To borrow a line from Lou Lumenick: The Curious Case of Benjamin Button is this year’s Forrest Gump. This is not really arguable. In addition to sharing a screenwriter (Eric Roth), Robert Zemeckis’ 1994 Best Picture winner and David Fincher’s 2008 Best Picture front-runner (at least, as of this writing) both put groundbreaking special effects to the service of sprawling stories, spanning many decades and weaving a breadcrumb trail through modern American history, in which a man holds a torch for a woman who can’t reciprocate his love until her dreams of autonomy are spectacularly dashed. For me, the Gump comparison is a pejorative, a shorthand way to say, “This film will likely make a lot of money and win a lot of awards, and yet is so phony and cloying and gimmicky that its success will some day be seen by some as a tragedy.” But to others, the second coming of Gump would be a blessing. An Oscars-bait blockbuster? As Lumenick put it, before seeing the film, “Paramount would be thrilled, and possibly the Academy would be as well.”
Watching Benjamin Button, occasionally I actively loathed it, but mostly I just felt genuinely disappointed that it seemed so lacking in the genuine feeling that makes a bloated, over-serious, firing-on-all-cylinders Hollywood blow-out even temporarily satisfying. Ultimately, we buy into films like the film Benjamin Button wants to be because they offer our only chance at that unique catharsis: they let us cry, in public, surrounded by and united with strangers who are also crying, regardless of our individual age, class or station in life. But Benjamin Button cannot be effective as an audience-leveling tear-inducer, because it’s not a film about people. It’s a film about the feat of its own whiz-bang, Frankensteinian digital imagery, drunk on its own accomplishment to an extent that feels quasi-ethical.
There are a few things I haven’t been into for awhile: Ryan Reynolds, who keeps popping up on my television with that terrible-looking movie with Abigail Breslin (the title, which I keep forgetting, is Definitely, Maybe), and movies about obsessive compulsives. But I have been a fan of both in the past. Reynolds was really terrific (and yes, really hot) in The Amityville Horror, despite the remake’s uselessness, and he seemed to show a lot of promise. Unfortunately, I haven’t seen him deliver since (I hear he’s good in The Nines, but I haven’t seen it). OCD, meanwhile, was an interesting and funny character trait in movies until Nic Cage played the most unbelievable and annoying obsessive-compulsive ever in the otherwise decent caper Matchstick Men.
But here we have a trailer for Chaos Theory, a movie starring Reynolds as an obsessive type, and it really hooked me in. Certainly it had to be the music, beginning with that wonderful Carter Burwell (arranged) composition from Raising Arizona, “Way Out There”, and continuing with Grieg’s “In the Hall of the Mountain King”, which is featured in tons of trailers but which always manages to excite me. The fact that Emily Mortimer, looking as adorable as always, appears is just an added bonus. Then, there’s the matter of Reynolds and the OCD. The former appears to be in perfect shape (and I don’t mean his abs, which are not on display here) and the latter, discarded by Reynolds’ character in favor of anarchic behavior, is pleasantly dealt with.
Whenever Warner Bros. decides to finally bring this out (it was shot two years ago and still has no release date), I’ll be there.
We’ve had a bit of trouble getting this episode to go through the iTunes feed, so we hope this re-post will fix the problem. The original post, with episode description and embedded player, is here.
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