"You never know..."

Rating: 7/10 (11 March 2009)

It's an interesting premise for any movie -and the only thing you need to know about this one-, aging backwards, that's for sure. But is it enough? At times, David Fincher's latest movie seems honest and brings out laughs and even smiles from the viewer; but most of the experience lacks those qualities, and the tale grows colder as Brad Pitt becomes younger. Taking it from its tagline ("life isn't measured in minutes, but in moments"), it's not life that's measured in moments but the film itself. If you measured it in minutes it would be endless.
With this contradiction mentioned, there's no doubt that "Benjamin Button" is Fincher's most ambitious work to date and, as it happened with Boyle's recent Oscar winner, the only one that could have ever been truly noticed by the Academy. The good news is that it still has some of the characteristics of the director's cinema, in a world that is, for the first time, not populated by obsessive bad people and full of blood.
Fincher's attention to detail is seen completely, as he puts his hands in all the elements he can possibly handle, and getting some things wrong because of that. Narration, always a great resource, is performed here by Caroline (Julia Ormond), a character the movie doesn't care much about. She reads a diary to her mother Daisy, an old woman who used to look like Cate Blanchett and with whom Benjamin Button -author of the diary in question- fell instantly in love.
Images are beautiful and breathtaking all the way through, but Fincher never seems to let them breathe, and in moments of quietness he accompanies them with music -which is fine, because Alexandre Desplat's score is terrific- and with Brad Pitt's narration -which is wrong, because we don't need someone to tell us the exact thing we are watching on screen-. The way in which Pitt narrates (attempting an affectionate tone but sometimes sounding neutral) serves the viewer as a great guide for the best "Benjamin Button" has to offer: an infinite gallery of wonderful characters and performances that illuminate the screen, starting from Pitt himself.
The actor doesn't raise his voice for one minute. His work is not good because of what he says; it's basically built on the opposite, and his good looks help a lot. In another contradiction, his performance is a careful study of looks and gestures, in the line of 'outsiders' like Johnny Depp's Edward Scissorhands. But on the other hand, this is a role he can play with his eyes closed; like George Clooney's Michael Clayton, he just has to stand there. However, with all of this, he and the movie are not able to establish a connection with the audience.
The film's technical work and his team of makeup artists do everything they can to make Pitt seem ten years younger, and they achieve it as the same time they make everyone else seem more than twenty years older. But it's all on the outside, it seems fake and it's out of our reach even when we want to grab it. As Benjamin keeps coming back home (as "Forrest Gump" did many times, from war and from being all around the world: yes, the script by Eric Roth is too similar to not be noticed; but we can't blame his temptation if that script got him an Oscar and if he's among the best screenwriters alive), time takes away his beloved ones, little by little, and everyone at a big house receives him as a man they've never seen before.
Even when he is wiser with time and comes into terms with his unusual situation, Benjamin becomes a stranger, a lonely man; and his life and the film's story, with all of the kindness, love and fascination we've experienced in it, becomes a tragedy. There are two cheesy lines in the script that foresee this: "You never know what's coming to you" and "You'll spend a lot of time alone", some people tell Benjamin Button. It's a shame that I couldn't share his pain.