David Fincher is no Ingmar Bergman

Rating: Null/10 (5 January 2009)

A film with the protagonist aging backwards is going to be about what?... Can you guess?... Life, of course. The life of a man with a rare disease of being born old, first, and he grows down, instead of up, so to speak. The man is Benjamin Button, played by different actors, but particularly Brad Pitt, who also narrates the story.
Benjamin is born the day World War I ends, with people celebrating in the streets. His mother dies in childbirth, and his father, frightened by the baby's bizarre wrinkles, abandons him by leaving him on the stairway of an old folks home. (What a coincidence.) From there, he's taken into care by a young Black woman, who works as a servant.
Over the years, Benjamin does, indeed, grow down. He learns about love, death, friendship, and, oh yeah, life... or at least this is what Brad Pitt's narration goes on and on about. Even though Benjamin is an ordinary man, the narration makes his life (there's that word, again) appear to be grandiose. Why? If there's going to be narration in a story like this, can't it at least be subtle? Actually, the reason there's narration is because it's being read from a book Benjamin wrote. Read by a young woman in a hospital, with her dying mother, who was Benjamin's lover. (No surprise, there.)
The acting is not the problem. Everyone here gives good performances, but it doesn't save the film, except for the first hour, which I *did* like. Also, the film is not predictable, but there are definitely no surprises along the way. OK, the scene about chaos theory with the taxi is clever, but that's it. After the hour mark, the story just feels like blah, blah, blah. So what if Benjamin's an ordinary man, except for his aging disorder? To be fair, it's good that he *is* this ordinary person, because making him as some kind of superhero would've probably been way too hamfisted.
I mentioned Ingmar Bergman in the summary. He was a famous Swedish director, who passed away a couple of years ago. I've only seen two of his films, ("The Seventh Seal" and his epic "Fanny and Alexander") but they work much better than this film, in my opinion, as they deal with similar themes. Well, at least "Fanny and Alexander" does.
Maybe this film would've worked better without Brad's narration. Again, it became too much for me. The length of this film is another problem. Since it's almost three hours long, and Benjamin's life is only so interesting, why not cut the film down by, say, an hour and a half? How much harm would it do? I like David Fincher's films, but this one, frankly, feels like pap.