A Life Course With A Twist.

Rating: 6/10 (24 June 2017)

A sweet sentimental tale of a man, Brad Pitt as Benjamin Button, who is born in 1918 New Orleans as a diminutive and withered old man and dies in the 1970s as an infant suffering from dementia. Actually, Benjamin Button is not only Brad Pitt, but is played by Peter Badalamenti at the age of around ten, and by Robert Towers as a slightly older teen-aged Benjamin Button. The casting is marvelous. So is the makeup. It took me some time to realize that the ghostly pale, withered figure, the ancient lady wheezing out a few hoarse words and dying in the hospital bed, was Cate Blanchett.
It's hard to resist the story. Benjamin Button is an appealing character, soft spoken, honest, and polite. He speaks little and acts mostly as an observer of everyday life in New Orleans, with occasional visits to Murmansk, New York, Paris, and other far-away-place with strange sounding names. It's a very Southern movie in many respects, slow, like Button himself, contrasting the quiet, colorful characters of New Orleans with the rambunctious snobbery of the New York ballet set, the sterility of Paris's hospital room, and the danger and bloodshed of Russia. But, insallah, we do not see a Mardi Gras in New Orleans, just the patient, gracious sound of a ragtime piece played on the appropriately named piano. We only hear a few notes of the ragtime and they're played simply and slowly, like the film itself. The overscore traces the plot with fairy tale harps and celeste.
The performances are pretty good all around. Cate Blanchett, of course, is unforgettable -- a fine actress with the most memorable nose in today's movies. Brad Pitt, I didn't care for earlier in his career, another hunk for teens to swoon over, showing his behind as well as the rest of his jacked up body in "Troy." But I've come to appreciate his range after comparing his recedent personality here with his maniacal psychopath in "Kalifornia." Julia Ormond doesn't have much to do as the daughter of Pitt and Blanchett.
It's an engaging movie -- I couldn't get away from it -- and the photography and lighting are exceptionally good but I had a problem with the plot. It's a tear jerker. The thing is laid out like an obstacle course. Brief moments of happiness, fame, success are inevitably followed by tragedy. Benjamin Button is a little like Hercule Poirot. When he's around, somebody is going to die, except that, to ratchet up the sentiment quotient, the person who dies must be someone that Button loves or has learned to respect. One by one, his family and friends disappear, usually because of some unnamed disease, as Ali McGraw did in "Love Story." Pitt is given lines that reflect his keen insight, such as, "You can curse the fates; you can go round the moon; but when the end comes you have to let go." The centerpiece of the tale is the relationship between Blanchett, who ages from a ten-year-old girl to a dying old woman, and Pitt, who ages from a sepulchral old man to a dying little baby. That particularly relationship is nicely structured. Blanchett and Pitt have their happiest moments in mid life when they are both the same age. It dampens the manipulative effect of all those unending tragedies.