The Curious Case of Benjamin Button · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

There's a station clock in this film whose hands turn the wrong way, and Alexandre Desplat's score keeps borrowing its tick: small waltzing music-box figures, a mechanism wound backward. Stay with that clock a moment, because it tells you what kind of movie you're in. A clock converts movement into time. Hands cross a face, and we agree to call the distance they covered an hour. Cinema made the same trade for most of its first sixty years: something happens, something follows, and time is what you infer from the gap. Deleuze called that arrangement the movement-image, and he thought film's great break came when it stopped inferring time and started presenting it. He had a name for an image that does that — a chronosign, time shown rather than measured. Fincher hangs one over the whole picture and then spends 166 minutes on what it implies.

Here is the idea worth borrowing, and it's the most beautiful thing in Deleuze's two volumes on cinema. At every instant, time splits. One part passes: the present, on its way to the next present. The other part is preserved: that same moment, laid down as past, going nowhere ever again. Two directions out of one point, and we can only live along one of them. An image that shows both at once he called a crystal-image, because you get a thing and its double with no way to say which is which.

Now look at what Eric Roth and Fincher actually cast. Benjamin travels one way through a body; Daisy travels the other. Jacqueline West's costume plan makes it visible without a word: Daisy blooming while Benjamin sheds age. They cross once, in a narrow window in the middle, then diverge. That isn't a gimmick draped over a romance. It's the split of time given two faces and a house in New Orleans, and the film's sadness isn't imposed on the premise, it's required by it. If time really does open in two directions at once, the only place two people can meet is the crossing, and a crossing has no duration to speak of.

What does Benjamin do about any of this? Almost nothing, and that's the second thing to notice. Pitt plays him still and watchful. He doesn't change the century; the century moves across him. Queenie's nursing home, the tugboat, Murmansk in wartime, the war, the postwar reunion. Deleuze's word for a protagonist like this is the seer: someone who looks and endures where an older kind of hero would have acted. And he has a term for what happens around such a figure — the movement of world, where the character goes still and the world takes over the moving. Roth had built this before in Forrest Gump, and Zelig built it before that: a fixed man technically inserted into decades that do all the traveling. In Button the concept and the pipeline are the same object. A near-passive face is composited into period after period, and the compositing is the philosophy. The episodes agree. Benjamin's trips transform nothing; he leaves and returns, and the plot is a chain of departures rather than a causal machine. Deleuze called that shape the balade, the stroll that changes nothing, and treated it as the symptom of a cinema that had stopped believing in the decisive act. Strange to find it inside a Christmas Day studio release. There it is.

The film also stops dead to walk through a chain of small accidents — a package, a delay, a cab, and whether a woman ends up under it. Each link is what Deleuze called an any-instant-whatever: an ordinary sampled moment with no claim to being the climax. Older arts chose the privileged instant, the pose at the peak of the gesture. Photography and film taught us to cut movement into equidistant nothings and let the sum do the work. That digression is the movie explaining its own mechanism out loud. A life isn't a shape. It's a sum of instants. Reverse the order and the sum comes out different.

Now the face, which is where the film entered the history of the medium and not just Fincher's filmography. Bazin's account of why photographed images move us rests on contact: light left a real body and touched the film. The close-up inherits that credit. When a face moves you in close-up, part of what moves you is knowing a person did that, with that face, while a camera watched. Deleuze's version is the affection-image, feeling registered and not yet spent on action, and its purest form is the qualisign: an immobile face reflecting one quality. Wonder. Attention. Benjamin at eighty, in a chair, watching.

That face was built. Pitt performed old Benjamin's expressions separately, in emotion-capture sessions coded against the Facial Action Coding System. Digital Domain reconstructed them on a computer-generated head. The body underneath belonged to a smaller, older performer in a blue hood, and Light Stage work from Paul Debevec's group at USC supplied how Pitt's skin returns light from every angle. Claudio Miranda then lit everything soft and sourced and consistent, so the synthetic head could sit inside a believable photographic world instead of announcing itself. It held. Audiences took the old man for Pitt. Deleuze's term for a description that builds its object and then stands in for it is crystalline description, and he files it under the powers of the false, where truth and falsity stop being decidable and that becomes the creative principle. Button isn't playing that as a plot trick. It plays it as a working condition. The image doesn't record Benjamin's face; it replaces the recording.

That's the invention, and it's Fincher's more than anyone's: he asked the most expensive digital human yet built to underact. The precedents were all louder. Jurassic Park proved a fully computer-generated creature could hold photoreal presence. Death Becomes Her had already grafted altered anatomy onto live actors, as a joke about vanity and decay. Andy Serkis and WETA translated a live performance onto a digital character in The Two Towers, the method Button industrialized with FACS. Titanic gave Digital Domain the compositing pipeline and the framed period-flashback melodrama besides. Every one of those asks you to accept a thing. Button asked you to accept a person, in close-up, for an hour, doing very little. What followed is a decade of de-aged stars and faces reassembled after death, all of it running through this door. The affection-image came loose from the body that had to have been there.

One caution before you rewatch. The outer frame is old machinery: a deathbed in August 2005, a daughter reading a diary aloud, a life unspooling behind it. Deleuze was cool on that device. A dated flashback is a recollection-image, time inferred from an order of presents, exactly the indirect handling the reverse-aging premise escapes. But listen to what's outside that window. Katrina is coming. The past is being read aloud in a room the near future is about to erase, and Kirk Baxter and Angus Wall keep the cutting slow enough that you feel both clocks at once.

The question the film leaves open is whether it's the same life, read backward. Benjamin gets every year anyone gets. He just gets them in an order where wisdom arrives as strength is leaving, and love arrives during the one stretch when the two of them are level. Watch that stretch again. It's the quietest passage in the movie and the least worked on: two actors at their own ages in a room, nothing running the wrong way for a while. A reported $150 million buys that patch of ordinary. That's the argument.