Forrest chump

David Fincher’s aging-in-reverse story
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button is
an overblown romantic epic

FLIMSY PHILOSOPHY: Brad Pitt (right)

by MATTHEW HAYS

Being one of those strange people who thinks that Brad Pitt can actually act, I was intrigued to attend the avant-premiere of The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. The high concept (apparently lifted from an F. Scott Fitzgerald story) has Button born an aged baby, then reverse-aging for the rest of his life. Weird, but weird with potential.

Not quite so, as it turns out. Here, director David Fincher misses. The Curious Case of Benjamin Button is strange, listless, moving along at an oft-deadening pace, a film that really only needed to be about two hours, if that. At 160 minutes, that makes this movie way too long. By final credit roll, I felt robbed of my time, rather than rewarded by the story.

And it’s too bad, because there are a few touching things that play out. In particular, Pitt meets the love of his life when he’s a wee old man and she’s a young girl. That lass should blossom into Cate Blanchett, who, as usual, turns in an amazing performance. That she gets older as he is getting younger haunts her; how will their great romance last as she turns into a senior and he begins struggling with acne? (It’s a bit of a bizarre irony; were the gender roles reversed, Hollywood’s male population would find this ideal, rather than a quandary.)

The wistful, if-only-things-were-different romance stuff starts to grate, especially when that’s the film’s main crux. And while there are superficial similarities to Forrest Gump—innocent freak of nature sees the world in a way that none of us can, but should—there are other parallels that run deeper and more irritating. There’s even a life-is-like-a-box-of-chocolates-type line here, in which some old bat waxes philosophic about the bucket of crap many of us are handed and just have to deal with. Who green-lit this screenplay?

There’s not a whole lot of revelation here about aging, except of course that it’s nothing any of us particularly want to do, and that it might be kinda weird to fall in love with someone who was doing it in reverse. A curiously empty movie experience.