In the current issue of The New Yorker, David Denby bemoans the decline of the Academy Awards selection process, focusing on the paltry quality of this year’s Oscar picks compared to previous years. In toting up the golden votes present vs. past, he notes:
The total of thirteen nominations for Benjamin Button has to be some sort of scandal. Citizen Kane received nine nominations, The Godfather: Part II eleven, and this movie, so smooth and mellow that it seems to have been dipped in bourbon aging since the Civil War, is nowhere close to those two.
If we accept Denby’s premise that the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Awards was ever about quality rather than commerce, and concentrate on the seeming vacuity of Benjamin Button it is clear that Denby misses the true message of the film, which is both a savage rebuttal of traditional linear modes of film viewing and a call to arms for all of us to revisit and re-evaluate our cinema favorites by viewing them in reverse.
I have obtained a bootleg DVD of Benjamin Button and have discovered that the film plays much better backward rather than forward. By means of the reverse button on my remote control, I can watch the marvel of the film’s protagonist growing old while everyone and everything around him rejuvenates. For example, Cate Blanchett transforms from a crotchety, middle-aged woman with a truly Medean mother complex into a vibrant young woman with an alarming Oedipal complex.
In forward time Benjamin Button takes us through a veritable IMDb of cinematic classics as the protagonist de-matures through a Grapes of Wrath New Orleans, an End of an Affair Moscow, a Guns of Navaronne war era, A Harold and Maude '50s romance, a decidedly non Brando-esque Wild One on a road trip, until finally settling into a perverse version of Look Who’s Talking. In reverse, Benjamin Button’s United States of America progresses from its present Bush-ian chaos back to a golden age when robber barons, racial apartheid, and the absence of womens’ or workers’ rights characterized the century.
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