Who’d have thought that David Fincher would end up making movies like Robert Zemeckis? And in what kind of twisted, crowded-race awards season does Brad Pitt cop nominations while Cate Blanchett gets bypassed for a much more difficult role?

Such is the unpredictability of the entertainment world; and one of the points that The Curious Case of Benjamin Button makes is that we can never quite be sure what surprises that fate may throw us.  I was just kind of hoping that the movie itself would be more surprising than the awards.

It’s no spoiler at all to tell you that Benjamin Button has the rare fate of being born an old man, and then aging in reverse; that is, as an infant he is the usual size—he just has all the ailments of a ninety-year-old, and looks the part, too.  As he ages, he matures like the rest of us, growing wiser, more articulate, and bigger—he just gets younger along the way.

An abhorrently ugly baby, he is abandoned by his father following his mother’s death at childbirth.  Raised by a housemaid at a rundown New Orleans retirement boarding house, Benjamin grows up around an eccentric cast of characters, is eventually (and anonymously) befriended as a benefactor of sorts by his button-manufacturer father… and, while still an old child, meets Daisy.  She’s the granddaughter of one of the home’s retirees, and she turns out to be the love of Benjamin’s life.

The framework for the tale has an aged Daisy dying in a hospital as a hurricane bears down on New Orleans.  Her daughter Caroline has come to be with her, and reads aloud from Benjamin’s diary to pass the time.  It’s a formula that has worked pretty well for films like Little Big Man and Amadeus—even in The Stone Angel and The Notebook—but not so well in films like Fried Green Tomatoes and Evening.  In the wake of The Notebook and Evening, in fact, the structure seems rather tired; and when Daisy and Benjamin fail to generate any real heat as a couple, the story falters.  It’s just too cutesy to be taken very seriously, and its similarities to Forrest Gump even manage to make Gump look more rickety than it did a decade ago.

The film deservedly won a passel of awards for technical merit.  With loads of CGI to manage Brad Pitt’s metamorphosis from aged baby to infantile old man, another bale of prosthetics for Cate Blanchett’s decades-spanning turn as Daisy, and a production design that has to cover the closing days of World War I through to Katrina-era New Orleans, the technical challenges of the film for Fincher and company were enormous… and enormously well met. 

The DVD release of the film as part of the Criterion Collection really does justice to the film on that level, with the usual stunning package and an outstanding second disc of bonus featurettes and interviews.  Fans of the film will die to get their hands on the DVD.

But I never bought into the chemistry between Blanchett and Pitt—pretty important for a romance—and the tone of the whole thing was a little too whimsical for an epic romance.  So the litany of bon mots and aphorisms that constitutes the film’s life lessons never accumulate any weight, and certain set pieces—such as an improbable encounter between a tug boat and a Japanese sub, or the chain of circumstances that cuts short Daisy’s dancing career—come off as gratuitous, showy, and dispensibly disconnected from the story itself.

But Blanchett, who has never been one of my favorites, really does rise to the occasion though saddled with a sketchily-written and rather slight role—as does Taraji P. Henson as Benjamin’s adopted mom, in a performance that did win several awards.  Pitt deserves an award for patience, however, not acting.  As an outsider always looking in to others’ lives, he really isn’t given an awful lot to do by Fincher.

The film’s ultimate point—that Fate or Providence sometimes deals us raw hands, but we still have choices about how we respond to factors over which we have no control—is certainly worth noting… but it could have been made just as well with about an hour less running time. 

By the time the film wound its gimmick to its inconsistent conclusion—why doesn’t Benjamin wind up an alert, full-sized old man with the visage of an infant?—I was no longer curious at all, merely impatient.

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button is rated PG-13 for “brief war violence, sexual content, language and smoking.”  I think the rating is a little strong.  There’s nothing here that I didn’t see watching soaps with my mom when I was five.  Okay, so there are just a couple of ripe profanities; but is smoking that big a deal for ratings?

Courtesy of a national publicist, Greg screened a promotional DVD of The Curious Case of Benjamin Button.