An overblown ode to indulgence

Rating: 5/10 (8 January 2009)

If ever Paramount wanted an alternate title for the lengthy The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, they might want to think about Try Hard. Director David Fincher (Zodiac) and screenwriter Eric Roth (Forrest Gump) pull out all the stops in their quest to create a profound movie masterwork, so much so that I'm surprised the movie didn't come with an advertising budget to festoon theater lobbies with neon signs saying "this way to greatness". It's the cinematic equivalent of the keener kid in class who's always got his hand up trying to win the teacher's attention, or the publicity hound seen jumping up and down in the background of news clips to get noticed.
Loosely based on F. Scott Fitzgerald's 1921 short story, Button tells the tale of a child born prematurely old who ages in reverse. The story is designed to show the capriciousness of life, and pounds home the point that we each must seize the day and make the most of each moment, lest we find ourselves looking back on what could have been and wishing we'd done things differently. The problem is, this theme is established fairly early on and keeps being hammered away at the audience for close to three hours.
Fincher practically throws the entire cinematic art school cliché canon up on the screen, repeatedly using nature's elements such as looming thunderstorms and hurricanes to foreshadow troubled narrative stanzas, and resplendent sunrises and downy snowfalls as backdrops for other life changing sequences. It works, and is refreshingly pleasant up to a point, given how Fincher is at least making an effort to layer into the story an artistic quality not often seen in Hollywood pictures, but when the same well is tapped multiple times over three hours it becomes akin to silver-screen pablum, and left me feeling as if I was being spoon-fed by filmmakers who thought they were smarter than the audience by half.
Roth's screenplay follows a structure similar to Forrest Gump, with Button's life broken down into stages, each recounting his life as recorded in his diary. Like Gump, the story introduces a collection of diverse offbeat characters, each of them an archetype ranging from a seductive lonely wife (Tilda Swinton) to a wise and brash grizzled sea captain (Jared Harris), who school Button in various aspects of life. It's in these diverse segments that the movie manages to entertain the viewer and hold interest. One passage, in which Button recounts how one small event, similar to the butterfly effect, radically impacted the life of his great love Daisy (Cate Blanchette), is a sequence of genuinely inspired storytelling. Unfortunately much of what else is offered either goes on far too long, or could have been expedited or excised entirely, thus tightening a story that appears over-indulgent and full of its own self importance.
There's a reason why Fitzgerald chose the short story format to tell his tale. If only Fincher and Roth had followed his lead the end result might have been better.
Oh to look back upon what might have been.