A Blog of My Own

Some flawed films transcend their problems to be wonderful moviegoing experiences after all. So it is with The Curious Case of Benjamin Button.

Through the first half of the movie, Brad Pitt, as the reverse-aging Button, is a cipher. Things happen to him, but as to who he is, there’s not much there there. Aging backwards could really do a number on you, I get that, but wouldn’t you have some personality, rather than none?

And at points along the way the storytellers haven’t worked out their timeline rigorously. OK, it’s World War Two now, so he’d have reverse-aged how many years? And his normally-aging girlfriend Daisy would be how old now? Then how come he doesn’t look that age, and how come she’s the dancing ingenue in the original cast of Carousel? And how come Daisy’s daughter (whom we see in the present-day framing device, as she attends her now-dying mother) looks like she’s thirty-two to her mother’s ninety?

Other aspects of the tale feel less than fully thought out. As Benjamin regresses into childhood, he seems to develop Alzheimer’s. But Alzheimer’s is a disease brains get when they get old. If Benjamin’s body is growing younger, and his brain is a part of his body, a disease of brain decrepitude makes no sense.

But while such questions nag, their nagging becomes less insistent, and the film takes on power, about halfway through, as we begin to recognize the emotional toll on Benjamin and those who love him as their ages cross each other and diverge. In the first half, Benjamin and those around him have the happy experience of seeing their ages converge from their opposite poles; but once that halfway meeting point is crossed and passed, we know the characters are in for a world of pain.

Button makes you believe in its story, makes you think about how you’d feel if it happened to you. And so it is different from the F. Scott Fitzgerald short story on which it’s based. Fitzgerald’s story is coldly comical in tone, and its main business is social satire. We aren’t meant to identify with the figure at its center for a second. But we do identify with the Button of Brad Pitt, director David Fincher and scenarist Eric Roth.

Here is the best thing about Benjamin Button: It made me grateful that my wife and I, and all my other friends and loved ones, are aging in the same direction. We usually think getting old and dying sucks. Well, maybe it does — but getting young and dying (when all about you are going the other way) sucks worse. It is a blessing we journey in the same direction as each other, even though that journey end in death. I’m going to try not to forget that.

Roth, by the way, just lost all his money to Bernie Madoff. He’s off on his own picaresque life adventure now.

Just in time for the holidays, here’s another installment in my Great (Hot) Girl Dancers of the Twentieth Century series. The first YouTube contains a twofer of numbers by the great Gwen Verdon in the film version of Damn Yankees, recreating the Lola she originated on Broadway. In the opener, “A Little Brains, A Little Talent,” notice how little she moves. By which I mean, notice how little she has to move to create an effect. Small movements this well-calbrated are, I imagine, as difficult (if not more) to pull off than large ones. Every little thing she does is magic.

As a bonus, here’s Gwen before she was Gwen. As Gwyneth Verdon, she was a featured dancer in the Danny Kaye comedy On the Riviera. Here she is, alone, at the beginning of “Rhythm of a New Romance,” although her distinctive voice (one of her best features) is dubbed by Veola Vonn* — possibly because Verdon at this point couldn’t pull off the French accent. (Her real voice can be heard uttering one word, “Gesundheit,” later on in the video.) In every tableau in this long production number, just keep looking for the amazing redhead.

*Dubber info courtesy of the stunningly comprehensive Ray Hagen’s Movie Dubbers List.

In this clip from I Dood It, the phenomenal Eleanor Powell starts out looking just like a living Gil Elvgren, and then goes on to do things with a lasso that you wouldn’t believe. The fun begins around 1:30.

In 1969, at the age of nineteen, my life was changed. That was the year I saw the London cast of the Burt Bacharach musical Promises, Promises, and a dancer named Donna McKechnie move like crazy in a number called (improbably) “Turkey Lurkey Time.”

She was sex itself. In fact, since I was still a virgin (quaint, I know), watching her dance from my balcony seat was the nearest thing I had yet had to having sex with a living being. I’d still rank it as one of the best.

In her autobiography Time Steps, McKechnie relates how debilitating pain put her out of commission through much of the seventies and eighties — as a direct result of dancing like that. If so, she made a magnificent sacrifice for us all.

You can see what I saw by looking at this clip from the 1968 Tony Awards. (A former Hullabaloo dancer, she had performed the number as part of the original Broadway cast before being exported to London to open the show there.) Give it time to build, and ignore, if you can, the asinine lyric. You won’t be disappointed. (P.S. On older computers, “Turkey Lurkey” may look herky-jerky in this embedded video, in which case, go here to view it directly on YouTube.)

And here’s writer Seth Rudetsky’s funny explication of the clip:

(In event it doesn’t play smoothly for you here, try here.)