Don't believe the hype.

Rating: 5/10 (31 December 2008)

Don't be fooled. Many critics have gone on record calling David Fincher's "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button" the year's best film. It's attracting tons of Oscar buzz as this review is being written. I walked into Fincher's film with high expectations, but I was let down. NOTHING about this movie screams "Best Picture". With a recycled screenplay, too many misfired metaphors and a generally gimmicky, confused premise, no amount of brilliant acting or technology can save Ben Button.
The premise is clever. Primarily based on a short story by F. Scott Fitzgerald, the film chronicles the life of Benjamin Button, played by Brad Pitt, who's mother dies during child birth, and who's father abandons him on the doorsteps of an old-folks home when he is born with the appearance of an elderly man. The home, run by a black maid named Queenie, takes him in as a son, and people begin to see that he is in fact aging backwards, from old to young. Its a premise that, in the right hands, could have been expanded brilliantly to reveal poetic ideas life and death, but, starting with the screenplay, a series of mistakes cause the film to sink.
People need to accept that Benjamin Button and Forrest Gump, both written by the talented Eric Roth, are fundamentally the same movie. There must be at lease 30 similarities. Both men are southern gentlemen, both have a miracle moment walking for the first time, both spend time on a boat, both spend time fighting a war. Additionally, both films involve a female love interest who ventures out of her home for several years to pursue a dream, while on a rocky road to find herself. These 2 movies are identical, and the film's biggest defenders will have a hard time arguing against that fact.
But I'll ignore those similarities for minute, because I should assess this movie as its own work. And when looked at that way, I'll say the first word that comes to mind is preachy. Every 7 minutes, Benjamin, narrating the film, gives us a brand new metaphor about life and how its just so "un-predictable". There's also some completely pathetic visual poetry with a hummingbird, whose significance in the film's message I'm still unsure of.
But you wanna know what's funny? For all its preaching about unpredictable events, Benjamin button lives a pretty normal life. He works on a boat, he serves in the navy in WWII, he co-owns a dance studio with his romantic interest Daisy, played by Cate Blanchett, and then he operates a toll booth. That sounds pretty average to me, and I found personally that Benjamin Button is, himself, more of a bizarre science-fiction character than a human being we could all relate to. The fact that he spends his whole life seeing his friends die off is interesting, but it seems repetitive and gimmicky by the middle of the movie.
I must concede though, this film has its strengths. Technologically, the make-up and height adjustments made to Brad Pitt are astonishing, and the way that he looks like an old man getting younger and younger progressively is extraordinary. Additionally, the performances, including Pitt and Blanchett, but also Tilda Swinton as a spy's wife staying in the same motel Benjamin is, were good, although I noticed Cate Blanchett struggled horribly with a Cajun accent.
I just don't get it. In a year filled with multiple competitive Oscar contenders, like The Dark Knight, Frost/Nixon, Milk, Slumdog Millionaire and Changeling, it is astonishing to me that this is the stand-out for Best Picture. Surely, Benjamin Button's technology is worthy of awards buzz. But little else is.
I feel like this picture thinks itself to be better than it actually is. Why else would the structure of the story by so explicit, the production so high quality, the acting, as a whole, so good? I don't know, and come Oscar time we will see if any members of the Academy saw what I saw in "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button." I hope they do.