Yes, You Could Be a 70-Year-Old Wrinkle and Still Enjoy Brothel Sex (A Movie Review of The Curious Case of Benjamin Button)

The problem with the much-ballyhooed Metro Manila Film Festival is that it insults the Pinoy demographic ’s intellect. Year after friggin’ year, producers churn out a steady supply of recycled plot of laugh-out-loud comedy scripts that border from pointblank idiocy to box-office-tested mushiness. You check the list of this year’s offering and suddenly, you understand why  the movie industry is ailing like an AIDS victim. Save perhaps a few films  (heck, is Baler, this year’s MMFF Best Picture even worth watching, anyway?), this year’s lineup seems to offer a formulaic comedy structure that contributes nothing to the moviegoers’ consciousness, or at the most, to the Filipino society’s identity, except give at least two hours of shallow delirium and hilarity. If this is representative of the Philippines’ movie quality, then I’d rather stab the movie industry to death. What’s next, Putangina Niyong Lahat? Sheesh.

So yes, instead of spending close to a hundred bucks and becoming more stupid sitting over some cheap hilarity parade, I retreated to watching a downloaded DVD ripped screener copy of The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. (Fine, the copy is pirated, I am a DVD pirate. But tell me someone who does not subscribe to Quiapo’s milieu of Muslim Dibidi’s and I will tell you who you are. You’re from Mars, you effin’ clusterfuck!) The movie, being starred by two of Hollywood’s much sought after, A-list actors notwithstanding, is one flick that is worth the ticket and popcorn box (unless it’s being moved, I am aware its showing in the country will be this 18^th). Out of the blue, you wonder why our movies, in spite of the Filipino race’s sheer ingenuity and creativeness, pale in comparison with the F. Scott Fitzgerald short story adaptation.

While I will have to admit that this will not make the cut of My Favorite Movies criterion (I am a sucker for blood and gore. Ha!), the film still very well delivers an eye candy palette of beautiful imagery that overshadows the story of a man born as a baby with 70-year-old wrinkles who curiously ages backwards. At the onset of the movie where you are delighted to a Warner Brothers logo of falling button mirage, the Fincher flick would like to promise you a colorful story which, by the title alone, would be so curious indeed you’re convinced it won’t happen in real life. So you hold on to your seat, become mesmerized by a queer fable, and get out of the movie house afterwards to sleep after being read tonight’s fairy tale from the 18^th century.

The movie is told first, from an ailing, prosthetics-made up Cate Blanchett’s point of view, the story’s Daisy after whom Benjamin Button has taken a puppy love liking that later on, will blossom to a decaying, tragic love story. Daisy is dying and while she awaits Death’s arrival, the almost impossibly audible 80-year-old asks her daughter to read from a diary – her father’s, Benjamin Button’s, actually – that will make up the movie’s almost three hour running. Suddenly, this scene will give you a familiar déjà vu and then you remember Titanic’s Rose’s retelling of her tragic love story with the pauper Jack.

From hereon, the narrator shifts to Benjamin Button’s point of view and you are regaled by a story of a baby that will remind you of Voldemort’s shrunken form who is abandoned by his vile father , not only because his wife dies giving birth to the unlucky child but more so because of his son’s unacceptable, hideous facial features. Baby Boy more repugnant than Hellboy is adapted by a big-hearted Black American to the protestation of the Negro lover and here we see Brad Pitt in his various digitally-mechanized forms, from the wrinkled seven-year-old with the voice of a grouchy adult diaper-laden old man to a fortyish folk finally of just the right age to fornicate with the normal fortyish Daisy to even a Botox-treated Brad Pitt in his acne-confused teens.

Benjamin grows up and, at a snail’s pace, improves on his physical appearance, leaving behind his mundane Black American-reared childhood and his first love with a young Cate Blanchett to explore the world and taste what exactly does life has to offer him. Young Daisy demands equally-young but old-looking Benjamin to send her post cards from all over the world and from this point forward, you know the narrative is destined to become one tragic love story. I gasp at how exactly this beautiful young Daisy, naïve and quite easily a virgin still, could fall in love with a creased, ugly seventyish-looking man and I become perplexed. Then again, your subconscious shoves up your ass the friggin’ truth that this is, indeed, just an Aesop fairy tale. For chrissake, it won’t happen in real life.

While Benjamin becomes a tugboat crew and becomes charmed over new interesting places, Daisy also molds her life to become a regal ballet dancer, stunning and graceful at that. Curiously, you can’t seem to take Cate Blanchett out of her TLOTR’s Lady Galadriel mold and wonder how such an Elvin deity will soon have sex with the shrunken Lord Voldemort clone wrapped in blankets as described in Book 7. You wonder, where have all the chemistry gone? And are Brad and Cate screen-compatible at all?

Throughout the course of the movie, we get to meet quirky characters who will largely make an influence on young-slash-old Benjamin Button’s take on life’s trivialities as love and death and time and waiting. We have the fucked up pastor of some pseudo-religion from Gomorrah believing to have divine powers to make crippled Benjamin walk again who later on becomes an irony of his own belief after staggering to heart attack death. We have the Negro boyfriend of Benjamin’s foster mother, Queenie, who recites some Shakespearean lines in an odd Black American accent. We have a British English-speaking tugboat captain drunkard who christens the seventeen-year-old Benjamin’s virginity (again, you must remember that Button looks like an old folk at this point) with some cheap brothel sex, dumbfounded how a 70-year-old man could live just fiddling with his own sausage and not dipping it to some hot sauce pan (the captain, after all, is Irish). We have the elegant woman whom he falls in love to while far away from his Daisy and who teaches Benjamin how to indulge adultery with some sophisticated caviar.

As the movie reaches its innuendo, director Fincher expects the moviegoers to sigh and become sappy with Benjamin and Daisy finally meeting up in their forties and now becoming compatible to a goodie goodie unconventional, dusk-till-dawn fornication. Eventually, as the premise dictates, the age clash will arise, and while Daisy matures and ages as a wine, Benjamin crawls down to an age of freckles and young masturbation overdose. The ending is poignant as it tells a love story so tragic emotions will surely run high in its closing. Young Daisy finally withers to a shrunken grannie nursing a diaper-laden baby Benjamin and she tells the audience how she felt Baby Benjamin knew her and the love that they shared as he closed his eyes to final goodbye.

Sappy and sentimental, indeed, but for a narcissistic, angst-ridden bastard in orgiastic rmoans recluse, it was too overdosed with pictures of unnecessary cinematography. For a movie that wants to tell the value of time, of life being temporal, I find it too odd for it to dwell extravagantly on extending the flick run with redundant ironies.

Benjamin Button tells us, “Mamma always said, Life is like a ticking clock — you never know when it’s gonna stop.” And then a line like that rings into your ears. Suddenly, you remember Forrest Gump and its “Life’s like a box of chocolate” gem. It’s a curious case, indeed, how such much-touted Oscar frontrunner seems to borrow much from a well-revered film classic.

Update:

Just read Jessica Zafra’s blog and apparently we share the same sentiments. The Curious Case of Benjamin Button is reeking with copy-paste Forrest Gump rehash. Bleech! Run, Benjamin, Run. Harhar!