Life goes on, it doesn’t stop and wait for anyone. People grow old and die, babies are born. Kids learn to walk , to talk to read and to write. We lose people we love but learn to love others. In the movie ‘The Curious Case of Benjamin Button’ director david fincher uses different techniques are used to illustrate the idea that life carries on.
The way he uses lighting and shadows add mood and feeling , the warms and colds give a tone to the movie .Sound and music is added to enhance emotion and to let the audience feel what the characters are feeling. The voice over narration puts us deeper into the mind of benjamin button and helps us to understand whats happening a bit more. All the techines the director has used help us an audience to feel for the characters , to be in their place, to understand what they are going though and how they are feeling.
Benjamin button is born as an old man and ages backwards. Rather than getting older he is getting younger but this does not stop having a full life and experiencing the things and young boy growing old would. Benjamin still reaches all the same milestones that we all do. He has his first love and his first heartbreak. A close friend is lost. He leaves home to work and he buys his first home. Life has stopped for him its continued and that’s the nature of life.
In the last scene of the movie benjamin is a young boy and getting younger. He is about 4 years old at the start of the scene and daisy is an old woman and has just moved into the retirement home where benjamin grew up looking after benjamin.
Throughout this scene slow classical piano song is playing. The tempo of the piano is slow and portrays sadness , it gives a feel of sorrow .As an audience it makes us feel sad for Benjamin and the fact that his life is ending soon. It might upset us because he didn’t get to grow old with someone he loved. Further into the scene montage of memories is shown. Flashback of all the people that benjamin had known and that meant the most to him. The music that is playing behind the montage, gives a feel of melancholy but at the same time somewhat celebrational. The music adds and enhances the emotion of the moment. Although the sad music makes us feel for benjamin we know he still got to life a full life and the celebrational tone shows this , it adds that sense of happiness. This shows that he has loved and been loved , that he has experienced the things any normal man would.
Along with music , sound is another strong factor that helps to enhance emotion. There is a storm raging on throughout the movie mainly in the hospital scene, it appears when a character is struggling with their identity. During the last scene, the storm is the worst , this is when caroline has just found out about her father and the puzzle pieces have just connected for her.
We know the storm is getting worse because we can hear it , the sound. We hear the rain getting louder and more heavy on the windows and the thunder and lightning becomes more prominent. With the use of sound you can make people feel the emotion of the characters. As the storm became louder and more intense, we as the audience could feel the confusion and difficulty that the characters are. The storm comes and goes and gets worse at times , with the use of sound it adds the extra emotine to enhance the fact that storms are a natural part of life and there isn’t anything we can do to stop them, this is similar to one of the underlying ideas of in The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. There are certain things in life that we can’t change that will just happen. Without the sound it would be harder for us to tell when its was getting worse , harder for us to tell when a character was struggling.
The whole movie is based on a dairy that benjamin has written. In the hospital caroline is reading the diary to her mum , Daisy. From her reading the diary it switches to what it would of been like though benjamins eyes. The use of voice over narration is very effective here. It gives us that deeper insight of benjamin’s life. It links the hospital scene and benjamins lives and helps the audience to understand that connection.
I think that the fact that it is caroline , benjamin and daisy daughter, reading the diary, again shows the idea that life goes on. The way we remember people is by memories and their stories and by caroline reading the dairy , is a way of remember him and who he was. It’s a way to keep him alive as life moves on.
All these techniques are used to enhance emotion , they connect the audience and help them to have a deeper understanding. They all are used to portray this idea of the nature of life and that life will just keep moving. Each technique is there for a reason and has a deeper meaning behind it. The sound gets louder when it needs to , the music will be soft or heavy when it needs to , shadows will be placed where they need to be, all to get an idea across to the audience.
And that’s just the nature of life. The cycle of life