doesn't quite rise to the level of its ambitions

Rating: 7/10 (21 January 2009)

Just as its title character reverses the process of aging - beginning as a wrinkled old man and ending as a smooth-faced infant - so too does "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button" reverse the quality arc we've come to expect from many of our movies - that of starting off strongly in the developmental stages then coming a cropper in the dreaded "third act." Instead, "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button" falters through much of its early and middle stretches, then achieves something akin to greatness towards the end.
The main problem with "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button" - which has been loosely adapted from an F. Scott Fitzgerald short story by scenarists Eric Roth and director David Fincher - is that it's trying so hard to be great that it frequently forgets to be good. To begin with, the movie frames its tale within what is possibly the hoariest storytelling cliché of them all: the dreaded deathbed confession. The dying person, in this case, is an elderly woman named Daisy, whose secret love of her life was the aforementioned Benjamin Button. As she lies in her hospital bed barely clinging to life - while Hurricane Katrina, of all things, batters away outside - Daisy has her understandably disconcerted daughter (Julia Ormond) read the journal detailing the couple's ill-fated romance. The story proper begins in 1918 New Orleans with the birth of Benjamin, a child with all the physical attributes of a dying old man. Abandoned by his father (his mother having died giving birth to him), Benjamin is taken in and raised by a compassionate black woman who lives and works at an old folk's home. As time passes, the strange child, rather than dying as predicted, slowly becomes younger and healthier, till finally he is strong enough and mature enough to venture out on his own to explore the world and make a life for himself. This includes a couple of key romances, the main one being with Daisy, a young girl he initially meets when he is still a boy trapped in an old man's body, and a stint working on a tugboat which lands him unexpectedly smack dab in the middle of World War II. To relate anymore of the story would be to do an injustice to both the movie and anyone interested in experiencing it for himself.
The most serious weakness of the film lies in the assumption on the part of its makers that just because something interesting is happening TO the character of Benjamin Button that there must be something interesting ABOUT him. On the contrary, Benjamin remains such a bland and passive person throughout the course of the story that we really don't learn very much about him - this, despite the fact that Benjamin has been called upon to narrate the tale in his own words. Unfortunately, the narration has such a you-are-there, Confucius-say banality to it that Benjamin comes perilously close to slipping into Forrest Gump territory much of the time. Much more detrimental is the fact that Benjamin really doesn't act or speak all that differently when he is a man/child from when he is an older "young" man. We see him changing physically, but not nearly enough psychologically, rendering the premise, finally, more of a gimmick than a gateway into enlightenment. Moreover, the film suffers from a built-in episodic structure that weakens the drama and vitiates the tension.
All that being said, there is still much that is good about "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button" and that makes it worth seeing, starting with the originality and cleverness of the premise itself. In addition, there are fine performances by Brad Pitt, Cate Blanchett, Tilda Swinton and, most notably, Faune A. Chambers, as the woman who raises Benjamin to believe that he is really no different from the rest of us whose biological clocks just happen to be moving forward rather than backward. Needless to say, the CGI effects and aging makeup are expert throughout, and when it finally settles down and focuses on the romantic relationship between Benjamin and Daisy, the movie becomes a thoughtful and tremendously moving meditation on aging, the inexorable passage of time, and the importance of living our lives in - and for - the present. In fact, so effective is the final third of the movie that, for all intents and purposes, it makes us forget the restlessness we may have experienced at other points in the story and leaves us feeling notably elated at the end. It is here where the movie finally begins to achieve that greatness it's worked so hard and taken us so long to get to. But achieve it it does - and that is accomplishment enough these days when you get right down to it.