no Forrest Gump

Rating: 7/10 (3 January 2009)

This is an ambitious movie, and it will enjoy I believe success especially with the American audiences and with the academy members grabbing a number of Oscars (but I hope not the one for the best film deserved I think by 'Sinedoche, New York'). It is Oscar stuff with a story located in America (New Orleans filmed at its best) spreading over decades, with greater than life characters. Or I should say greater than time in this case.
The ambitions exceed even the usual American saga story. The script written by Eric Roth, script-writer of 'Forrest Gump' and loosely inspired by a short story by Scott Fitzgerald tries to tell deeper things about the relativity of the passing of time, the inevitability of death even if time runs for the main hero from old age to childhood, about the power of love to transcend time. Yet the ideas as interesting as they are do not all find a cinematographic equivalent on screen, the result being a film with many memorable parts but also with failed ones.
I did like the story telling in the first part of the movie, the many simple stories and moving characters coming together, but I had the feeling that there were too few new elements or surprises in the second part to justify the almost three hours film length. I loved the setting of the city of New Orleans, which filmed across many decades provides a fabulous landscape of color and passion, sounds and mist where all legends are possible. I liked the acting of Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett, each of them would deserve an Oscar, but overall they did not come together perfectly in a story that needs intense emotion and perfect chemistry in order to overcome credibility problems. Most of all however the feeling on mission incomplete derives from the fact that not all the ambitious philosophical messages found a cinema equivalent on screen.
At the end this film does not stand the comparison with Forrest Gump, the other story of a different type of hero located in the Southern hemisphere of the American universe. The reason is maybe the fact that while Tom Hank's Forrest Gump carried the innocence of permanently rediscovering the purity of the world through the eyes of his character, Benjamin Button's recession into young age and childhood lacks such innocence and keeps a taint of sickness and uneasiness failing despite Pitt's magnificent acting to take us viewers with him into his universe.