A good movie. A very good movie. But not the 83rd best movie ever made.

Rating: 7/10 (26 January 2009)

I don't go to movies in the theatre very often anymore. I have a nice big-screen TV and DVD player and most of the time I watch movies like that.
So when I do go to the theatre I try to make sure it's a very good movie. The IMDb is a big part of that, I have found generally the IMDb median rating for a movie is a dependable indicator of whether I will like it or not.
So I pulled a list of movies playing at the local theatre and fed them into IMDb. Gran Torino and Benjamin Button both had very, very high ratings. Benjamin Button was slightly higher ... and it really needed to be, as I saw it was nearly three hours long. At the time it was something like the #78 highest rated movie of all time in IMDb.
I didn't even know very clearly what it was about, but to me it doesn't matter, either a movie is good or bad, whatever genre it's in.
So I chose Benjamin Button. I had very high expectations for it, I was really expecting to see a movie that deserved to be rated the 78th (currently 83rd) best movie ever made.
There is nothing I think is -bad- about it. The acting is all good, the story is engaging. The movie did draw me in emotionally at times.
But there was just nothing stunningly good about it. I can't think of a scene that struck me as being a GREAT scene, a scene that really moved me or amazed me or touched me.
Overall I thought the characters were good. Good, not great. The device of having him aging backwards worked, I thought, personally. I'm still not sure why, but there was something touching about watching him grow ever younger, especially as a part of the love affair which was the center of the movie. (And some of my favorite scenes were the ones in the beginning with Benjamin as a very young old man ... to me that was very humorous.) Watching the young/old Benjamin fall in love with the young Daisy was kind of wonderfully strange and touching. (Although, as another reviewer here pointed out, there was also something vaguely creepy about that, in a sort of vaguely pedophilic way.) To me it was all GOOD. Very good, quite possibly.
But I could never really call any of it GREAT. I mean if there is somebody reading this who, like me before I saw it, is trying to decide whether to see this movie or not, that's my conclusion. If you want to see a good movie, watch it. But if you really want to see a stunning, great movie, I don't think Benjamin Button is there.
I've said i don't think it's great, but I haven't really said much about why.
After I saw the movie I looked through other people's IMDb reviews and I found one which I thought hit the nail on the nail.
I don't think there is a way to link directly to an IMDb review but it was posted on 15 December 2008 and the title is "Fine-looking and well acted, but ultimately flat".
In a lot of ways I would like to just point at that review and say "I agree".
As that reviewer says, Benjamin himself is basically a very emotionally flat character. And he's utterly the heart of the movie, so as a result the movie is very unengaging. Because Benjamin has no evident emotions, one doesn't care about what happens to him.
Which is such a waste when you have Brad Pitt as an actor. I think it's a shame that Pitt has not, like Johnny Depp, insisted on roles that would give him a chance to show what he can do, because I just can't believe that somebody who could do what he did in Twelve Monkeys is not capable of genius work. But definitely, Pitt is great when he can stretch out and be wild. Exactly the opposite of Benjamin Button.
For what it's worth, I can understand a lot of why the character is the way it is. I mean I'm not going to sit here and say the film-maker is an idiot, I think I get what he was going for.
TCCOBB is, I think, intended to be a lot like Forrest Gump. Not so much a movie about the character as about the times in which he lived.
So I think Benjamin is so neutral because he's supposed to be a neutral, Forrest Gump-style observer. He's watching the times go by, and we are watching them through his eyes.
But the thing is, while I can see the logic of it, the fact remains that we wind up with an emotionally dead, unengaging movie.
But unlike FG, I don't think TCCOBB does all that great a job of making me feel like I am living through the times Benjamin is living through.
Most of the scenes feel, to me, like they could be transplanted to modern times without anything being lost.
One thing I will say in favor of the film on that point though, I loved their choices of period music. There was one moment in a restaurant during which a Stephane Grappeli/Django Reinhardt tune plays, set in the 30s I think, which I particularly liked. And the Beatles on TV.
But it did not do a great job of capturing a feeling of the times.
And in trying to do so, it sacrificed emotional engagement.
A good movie, but in my opinion, far from a great one.