Before Brad Pitt returns as Cliff Booth, rewatch his most unusual David Fincher movie
If Brad Pitt and David Fincher are going back into the world of Cliff Booth together, rewatching Fight Club for the hundredth time will be too obvious.
Not that it’s a bad film, but it’s time we move on. That movie is not waiting to be rediscovered mainly because it never stopped riding the pop culture wave, and neither is Se7en, so this is a much better excuse to return to the strangest creation of Pitt and Fincher: The Curious Case of Benjamin Button.
But let’s talk a bit about the upcoming The Further Mis-Adventures of Cliff Booth, which has Pitt returning to Quentin Tarantino’s stuntman with Fincher directing Tarantino’s script, which is enough for the cinephiles to lose sleep over. Pitt and Fincher made Se7en and Fight Club together, but Benjamin Button remains their most curious collaboration to date because it asks both of them to work out of their comfort zone.
Brad Pitt plays Benjamin, who is born in New Orleans with the body of an old man, although he is a baby in every other sense. Imagine being born a baby, except a very old-looking one, and then spending the rest of your life getting younger instead of older.
Benjamin’s father is not very happy about any of this and abandons him. Then he is raised by Queenie in a nursing home. As he grows older mentally, his body grows younger, and if you think that the film will hand you the answer behind this condition, you are waiting for nothing.
You can see that happening in the first half of the film, which makes little to no effort in solving Benjamin’s condition. Instead, we watch what it does to his life, which is where the film becomes much more interesting than its premise. After growing up in an old age home where he meets Daisy, he works on a tugboat as he sees war and keeps returning to Daisy.
Then Benjamin and Daisy finally reach the point where they look roughly the same age, and for a while, the movie lets them have the romance they have been denied. You know it cannot last, because Daisy keeps getting older while Benjamin moves toward youth! It breaks your bubble rather harshly. Their problem is not love… It is that time that doesn’t want to make them stay together.
Did you know that for some of Benjamin’s older scenes, Pitt was not even performing with his own body on screen? Instead, he had his face digitally attached to body doubles. Yes, really. So while the character is meant to feel like one continuous person, Pitt was working through a setup, but when you look at the movie, it doesn’t seem like patchwork.
The film earned 13 Academy Award nominations and won three, including visual effects and makeup, but the more interesting thing is how peculiar it still remains. Benjamin Button can be sentimental, yes, but it’s admirable how seriously it takes an impossible idea and executes it to near perfection. Before Pitt becomes Cliff Booth again, give this one another shot and see whether it feels stranger now.