Beautiful, but too much for something so simple

Rating: 7/10 (23 January 2009)

The Curious Case Of Benjamin Button is curious, but not the best interesting thing that you could be expecting.
First of all, it's curious the fact that David Fincher is the director, because he's the wizard of kick asses like Seven, Fight Club and The Panic Room, so you could never imagine that someday he would just jump into something that is too much Chris Columbus, Robert Zemeckis or even Tim Burton for him. But that's OK. Maybe he's just trying to dive into something a little different to express his eclectic taste or also his versatility as a director.
For someone that built an entire career as an outstanding director of amazing thrillers and was responsible for some kind of revolution into the genre, Benjamin Button seems a little vain in his hands. This kind of story holds dense feelings that David Fincher is not able to express intensely, failing at times that other directors like Columbus or Zemeckis would probably care a lot more than he did.
Getting 13 nominations for the Oscars doesn't mean anything because this is the movie that Academy's waiting for so long since Titanic because it's romantic and perhaps intense over an uncommon story, and everybody loves it. So, this is the kind of thing that Academy will always receive and announce with open arms even if it ends up with none of the statues.
The story is simple and everyone already thought about dying young once in a life, but it happens so slowly and suddenly it ends so fast as an attempt to make you feel together with the character his perception of time passing by with the ages, so there are times that you just want to skip all the intense narrative and jump right to the point that everyone's expecting since the beginning: how will it ends? That line connecting fantasy to reality riding you naturally thru the movie like happens in Forrest Gump fails a lot even Fincher trying hard for it sometimes.
For sure it's a beautiful movie that makes you think about all the meanings of life for hours, but it's a long-long movie that sometimes seems going to no where. The best parts of it are when Pitt's character is not alone because Benjamin Button is a curious character but he's not interesting enough to hold entire movie up on his back. Brad Pitt is a lot different from everything he did and he's a lot convincing as an old child during the first half of the movie, but that's it, because he backs to his comfort zone after it. Cate Blanchett has a very supporting role in a story that's about Benjamin but surrounds her all the time, anyway... any comments about her are dismissed because, you know, she is Cate Blanchett! The make up is outstanding most of the times, but it's kinda bizarre that they had so much care about Pitt's character that the same cannot be said about Blanchett's.
Don't get me wrong, I liked the movie, I just think that there are too much in it than is needed and most of its success are for the important names in it than for the story itself as it's told. Maybe if things were a little different like being produced, written, directed and performed by different people the results could be a lot better but it also would never get 13 Oscars nominations and probably would never be a massive success.