The Curious Case of Benjamin Button

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button is certainly curious — a modest F. Scott Fitzgerald story, about a man born in the twilight of life who is gradually regressing toward dawn. Directed by David Fincher from a screenplay by Eric Roth, Benjamin Button announces its epic intentions right from the start. An orchestra tunes up on the soundtrack; two studio logos appear, redesigned as button mosaics; and the movie fades in on an aged woman (Cate Blanchett) dying in a hospital bed before you can say, “And the winner is ….” Unsurprisingly, the dying woman, who is called Daisy, asks her daughter (Julia Ormond) to read to her from a diary — the contents of which, even less surprisingly, play out as decades-spanning flashbacks.

So we return to New Orleans, circa 1918, where merriment attending the end of World War I is interrupted by the arrival of a baby boy (played, in a manner of speaking, by Brad Pitt), who emerges from the womb looking like a midget Methuselah. His mother dies during his birth. His father, terrified by the sight of this strange infant, swiftly deposits him on the doorstep of an old folks’ home. There, the childless, gold-hearted, black proprietress (Taraji P. Henson) christens the boy “Benjamin” and opts to raise him as her own.

We’re already a long way from Fitzgerald, whose Benjamin Button came into the world not only with the appearance of an old man but also with the fully developed body, wizened mind and ornery temperament of one. But it’s clear from the start that Roth and Fincher have different aims. Closer in spirit to the Roth-scripted Forrest Gump, Benjamin Button is to the first half of the 20th century what Gump was to the second — a panorama of the American experience as seen from the perspective of a wide-eyed Candide.

Here as there, Roth reduces our complex times to a parade of shockingly straight-faced kitsch. A hellfire-and-brimstone tent revivalist imbues Benjamin with the holy spirit; a pygmy lothario serves as his introduction to the outside world; and a drunken, Irish tugboat captain shows him how to be a man. But where Gump actively trivialized history, Benjamin Button effectively ignores it. Although Benjamin briefly exchanges fire with a German submarine during World War II, and Hurricane Katrina makes a cameo toward the end, this movie about a white baby raised by a black adoptive mother during the inglorious years of the Jim Crow South never once addresses race.

The strived-for atmosphere is whimsical and picaresque, and the results — save for Benjamin’s brief dalliance with the coolly amused wife (Tilda Swinton) of a British spy in Murmansk — are mostly tedious. Very little about the first half of the film invites us in or gives inner life to the characters, leaving only the admittedly fascinating spectacle of seeing Pitt’s computer-aged face digitally grafted onto the several pint-sized performers who help embody Benjamin over the first two decades of his existence. From a technological standpoint, this is rivaled only by the later “reverse aging” effects that convincingly restore Pitt to his Thelma & Louise–era visage, which should, if nothing else, establish Benjamin Button as a cult film with the Botox crowd.

The movie finally gives off a spark or two at exactly midpoint, when Benjamin is reunited with ballet-dancer Daisy (Blanchett), whom he loved from afar as a boy but can now see socially without causing a scandal. The trajectory is obvious, and Pitt and Blanchett surrender themselves to it with reasonable conviction: She’s getting older while he’s getting younger. Eventually, they’ll meet in the middle somewhere, but that too cannot last. “Will you still love me when I have acne, when I wet the bed, when I’m afraid of what’s under the stairs?” he asks her. It speaks to the treacly nature of the entire film: Most of the scenario’s potential unpleasantries are carefully elided. Unlike Fitzgerald’s Button, whose adolescence and eventual infancy bring with them a series of public and private humiliations, Roth and Fincher’s Button is attended to by the ever-loyal Daisy and the oppressively emotive stirrings of composer Alexandre Desplat’s score. No bed-wetting is ever shown.

Considering that producers Kathleen Kennedy and Frank Marshall are longtime Steven Spielberg associates, perhaps it’s no wonder that one of Benjamin Button‘s closest cinematic precursors is “Kick the Can,” the Spielberg-directed segment of 1983’s Twilight Zone: The Movie, in which the denizens of a retirement home briefly revert to their childhood selves, only to realize that, no matter what age you are, into every life some heartache must fall. There, the folk wisdom took a mere 30 minutes to dispense; here, it takes the better part of three hours, which is odd for a movie so concerned with the preciousness of time. Mamma always said life is like a ticking clock — you never know when it’s gonna stop. You dig?

It was just last year that Fincher delivered a great film, also three hours, on the subject of time. In Zodiac the passing years wrap around the characters like a vise, catching them up obsessively in a single, distended moment; in Benjamin Button, the ravages of time are trumped by a kind of eternal, undying love that mere physics is at a loss to contain. And Fincher scarcely seems able to buy into Roth’s brand of Harlequin-romance hokum. In order for Benjamin Button to succeed on its own terms, there shouldn’t be a dry eye left in the house. Yet, when the lights came up, mine were like sandpaper.

Mostly, the film is an orgy of excess. Fincher indulges his passion for luxuriant image-making with little regard for whether the story merits (or can withstand) such grandiose treatment. “All I have is my story,” Benjamin tells us in voice-over early on in the film. The true worth of any story, though, lies in the telling, and some stories aren’t worth telling in the first place. Life, after all, is too short.