Pure Kitsch

Rating: Null/10 (24 November 2009)

This is a terrible film, almost unwatchable with its greeting card dialogue, its Hallmark cinematography, its goofy moralising, its nauseating music. But what's worse about the film is this: it pretends to be about a man who is constantly "out of sync" with the world (he ages in reverse) and who learns that love can transcend both time and the gradual deterioration of the human body, but in reality it does the complete opposite.
A film like this should show us how the mind and heart can defy the limitations of the flesh, but instead it shows us human being who are defined entirely by their bodies. Observe how the film never celebrates the fact that Brad Pitt, now in a youthful body, possess the wisdom of a seventy year old man. Instead of finding value in knowledge, the film focuses on the dissonance between Pitt's beauty and the wrinkles of his lover's forehead. This is a film which celebrates youth and outer appearances, which mourns the losses of the flesh, the deterioration of Botox injected skin, the greying of hair, the ugliness of old age, the passage of time, and instead celebrates healthy bones, good knees and the sexy face of Brad Pitt. Pitt's youth is what we're instructed to long for, not Benjamin Button's wisdom.
The body is just the vehicle for the far more valuable thoughts and feelings it contains, but this film is more interested in pandering to the usual Hollywood fantasies.
4/10 - If Tom Hanks from "Forrest Gump" met Will Smith from "The Legend of Bagger Vance" and used the horse from "Seabiscuit" as a surrogate womb to carry their artificially inseminated baby, then that baby would be Benjamin Button. Which is not to say that all four films are nauseating examples of kitsch, egotistical vehicles for their stars to take part in hokey modern fables, no, quite the opposite, for Benjamin Button is literally the lovechild of a retard, a black man and an overachieving horse.
Worth no viewings