Technically brilliant slow crawl to nowhere

Rating: 4/10 (28 January 2009)

OK first things first, there is no doubting the skill of David Fincher in creating what is a visually stunning spectacle; the acting is top notch, especially Brad Pitt, but the movie is sooo long and based on a premise that is innately ridiculous. Are we really expected to feel anything other than revulsion when old man Button falls in love with 12 year old Daisy? It's just not right. Thankfully we are spared any sexual congress until our romantic heroes meet half way through their respective lives and get down and dirty without the audience needing to reach for the sick bag.
The movie is scripted by Forest Gump scribe Eric Roth and the similarities are clear, long journey through life learning valuable lessons along the way from an assortment of eccentric characters and situations yadayadayada. But whereas Gump was filled with a poignant entourage of fabulous characters and thrilling set pieces, Button crawls along through a turgid treacle thick layer of cloying and banal over-sentimentality that alienates rather than captivates the viewer.
A raft of wonderful acting talent is wasted on characters with which it is very difficult to empathise. Tilda Swinton plays a pointless and irritating rich English woman who conducts a brief affair with Benjamin. Yet she is so shallow and egocentric it is difficult to grasp exactly what life affirming pearl of wisdom Benjamin and the audience are supposed to take from the episode.
There are also several plot points that beggar belief. Are we really supposed to believe Daisy waited 40 years before asking her daughter to read Benjamin's diary to her as she lay on her death bed? Why is the Benjamin character allowed to drift into semi-vagrancy by those who love him as he gets older and more childlike? Wouldn't the social services who found him and read the diary believing him to be a child, find it worthy of investigation that he reports having sex with a 40 year old woman, least of all leave him in her care? I accept that as a fantasy, some level of belief suspension is necessary but as a plot conceit it just fails, it is just too much like hard work excusing the story's ridiculousness and as such the film fails. I am reminded of Tim Burton's far superior Big Fish. A film that took outlandish fantasy elements and a story retold from the death bed, but still managed to weave them into a touching, believable and ultimately satisfying fable. Over long, over earnest and over hyped, and will probably over achieve at the Oscars at the expense of the worthier Slumdog Millionaire.