Jesseca Cornelson – Bitch Flicks

Best Picture Nominee Review Series: The Curious Case of Benjamin Button

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button

This is a guest post from Jesseca Cornelson.

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button occupies a curious space in my imagination. I asked to review it because I have long wanted to view the film—it’s been pretty high on my Netflix streaming queue for more than a year—and yet, every time I sit down to watch something on Netflix, I pass it over. Even though TCCOBB was one of those must-see movies when it came out in December 2008, and as much as it seemed a neat little imaginative tale in reviews and commercials, I just found it really hard to get terribly excited about anything Brad Pitt is in. I’m not an anti-Brad Pitt snob, it’s just that I get enough Brad Pitt coverage in my favorite gossip blogs that I really don’t feel like seeing him any more than I have to.

Once I settled into the movie, however, I was able to enjoy it like the popcorn fare that it is—pleasant, but not terribly complex and with little nutritional value. My very first impression of the film was that it is one of those movies whose story is designed simply to make the viewer cry, and for me, it succeeded quite effectively in that regard. I’m a sucker for stories shaped like sadness. My second impression was to wonder why on earth I was being made to cry about the tragic love story of two imaginary white people against the back drop of Hurricane Katrina, which was a very real and epic tragedy for the city this story is set in (as well as for areas well outside New Orleans). To this second point I will return shortly.

But first, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, based on a short story of the same name by F. Scott Fitzgerald, bears a family resemblance to another film adaption of a literary source, Forrest Gump, so I wasn’t terribly surprised to find out that screenwriter Eric Roth penned both films. In each film, we follow a quirky white boy in the south from his childhood through his adventures in adolescence and early adulthood and on into maturity. Covering such a large time span, the plots are largely episodic in nature but the feeling of an overarching structure is achieved through the protagonist’s varied and lifelong relationship with a woman he’s known since childhood. Both Benjamin’s Daisy and Forrest’s Jenny are remarkable, I think, only for their beauty and their rare understanding and appreciation of their respective misfit men. Both films also present what I think of as problematically unproblematic racial relationships. I don’t necessarily believe that every film, much less those that are comedic or fantastical in nature, needs to radically explore gender and racial relationships and stereotypes, but I suppose I don’t believe that we’re sufficiently post-racial to be able to gloss over historical struggles without such glossing over itself feeling like a distraction. And I think that’s part of what renders both TCCOBB and Forrest Gump ultimately conservative films.

Before I take on what I think is Benjamin Button’s most interesting relationship—that with Queenie, the African-American woman who adopts him, I want to talk about the film’s magical realism. While TCCOBB is clearly grounded in familiar historical periods and places—1918 New Orleans, Russia pre-World War II, a Pacific marine battle (if I recall correctly), not to mention the frame story set in a 2005 New Orleans on the brink of Hurricane Katrina—the world Benjamin Button lives in is also one of magic and wonder. In the frame story, Daisy’s daughter reads to her mother from Benjamin’s diary as Daisy prepares to die. The narrative in Benjamin’s diary is further framed by the story of Mr. Gateau’s backwards running clock, built out of Mr. Gateau’s desire for his son who died in World War I to return to him. Presumably, this backwards running clock had some kind of magical influence over Benjamin, who was born the size of a baby but with the features and ailments of an old man and, as anyone who is remotely familiar with the film’s concept knows, appears to grow younger as he in fact gets older. [I have to admit that I totally thought Benjamin was going to end up as a man-sized baby at the end, an idea I got from reading too much Dlisted where Michael K would go on and on about Cate Blanchett as an old lady having sex with Brad Pitt as a old man baby. Oh, Dlisted, I can’t believe I believed you! Also, try as I might, I cannot find the posts where Michael K says this, so maybe I imagined the whole thing.]

Other than these very important magical elements, the universe of TCCOBB is relatively realistic, save for its gliding over of both the women’s movement and the Civil Rights Movement. What are we to make of this? The way I see it, since TCCOBB works hard to incorporate historic events like World Wars I & II and Hurricane Katrina, (1) the filmmakers don’t think that race and gender figure very largely in 20th century and early 21st century American history; (2) they imagine that in the same magical world where a baby can be born with the features and ailments of an old man, issues of gender and race are magically non-issues; or (3) since this is Benjamin Button’s story, he just doesn’t give a crap about race and gender. Choice three is definitely the least plausible. Benjamin Button is one very nice guy who definitely gives a crap! (Maybe the point is “Here is a really nice white guy!”) He loves his black momma Queenie (as portrayed by Taraji P. Henson)! He loves Cate Blanchett’s Daisy, even when she’s an unlovable prick. I sympathize with filmmakers and writers of all kinds, for that matter, who want to tell stories set in the historic south about something other than race. Must every story set in the historic south be about race? No, certainly, I don’t think so. But when race comes up—as it most definitely does here since Benjamin is adopted by an African-American woman—it seems strangely unrealistic to neglect the complexity of historic race relationships.

Maybe the question I should be asking is what purpose does Queenie’s blackness serve? Does her blackness make her more accepting of Benjamin when even his own father abandoned him and others were repulsed by him? Does it make the film feel integrated and inclusive while still focusing mostly on white experience? Perhaps it’s better to ask what possibilities might Queenie’s blackness have presented in this magical version of historic New Orleans. If historical gender and racial issues are going to be ignored, I think it’s an exciting possibility to think of how they might have been re-imagined altogether. That’s one of the great possibilities of speculative fiction: it allows us an opportunity to imagine how else we might be—both in utopic and dystopic senses. But even as TCCOBB neglects historical oppression, it also fails to present an imaginative alternative, and that feels like a missed opportunity.

Essentially, Queenie, as a black woman, is limited in her employment as a servant to whites. And even though she fully accepts Benjamin as her son and Benjamin does seem to love and appreciate her, he seems to fail to see how the world treats her differently and, as he grows up, he surrounds himself with white people, almost forgetting about Queenie altogether. Ultimately, the stereotype of the nurturing black woman as a loving caretaker of whites is not greatly challenged or expanded upon. African Americans are presented largely as servants. And they are truly only “supporting” characters for the white characters. Benjamin doesn’t seem to see African-American women as potential lovers or mates—only as mother figures, or rather as his mother, since the only African-American woman presented in any kind of depth is Queenie. Most strikingly, he doesn’t use his inherited wealth to get Queenie her own place or otherwise take care of her, and the last time we see Queenie, she serves Benjamin and Cate cake before retiring to bed. My heart broke for Queenie that Benjamin didn’t see to her retirement in the same way that he looked after Daisy. Is TCCOBB saying that a black woman’s motherly love is expected for free but the romantic affections of a white woman are worth money? Certainly, I think the film suggests that while black women may make good enough mothers for white boys, those boys will grow up only to desire white women. Or perhaps the film simply suggests that black women are perfectly acceptable as caretakers, but they aren’t sexually desirable like white women are. If that last sentence seems far-fetched, think about how the black women who are seen as sex symbols in our culture have or affect features often associated with whiteness. At very least, it seems that the role of lover is elevated above that of mother.

This could have been a more radical movie—and not just one in which a white character has a revelation about what it’s like to know and love black people but one whose very imaginings might show how our racial conceptions and constructions might be otherwise. Instead, we get the opposite: race relations are sanitized of all conflict, while the segregation of family and romantic relations is upheld, with the sole exception of Queenie and Benjamin.

Queenie’s preposterous explanation that Benjamin is her sister’s son “only he came out white”—possibly the film’s most hilarious moment—suggests a missed opportunity. What if in this imagined world black women commonly had white babies and vice versa? Even in our own world, racial designations aren’t as clear cut as we often assume them to be. (See “Black and White Twins”; “Parents Give Birth to Ebony and Ivory Twins”; “Black Parents . . . White Baby”; and “My Affirmative Action Fail”.) What if TCCOBB totally upended everything we think we know about race and women’s roles in the south of the past? Wouldn’t that be interesting?

Moreover, it’s one thing to neglect race and gender issues of the past, but what about in the frame story of the present? All of the nurses and caretakers in Daisy’s hospital are also black women. Daisy is kept company by her daughter, Caroline, and a black woman the same age as Caroline, who eventually leaves to check on her son and never returns to the movie. WTF? Why is she there? Is she Caroline’s girlfriend? A good friend? If we’re not going to see her again, why is she there in the first place? Okay, I looked up the script. For what it’s worth, it specifies that she’s “a young Black Woman, a ‘caregiver,’” though nurses in scrubs are also present and Dorothy dresses in civilian clothes and spends most of her screen time thumbing through a magazine. I so wish that Dorothy had been Caroline’s girlfriend or wife.

And what of Hurricane Katrina? In the end, all we see is water rising in a basement, flooding the old train station clock. There’s nothing about what happened in the hospitals, in the Ninth Ward, in the attics, in the streets, in the Superdome. I don’t even know what to say about that. That the preposterously tragic love of two imaginary white people trumps and erases all the suffering of real, mostly black people? Even through my great big ole sappy tears as Daisy dies, that just doesn’t feel right to me.

Finally, I am reminded that part of my reluctance to watch The Curious Case of Benjamin Button lies with its format as a film. Over the past decade, I’ve grown to prefer serial dramas to just about everything—film, books, whatever (though I’ve recently become consumed with popular fantasy and horror novels). HBO led the way and remains at the top of the serious television game. Deadwood and The Sopranos developed true ensemble casts with richly developed morally-complicated characters shaped by their social, historic, and economic milieux, with deft dialogue that could be emotionally moving or belly-shaking hilarious. The mere invocation of Hurricane Katrina makes it impossible for me not to compare the long but ultimately light fare of The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, which aside from its technical and artistic wizardry is ultimately forgettable, with the robust, lifelike, brilliant work of art that is Treme. Where TCCOBB uses its historical setting like a painted backdrop to affect historic depth without actually engaging history, Treme is a masterpiece of the fictionalized drama of the everyday real life of one of America’s great cities. Where women and African Americans are given roles in TCCOBB that support white stars, every character in Treme’s diverse cast is treated as the star of his or her own life, and they are richly complicated people whose lives are never defined solely by their relationship to white main characters. So that’s my loopy recommendation about The Curious Case of Benjamin Button: you’re better off watching Treme.

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button was nominated for thirteen Academy Awards in 2009. It won three Oscars for art direction, makeup, and visual effects. It was nominated for cinematography, costume design, directing, film editing, original score, sound mixing, best picture, best actor in a leading role, best actress in a supporting role, and best adapted screenplay.

Jesseca Cornelson, who has finally finished her damn PhD already, is an assistant professor of English at Alabama State University. Every now and again, she updates her blog, Difficult History, where she writes about all manner of crap. She previously reviewed An Education for Bitch Flicks‘ 2010 Best Picture Nominee Review Series.

Movie Review: An Education

*This is a guest post from Jesseca Cornelson.

An Education is a perfectly fine film. The performances are pleasant enough to watch, but much of the plot and characterization seemed to me to be yet another retelling of the popular “how to make a proper woman” story, complete with yee olde stereotypes of the necessary dowdiness of smart women in popular films and a shot of Carey Mulligan, dressed like Audrey Hepburn, shrieking with joy at winning at the dog track à la My Fair Lady. The “how to make a proper woman” story has as much to do with class as it does gender. In this incarnation, Jenny (Carey Mulligan) is a smart, pretty girl being groomed for Oxford by her middle-class family—or rather, I should say, by her father Jack as her mother does almost no talking. The whole family’s being seems to pin its hopes on Jenny’s hoped for acceptance into Oxford. The family’s aspirational longing is as keenly felt as any teenage lust, though for Jenny it means living the life of an intellectual bohemian, and for her father it means marrying her off to a lawyer. This longing renders the whole family vulnerable to the charms of smooth-talking David, impeccably played by Peter Sarsgaard, a sometimes art thief who turns out to be married (oh noes!). Predictable stuff predictably ensues. Both Jenny’s English teacher and the uptight school headmistress warn her that her Mr. Rochester figure (of course there are Jane Eyre reference—this movie is highfalutin!) will likely disappoint her and worry that Jenny (wait, Jane E?) may squander her chance at Oxford before she comes to her senses. Jenny, of course, will have none of it and, of course, David disappoints. So, of course, she once more pins her hopes for the future on Oxford. Wanna guess whether or not she gets in? The last few minutes play out with all the suspense of an uplifting afternoon special of redemption.

I had high hopes when I saw that the screenplay was adapted by Nick Hornby. His story “Nipple Jesus” ranks among my favorite ever, and I was impressed with his book How to Be Good, which is written from the first-person point of view of a doctor mother who strays from marriage to her househusband. In each of these—the story, the novel, and the film—I find his presentation of the moral ambivalences to be the most striking element. Each, it turns out, is concerned with how people negotiate the appearance of morality with actual morality, and each implicates pretty damningly middle-class values of maintaining an appearance of morality while being oh so quick to compromise any actual morals the moment it becomes convenient or self-serving. It makes me wonder how much of Hornby himself we hear in David and Danny when first one tells Jenny not to be bourgeois in her moralizing and then the other turns her moral condescension around on her by noting that she had watched them steal from little old ladies without saying much either. I guess I should admit that I’m using “morality” and “moralizing” to stand in not only for everyone’s obsession with Jenny’s virginity and the various duplicities perpetrated in the film, but also for that middle-class form of snootiness that is so quick to judge others in its desire to be respectable.

An Education is at its best when it subtly complicates and plays against audience expectations. The scenes where Alfred Molina’s jolly but domineering Jack practically stutters and falls over himself as he is charmed by David are delicious. We, wise audience, see how easily the big man’s desires for upward mobility are used to seduce him as well. Dominic Cooper’s Danny, David’s art thief buddy, is worried enough that Jenny will get hurt that he says something to David about it, but then doesn’t actually do anything about it except dance flirtingly with Jenny.

What bugs me is how tidily Hornby’s script draws on familiar types for characterization and sets up a whole series of foils. Take Olivia Williams’ portrayal of Miss Stubbs, Jenny’s English teacher. The movie tells us in a conversation that Miss Stubbs is both smart and pretty (unlike some films which present pretty actresses as ordinary—Kate Winslet is a Plain Jane in Little Children, puh-lease!). And yet the film presents Miss Stubbs as dowdy, as if smart women are incapable of doing anything other than wearing severe buns (or, for one all-too-brief scene, a ponytail that manages to be both severe and sloppy) or compulsively quaffed with prim bobs, like the headmistress’, something like an upper-class, executive severity. Yawn. And how convenient that after Jack’s rant about Oxford trees, school trees, private tuition trees, and pocket money trees growing out in the garden, David justifies his art theft by saying that “these weekends [in Oxford and Paris], and the restaurants and the concerts don’t”—here it comes!—“grow on trees.” Convenient, too, the discussion in Jenny’s English class on Mr. Rochester’s blindness in Jane Eyre and King Lear, with its own themes of blindness. When it comes to David, Jenny and her family are so hungry for the world he offers that they are willingly blind to his deceits. Jenny watches gleefully as he forges the signature of C.S. Lewis, whose acquaintance he falsely claims in order to get Jenny’s parents’ permission to take her to Oxford for a week, and Jack later tells Jenny that he and her mother Marjorie (Cara Seymour) had heard on the radio that Lewis had long since moved to Cambridge and rather than accept David’s lie they convinced themselves that the radio announcer had it all wrong.

The script isn’t bad. After all, if movies didn’t routinely take shortcuts by using familiar, stylized codes for characterization, they couldn’t tell their intricate tales in about 100 minutes. It’s just that the script is so tidy and effective that it doesn’t come anywhere close to transcending its form. At times I wondered if the film would have felt as artful if it had been cast with more familiar Hollywood types, say Julia Roberts as Miss Stubbs or Anne Hathaway as Jenny, both of whom I find exude a sweetness that always makes me aware of how terribly charming they are. Would the film have been as engaging if everyone had American accents? I wonder if audiences’ own aspirations to sophistication might make us a bit blind to how ordinary this film is.

And here’s where I want to shift gears and put An Education in conversation, however briefly, with another film from this year that blew me away, Lee Daniel’s Precious, which also features a young woman, who’s been manipulated by an older man and whose hopes for the future are likewise pinned to her education. I know Precious has been accused of being exploitative, and maybe it is, but it is a far more interesting film, in terms of characterization alone. Here we have another female teacher who reaches out to her young student. And while Paula Patton’s Ms. Rain is also smart and pretty, she’s a fully developed character and not just a type. She in fact is presented as pretty and well groomed (a pretty, neatly dressed, well-groomed lady English teacher, oh my!) and, in another surprise, she’s a lesbian! Ms. Rain’s relationship with Precious, far from being limited to a few words of encouragement or knowing warnings, is central to the film. In An Education, all of the relationships seem comparatively superficial. Jack’s semi-mock anger at having to pay for so many lessons and longing for social standing is nothing compared to Mo’Niquie’s brilliant turn as Precious’ self-loathing and enraged mother, who is herself starved for affection.

And back to that ending. Holy voice over! It’s never a good sign that all of a sudden you need a voice over to close a movie after a minute-long montage of redemptive studying. How tidy, how comforting: see Oxford was the way to go after all! I would have preferred if the film had ended with the long closing shot of Jenny hugging her knees on the stairs, her face caught somewhere between relief and worry, not fully capable of enjoying her victory. Yeah, I know: The Graduate. But we all get off easy when the movie lands very near where it would have had Jenny never met David. Oh, sure she’s now been to Paris and all the boys she dates at Oxford are, we’re told, really boys. But her earlier questions about the value of an education and the limited options for women go unanswered. She was right to tell Emma Thompson as the headmistress that “it’s not enough to educate us anymore. You’ve got to tell us why you’re doing it.” It is indeed “an argument worth rehearsing”—an argument that the film fails to rehearse even as it resolves with Jenny’s acceptance to Oxford. What is the value of an education if the only things you can do with it are teach or go into civil service? Compare that to Precious, whose closing moments of victory aren’t tinged with yet another level of superior condescension, but rather present a young woman, HIV-positive before the AIDS cocktail, walking into the sunlight hand-in-hand with the children fathered by her own father. It’s a much more genuine ending. What do I mean by that? I suppose that the victory is both more humble and more hardly earned. As Precious walks down the street, we know her life cannot help but hold more difficulty and heartbreak. As Jenny cycles carefree down a different street, we suspect that the Oxford education will serve her just fine. So maybe what I mean by genuine is that Precious offers up the rare ending that opens out, leaving the audience with a sense that the character’s life and struggles will continue in spite of her current moment in the sun.

And isn’t that more like real life anyway? I know boatloads of smart, pretty women who find disappointment in their careers and relationships as much as those of a plainer sort, but we don’t really get the sense that Jenny will struggle with the difficulties of being a smart woman in 1960s Britain that she had so clearly articulated earlier in the film. And that seems a bit counterfeit.

Jesseca Cornelson is currently working on a collection of documentary poems about the history of Mobile, Alabama, which will serve as her dissertation for a doctorate in English and Comparative Literature from the University of Cincinnati. She blogs about her research and writing at Difficult History.