David Fincher’s adaptation of Fitzgerald’s story is made with enormous care and for long stretches it is beautiful. It is also 166 minutes in the company of a man to whom life mostly happens, and the hospital framing tests our patience.
F. Scott Fitzgerald’s 1922 short story about a man born old is a joke told over a few pages. Eric Roth’s screenplay tells it over 166 minutes, moves it from Baltimore to New Orleans and adds a love story, a war, a tugboat and a hurricane. David Fincher, who had until then made films about killers and the men who hunt them, directs it as a slow, respectful romance. The result is handsome and careful and, for long stretches, cold. We admired a great deal and were moved by rather less.
It is superbly made. Claudio Miranda photographs the early decades in lamplight, the colour of old varnish, and lets the palette cool as the century wears on. Donald Graham Burt’s old people’s home is a tall New Orleans house where the residents sit in the same chairs every day and a wrinkled boy fits in without remark. Jacqueline West dresses forty years of Americans without once drawing attention to it. The effects, which put Brad Pitt’s face, aged by decades, on the body of a much smaller man, are disconcerting for about a minute and then simply accepted. Alexandre Desplat’s score, mostly piano, is patient and does not push.
Taraji P. Henson is the warmest thing in it. Queenie finds the baby on the steps, decides on the spot that he is a miracle and hers, and Henson plays her as a practical woman with a house to run rather than a saint. Jason Flemyng gives Thomas Button, the father who left the child, a guilt that sits on him for years. Jared Harris enjoys himself as Captain Mike, a tugboat skipper who considers himself an artist and has the tattoos to prove it. Pitt is watchful and decent and still, and the stillness is the problem: Benjamin is written as a man things happen to, and he takes them politely. Cate Blanchett has more to play as Daisy, a dancer with ambitions, and the film wakes up when she is angry.
And then there is a stretch in a hotel in the far north, where Benjamin, now at sea, meets Elizabeth Abbott (Tilda Swinton), the wife of a British official, over tea in an empty lobby at three in the morning. Nothing much happens. Two people who cannot sleep talk about caviar and the things they meant to do. It moved us more than anything else in the film, and more than we expected, because for twenty minutes the script stops announcing its themes and lets two lonely adults be careful with each other. Swinton does it with almost no gestures. When the film leaves her we felt the loss, and we were not sure the film did.
The framing is the worst of it. The whole story is read from Benjamin’s diary by Caroline Fuller (Julia Ormond) at the bedside of the dying Daisy in a New Orleans hospital in 2005, with a hurricane coming in. The film returns to that room repeatedly, Blanchett rasping under prosthetics, Ormond turning pages, the wind picking up, and each return stops the story so that it can tell us how to feel about it. The hurricane is meant as a large symbol and lands as an interruption. Roth’s dialogue does not help; people speak in the film’s tagline, and the script has the shape of his Forrest Gump (1994), a mild Southern man drifting through the century towards a woman who is not ready for him. Angus Wall and Kirk Baxter cut the decades as tidy montage, but the middle hour goes round the same track twice, and past the two-hour mark we were checking how much was left. That is not a good sign in a love story.
Fincher’s Zodiac (2007) was also long and also patient, and it never dragged, because its people wanted something and could not have it. Benjamin wants little. Fincher’s reserve stops Roth’s script from turning to syrup, but it also stops us getting close to anyone.
It is worth an evening for anyone fond of Fincher, of Swinton, or of a period rebuilt to the last brass fitting, and it is better at home, where the hospital scenes can be got through with a cup of tea and the long middle becomes a matter of your own patience. It carries a 12A and runs 166 minutes, of which perhaps two hours are needed.
