Best Picture? No....best crowd-pleaser...maybe...in a pinch....

Rating: 7/10 (22 February 2009)

This is a genial, very well made movie with lots of charm and vitality..but very little in the way of genuine depth or substance.
Despite the overpraised "Local Color" (The unfairly underrated "Darjeeling Limited" captures the heat, atmosphere, beauty, and savagery of India much, much better) this has a rather musty air narratively speaking...perhaps because the plot is actually a rather palid melding of several Victorian era plots that weren't entirely fresh when Dickens used them..
If you have seen any version of "Oliver Twist", "David Copperfield", or even more obviously "Great Expectations"...you have seen this plot...and no amount of narrative non linear construction is going to disguise that fact...(and no amount of game show flash can make it look any more "Modern")...
The early scenes involving non-professional child actors have some genuine grit and life to them...
The actors who take over the characters as young adults have a much more difficult time registering with the same conviction...(despite their undeniable good looks and charm)...mainly because the "win the money...find the girl" plot drifts so dangerously close to cheap, shrill soap opera...
Anyway..."The Curious Case Of Benjamin Button" has more imagination and magic in any one of it's wondrous scenes than this movie has in it;'s entire two hours.