Forrest Gump without a heart (or a brain)

Rating: 4/10 (3 January 2009)

This movie irked the he11 out of me. It annoys me further that this dirge of a movie is getting better ratings (and reviews) than Revolutionary Road.
Let's start at the beginning. There's this bit of tedious exposition clumsily explaining *why* Benjamin Buttons might experience life backwards. Then the narration herkily-jerkily jumps to the daughter who while reading a diary, is supposedly articulating Benjamin's accounts. The choppiness of this narrative was unoriginal and poorly executed. Like the time-jump cuts to and from Forrest at the bus stop, this movie time-jump cuts to and from a supposedly dying woman. Except that she only narrates the beginning. For the rest of the movie, she makes guttural noises to let us know she's holding out until the end of the movie to die.
Next, there's the problem with the movie's magic itself. I have no problem suspending my disbelief, but the rules of a magical world have to be honored--or at least make sense within that world. Benjamin is born a very old, gnarled, and ugly baby. Fair enough. But according to that logic, he should have ended his life as a very smooth, chubby, cooing and drooling adult--NOT as a baby again. If he was going to end up a baby, he should have been borne into the world as a full grown (albeit hunched-with-age) adult.
Next, there's the lack of believability in the connection between Benjamin and Daisy. No way for a second did I buy that those two should have or would have had a connection to each other when he was an old youngster and she was a young youngster. Mostly, this is because Brad Pitt's characterization of Buttons wasn't youthful enough mentally or emotionally. Did he need to go as full-blown regressive as Tom Hanks in Big? No. But he didn't go far enough to sell me on the idea that those two would have had any connection. And anyway, it smacked of the whole Forrest and Jenny relationship--but with none of the backbone.
After that, there's the repetitious use of the hummingbird as a symbol. Okay, it makes sense for us to see a hummingbird far, far out to sea, because it symbolized the spirit of the tugboat captain. It was the tugboat captain's avatar--not Benjamin's. Why then would we see a hummingbird at Benjamin's passing? Only because it wanted to employ the same tonal continuity thread as did the feather in Forrest Gump. Trite at best.
I was also left dissatisfied by the premature Benjamin's abandonment of his true love and their child. If he wanted to leave, fine--though wouldn't a person who'd experienced so much personal rejection and abandonment issues as a "child" not be more sensitive to this issue? Why tug cloyingly at our heartstrings one more time by bringing Benjamin back one more time when he's like 17 and his daughter's in her early teens? Surely he had six more sane years left in him to see his daughter through to adulthood. But no. It's more dramatic to have him leave and go on his Gumpian romp through foreign countries than to actually have his character make sensible choices.
Also, it was disappointing to see the National Guard's "Citizen/Soldier" ad campaign so brazenly product-placed in the movie. Not only was this ad campaign the sponsor of the pre-movie's trivia reels, but it also had a full-size placard out in the lobby. This kind of commercialism zaps every ounce of artistic integrity I *may* have been willing to believe the film makers possessed. Yes, Gump had lots of product placement--Nike, Apple, Dr. Pepper, etc--but at least it made sense in the context of the story. The National Guard piece was just synergistic window dressing.
The movie had a few genuine and genuinely heartfelt moments. But nowhere near as many required to sustain a ~3 hour movie. If you have to, wait for a time-compressed, edited-for-TV version.