Movie theater. Photo by Fin Fahey. Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

Technological advances have always driven major changes in the art of film making, from the coming of sound to the development of computer animation. But could the digital age render film itself irrelevant? Tribeca Film is tackling this question through a series online of video clips exploring the new documentary Side by Side.

The documentary, directed by Keanu Reeves and produced by Christopher Kenneally, deals with the effects of the digital revolution, and specifically new methods of shooting movies without film, upon traditional film making. After asking whether film can survive in its current form, Reeves explores the history of cinema and attempts to shed some light on its possible futures.

Reeves interviews a pantheon Hollywood mavens, including James Cameron, David Fincher, David Lynch, Christopher Nolan, Martin Scorsese, George Lucas, and Steven Soderbergh, in his attempt to depict the monumental shift digital film-making has created at the movies .

Tribeca Film’s Future of Film blog is hosting a continuing conversation by showing daily clips featuring interviews edited out of Side by Side in the final cut. Each day features a new interview with film industry veterans and stars, including Greta Gerwig, Jost Vacano, Wally Pfister,  and Ellen Kuras, among others.

Tribeca Films will release Side by Side through on-demand platforms on August 22.  The film will also play theatrically in select cities, including Los Angeles (August 17), New York (August 13), Boston (August 23), Seattle (August 31), Chicago (September 15), Tacoma (September 15), San Francisco (October 18), and other cities to be announced.

By Clare Coffey

The incredible story of a man who is born old and ages backward into infancy brings Fincher closer to his idol Kubrick. But it also exposes Fincher’s facile imagination. If Fincher was a socially responsive filmmaker, he would have rejected F. Scott Fitzgerald’s 1922 short story “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” and, instead, adapted “The Diamond as Big as the Ritz,” a classic fantasy appropriate to satirizing the unquestioned materialism that Fitzgerald—while formulating his Gatsby vision—thought was key to America’s post-industrial-boom mentality. Fincher could have addressed contemporary economic/class divisions. But for a technocrat fanboy, Fitzgerald’s bizarre death-to-birth fantasy had more appeal: self-importance.

In this cinematic oddity disguised as a coming-of-age story, Fincher dodges any social or spiritual significance in Benjamin Button’s sojourn through the 20th century. It’s a tall tale with no sense of the fantastic. Solipsistic to the extreme, even its love story—Benjamin connects with Daisy (Cate Blanchett) midway through both their lives—is morose. Kubrick was a misanthrope, but Fincher’s fashionable nihilism means he’s made another movie celebrating nothingness. There’s no philosophy about living or dying. It’s all a somber, pointless technical exercise—or “process,” as Fincherheads defended last year’s celluloid void, Zodiac.

Indifferent to Fitzgerald’s ideas about society and ambition, Fincher falls back on Hollywood cliché—reworking both Titanic and Forrest Gump. Starting with Daisy in wrinkly old-lady make-up like Titanic’s Old Rose, the silly narrative is complicated with unnecessary flashbacks. Fincher’s hero passively inhabits decades, observing the father who abandoned him (Jason Flemyng), a sad adulteress (Tilda Swinton), the unattainable Daisy, a salty sea captain (Jared Harris) and other minor characters. Forrest Gump screenwriter Eric Roth must have been a little bored with another innocent hero, so the story emphasizes Daisy’s rootlessness (recalling Forrest’s beloved Jenny). This blatantly commercial framework disastrously unbalances the fantasy concept, emptying-out Benjamin’s idiosyncrasy and leaving Fincher’s assorted exercises in film technique as the main purpose. Like Benjamin, we can only sit back and watch the dollars being spent.

Fincher isn’t excited by the chronological cavalcade; each sequence becomes a technological set piece—on clock making, shipping, a caprice about fate that rummages De Palma’s Femme Fatale and a running gag about a man (not Benjamin) struck by lightning seven times—nodding to P.T. Anderson’s Magnolia. Apparently, Fincher is speaking in fanboy code while Roth’s insipid love story pacifies the rabble. Hard to imagine who’ll have the least fun.

Brad Pitt has none. With his head digitally placed on various bodies, Pitt displays less character than did Marlon Wayans’ CGI tour-de-force in Little Man—which hilariously said more about man’s stages of life. Benjamin’s a cipher. Watching him de-mature—or shrivel—into an embryo is a terrible movie idea. Pitt never ages into the sex god you expect; he devolves into an incurious, calf-eyed dweeb. The 20th century bores him. It’s just “process.”

Yet, because Pitt does consider himself a socially responsive film actor, he’s packed Benjamin Button with semi-topical references to Hurricane Katrina: It’s full of deprived Southern Negroes (especially Taraji P. Henson overdoing Benjamin’s Mammy). These superstitious but solicitous blacks don’t waken Benjamin’s awareness of Jim Crow; rather, they’re inconsequential—corny remnants of old Hollywood stereotypes.

It’s Cate Blanchett who gets star treatment. Horning in on Benjamin’s personal epic, unmagical Blanchett is the wrong actress to play an enchantress. Daisy, a quasi-Zelda Southern Belle, channels the worst Fitzgerald sentimentality. Vapid, imperious, hammy and off-putting, Daisy’s a ninny who name drops high-culture celebrities to justify her ballet-dancer aspirations. Shots of a ballet body double would be risible except Fincher keeps cutting back to Blanchett who’s heavy and graceless—a deadweight art-movie icon. Blanchett’s the perfect embodiment of Fincher’s pretenses. Benjamin Button’s real love story is between these apathetic aesthetes.

Their brazen self-involvement negates Brad Pitt into extinction. By the end, Fincher literalizes Kubrick’s iconic “starchild” as a zygote.

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The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
Directed by David Fincher, Running Time: 159 min.