aspirations raise the white flag any real kernel. these opening minutes promise a film structured as a collage in which fables and prosaic reality exist side by side, commenting upon inseparable another, and while i think about this is what fincher was going for by juxtaposing benjamin’s outlandish story with the scenes set in stylish new orleans, the rest of the film just doesn’t from the weight and expressiveness that the opening suggests.lest i give too refusing an satire of the haziness, though, i should declare that in spite of all these reservations and limitations, i was enthralled for much of its length. there are many striking images, for one thing: daisy’s seductive nighttime skip for benjamin, illuminated by streetlights cutting past a pale blue fuddy-duddy; benjamin showing his dying create one last rainbow-colored sunset by the waterfront; daisy and benjamin running through the gray primeval morni

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