By Ray Pride

It get don’t I.

A case of too much of a so-so thing, “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” is a fatal mismatch of sensibilities, orchestrated by a master of complete control, David Fincher, with a poet of the passive, screenwriter Eric Roth, whose work includes “The Good Shepherd” (spy as watcher) and “Forrest Gump” (simpleton as empty vessel).

Drawing on a slim conceit from a wafer of a short story by F. Scott Fitzgerald—man bites dog! I mean, “man born old grows young”—“The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” is less picaresque or lifelong wanderjahr than a hybrid “Forrest Button.” Things happen. A character gawps. The mind wanders. And it makes one muse over passivity in Fincher’s films: in “Fight Club,” doesn’t The Narrator lie back and let rampaging id Tyler do all the work? And “Zodiac” is a masterpiece about a gaze that misunderstands, about asking the wrong questions rather than not ever finding a sought answer.

Benjamin Button (Brad Pitt) is born old and grows to be an ancient newborn. Ever-fresh Daisy, the girl he loves, dances from a redhead of 10 to a dancer of whatever, embodied in some parts by Cate Blanchett, and in the distancing present-tense portions, set during the winds and lashing rains of Hurricane Katrina, by a bid for a Best MakeUp Oscar. In the middle, there’s stuff about shipping out to sea and committing adultery with Tilda Swinton in a Russian hotel and getting sunk at sea and eventually Brad Pitt digitized to a younger, ever more angelic version of himself on the back of a fine shiny motorcycle. For me, the feeling was less one of coolness and distance and apartness from the material that some have identified than simply, what is going on here? It feels as impersonal as a yellowed telegram ordering clock parts. Pitt is a lovely mirror, but what’s reflected back? Are you the hero of your own life if your fate is to repeatedly open the closet in the hall and life avalanches on your head like a succession of empty boxes?

Born in New Orleans on the day World War II ends, Benjamin is a foundling, thought a monster for his newborn decrepitude, but once left on the doorstep of an infertile young woman (Taraji P. Henson), a miracle. Fireworks play across the French Quarter night, like the similar digital sky that opens “Zodiac,” with fireworks exploding above the bridges of the Bay. But the episodic tale that follows pales in comparison to “Zelig” or to “Forrest Gump,” less a chronicle of experiential amplitude than one of fussy gee-whillikers cod-drollery.

Images of intimate beauty twinkle through the tobacco’ed skies of this would-be epic, but the voluminous narration reminds again and again of only one indelible figure from the pantheon of cinema: Joey Nickels. Joey Nickels? Joey Nickels from “Annie Hall”! Joey Five Cents? (What! an asshole!) The stories being funneled through the walls of the theater invariably sound like oft-repeated balderdash from someone who’s grown used to no one listening, not even himself. (”Button”’s best recurring joke involves lightning strikes, and is self-criticism of high comic attainment.)

Still, in terms of inedible imagery, Jean-Pierre Fincher still trumps Jeunet, to whose work “Button” has been compared. In faux battlefield footage, doughboys stride backward as if emerging from the bullets that had in fact just pierced their chests. Florets of fireworks reflected incidentally in a Model T’s tilted-just-so windscreen. Night-set scenes that work on the verge of pitch, the blackness and guttering sepia of de la Tour candlelight. A perspective of bridges overhead melting with fog. Daisy in a flat beret. An early 1960s rocket launch from Cape Canaveral. Scars on a woman’s legs, fingered deftly.

Any element beyond the simplest elements of timepieces, beyond basic movement, consists of constructions that are crested with a lovely term of art: complications. (Thus, great and treasured watches are built from complications of complications.) But in plotting, as in childbirth, complications can be the death of a thing, the death of narrative grace and ease. There are heartening, hushed instances when you can feel Benjamin and Daisy meeting in the middle, the conceit of the moments of the two lovers are slowly hurtling in opposite directions, and you can furnish the particulars of your own life and loves to capture the sense of the fleeting correspondence of contact, or parallel human treks. But that’s the function of canvas, not of a painting. And at these instances when the characters meet at nearly the same age that imply the sorrows of fleeting flesh and ever-limber love…yet the moment you’re touched Roth reaches out and slaps you with a nice wet bromide. Something like “You’re odd. You’re diff’r'nt from anybody I ever met,” or “You can change or stay the same. There are no rules to this thing. You can make the best or the worst of it.” Box of chocolates for $160 million, Alex? I can’t see the trees for the Forrest, but sweep Oscar smell I.

“The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” is birthed Christmas day.

By Ray Pride

David Fincher’s adaptation of Chuck Palahniuk’s “Fight Club” ends with a meltdown, an apocalypse of sorts, a cataclysm that triggers the collapse of the credit system.

An ending like that may be more timely than the one of Clark Gregg’s (screenwriter of “What Lies Beneath”) adaptation of Palahniuk’s lesser, less-read “Choke,” which in final form, mingles compulsive sexual addiction, convulsive faked choking, Colonial reenactment theme parks and faith that grows from the ostensible foreskin of Christ. But the real world can take care of the major apocalypses without this week’s new movies.

Ever-watchable Sam Rockwell’s fans know his many roles and whom everyone else seems to recollect, “Oh! The quiet actor with the volcanic hair!” He stars as Victor, a med-school dropout who has to face the increasing dementia of his hospitalized mother (Anjelica Huston). On the side, he finds community and cash by faking choking accidents at restaurants and allowing himself to be a kind of reverse savior of the affections of strangers. By day, he works at a Williamsburg theme park (an apocryphal one, not the neighborhood theme park in Brooklyn), facing fines or time in the stocks if he acts in any way out of the era. There’s a shapeless subplot about a friend, Denny (Brad William Henke), who provides a foil for Victor to explain himself, and who fashions a perfect love for a stripper to replace his uncontrollable masturbation. More productive is Victor’s weird relationship with Paige (Kelly Macdonald), white-coated but dark-hearted at the mental hospital. Could he, a sponsor, give up going to meetings and banging those who trust him for the love of Paige? And will his mother ever tell him who his father was before she’s gone in one fashion or another?

A wicked stew of dependencies, which move on and off the screen at regular intervals. A fear of conventional intimacy alternates with the desire of nurture by some larger, outside force. The ending, however, wholly at odds with Palahniuk’s impulses, is a touching thing, where two characters are allowed to find some kind of romance and passion, molding their sexual obsessions into one in a sustained close-up of several minutes, scored to the aching “Reckoner,” by Radiohead. “Choke” is one of those movies like “Birth” where dizzying, odd zigs and zags leave intentions blurry, yet ends with a gorgeous and moving, if contradictory, ending.

Rockwell abides to convincing effect even when his character is trying to comprehend the peculiar developments involving Christ’s foreskin, and in person, he’s charming on the subject of acting. In Chicago one sunny afternoon, wearing a green t-shirt with a “Pirates arrr cool!” design, digging a Newport of matching green from a Ziploc bag, he concedes he’s an “acting geek.” While he’s intrigued when I ask whether journalists generally find a common vocabulary in which what acting can be discussed, he’s ready with films to cross-reference and actors to praise and scenes to go “aw, man!” over. Among them: “One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest,” “The Deer Hunter,” “Stripes,” “Animal House” and Richard Pryor in “Bustin’ Loose.” “I have a strange group of heroes,” he says with a small smile.

Rockwell places his recent turn as a troubled alcoholic looking for salvation after a child goes missing in David Gordon Green’s “Snow Angels” (released on DVD this week) in the line of a lot of 1970s turns that he admires, such as Eric Roberts’ frustrated, jealous, murderous cuckold in “Star 80,” “Taxi Driver” and Jon Savage in “Deer Hunter,” “The Onion Field” and “Inside Moves.” “He has these fragile qualities, vulnerable Montgomery Clift qualities.”

“I set high standards for myself. Everything’s been done,” he says. He’s about to play an alcoholic basketball coach of a girls’ basketball team. “Once you accept that, well, ‘Bad News Bears,’ that’s the best of that. You don’t get better than Walter Matthau. I just think about how to do it better in my own way.” He reflects on “Choke” in an aside: “Very ‘Glass Menagerie,’ all that stuff. That Oedipal stuff.”

Of supporting roles versus leads, Rockwell observes, “There’s a lot more waiting around. Especially on studio films. I don’t like that as much. I like to show up and <i>act</i>. I don’t want to sit around. I want to get up and do <i>shit</i>. I’ve been a day player and I’ve done episodics like ‘Law & Order.’ I feel for day-players. It’s not easy, it’s nerve-wracking, in fact.”

And in lead roles coming up? “You’ve gotta let ‘em know what you need without being a dick. It’s a fine line.” Rockwell goes to light another cigarette. The match flubs. Another one snaps. The head of a third, lit, flies. “These are trick matches! Look at the bullshit.” Finally it lights. “I can be kind of a clown.” Takes a drag. “It’s all the same to me, it’s just talking.”

“Actors used to come from theater,” he reflects about the 1970s era he reveres. “Meryl Streep, DeNiro, John Cazale.” Cazale, who died young, was in “Deer Hunter,” “Dog Day Afternoon” and Fredo in “The Godfather” and “The Godfather II.” “An apprenticeship teaches you respect for the craft. You’re a spear-carrier, and eventually, you get to play Romeo or Mercutio.”

But at the end of the day? “At the end of the day? It’s just talk and listen. Talk and listen, pretty much.”

“Choke” opens Friday.

By Ray Pride

“American Teen” debuted at Sundance 2008, and some viewers begrudged the sale of Nanette Burstein’s eminently entertaining, beautifully constructed snapshot of the lives of several teenagers across a senior year at a Warsaw, Indiana high school.

“What sort of fresh nonfiction is this!” seemed the exclamation-point-capped question. A couple months later, when she and I were on a panel about the documentary marketplace at the True/False festival in Columbia, Missouri, the questions tended more to how do you tell a story well? And how the heck do you get anyone to see it?

In the case of “American Teen,” following the 38-year-old Burstein’s co-directed “On the Ropes” (1999) and “The Kid Stays In The Picture” (2002), you follow the expected acts and acting-out of American teenage life with restless curiosity. Yet some of the criticism leveled at the film was that it’s simply too well made, that it could not be true with its genuinely entertaining set of characters and its superbly structured narrative.

Burstein takes pains to note that shooting over 1,000 hours across a senior year is different from the exigencies of reality television. It’s a bulk deal then, “You make twenty episodes in a few months and you have to have a story editor. A lot of times in those situations, it’s not uncommon even for [networks] to create talking points for people, in certain situations. Which you don’t have to do if you have the luxury of time. Which I did.”

So it’s the tradition of the longitudinal documentary, capturing the arc of a process, as in Kartemquin productions like “Hoop Dreams” or in Barbara Kopple’s documentaries. “Right, right.” Burstein pauses. “You develop a relationship with the teenagers so that they trust you and they allow you to be there at very intimate moments. Some of it is luck. But there are storylines where you miss a crucial scene and you just don’t follow it because you’re never going to be able to make up for that.”

Unless you were to recreate it, which you weren’t going to do? “Right. There was one scene I had to recreate, because I didn’t get it, and I’d filmed so much of this story. It wasn’t a dialogue scene. It was when [one female character] got the text message of [a guy] breaking up with her. I wasn’t there. Because it was totally spontaneous. He didn’t tell me he was going to do that. So I recreated that, because there was no other way to show that they broke up. But everything else was very real. But, yes, some reaction shots, are they used from a different place, like in a phone conversation? Yes. But that’s just editing and I’ve been doing that in documentaries for ten years. Are there shots where it’s to show a mood where they’re laying on the bed thinking, are they thinking of that exact voiceover at that moment? No. But on ‘60 Minutes,’ they go, ‘Can I get a shot of you walking down the hall?’ They add a voiceover. That type of thing.”

“It really upsets me,” she continues. “I never lit any scenes. There was a lot of spontaneity. I tried not to be obtrusive and, y’know, a lot of it is like, you have to be a storyteller, you have to be thinking about ‘Where is this story going and how is it going to be told?’”

“I have thousands of outlines,” she says, laughing. Like algebra? If X has this value, but then Y…? “Exactly! This is how the story’s going to be laid out. I’m always thinking about what I’m going to have to shoot in order to tell the story. It’s really annoying that I’ve had that as a criticism. ‘Cos if anything, it should be like… it should be a compliment, not a criticism, not a suspicion. ‘Wow, this is a great story!’”

The visual style, to a practiced eye, suggests through grain and shadow that you are working in available light. Plus Burstein leaves the radio transmitters in several shots, including in one memorable scene where a character throws hers aside in anger. “It’s funny, ‘cos one reviewer said, ‘Yeah, you really get that sense that things are staged when you see the microphones.’ Because you see there are microphones? I don’t understand that. That makes no sense to me!”

There’s a traveling shot through the town across house fronts akin to the opening of David Fincher’s “Zodiac.” As a particularly pernicious bit of gossip telegraphs through the town, we see the plain streets course past. “I really wanted to show the way that technology works. At one point, I thought well maybe I’d animate a fiber optic cable, but then my editor, Mary Manhardt, came up with the house [sequence]. She did that, and I went, that’s brilliant. You can see it traveling, you normally think of the Internet as being able to go across the world but so much of it is used just to communicate within this town, often used in an act of cruelty. You could see clearly how things could spread so easily in a way the telephone could not achieve, the old technology.”

RECOMMENDED

Tarsem Singh’s voluptuous second feature (after the hermetic “The Cell”) was made around the world, with scenes grabbed in exotic locales while he made mega-budget commercials. A narrative within a narrative, “The Fall,” the framing story, set in a California hospital in the 1920s, finds a bed-bound stuntman (Lee Pace) telling fantastical stories to a young emigrant girl (round-faced Romanian Catinca Untaru). The child’s non-acting is appealing; Pace’s bad acting is not. But the flights of fancy include imagery of rare beauty, at once concrete and lyrical. (Note the perspective on a swimming elephant, from just beneath its gently kicking legs against the blue-on-blue surface of water lit by sky.) “The Fall,” finished in 2006, is only now finding a release with a presentation credit from his commercial-making colleagues Spike Jonze and David Fincher, but the exuberant extravagance of Tarsem’s tableaux is timeless. The narrative’s misshapen but the filmmaking is powerful. The ending, however, is anathema, in which a supposed tribute to silent movies is depicted in tragically awful transfers, in the wrong ratio and in the sped-up fashion familiar from television in decades past but utterly unlike what was witnessed by the first audiences for these films. The suggestion that the character did several of Buster Keaton’s stunts also reeks. Based on the 1981 Bulgarian film, “Yo Ho Ho.” 117m. (Ray Pride)