Disjointed, stupefying nonsense

Rating: 2/10 (2 January 2009)

I saw it up there on the screen but I didn't connect with it. It was a beautifully mounted movie with nothing interesting to say -- not to me, anyway. I did my best to accept the central premise as a fantasy not to be questioned -- I mean when I found myself wondering how the body of an infant born with the skin and the arthritis and the cataracts of an old man might conveniently be blessed with growth spurts in old age followed by shrink spurts in youth ... nah, I decided there's no need to go down that road. Repeat after me: The movie is a fantasy. Benjamin Button was born old and progressed to infancy and that's the movie's premise and I accepted it. And with that behind me, I wanted to see the life of Benjamin Button developed into a story that would fascinate -- that might offer insights on life as viewed by someone living it backwards.
Instead I got a mishmash of vignettes told in flashback from a dying woman's hospital room in New Orleans -- with EEK! HURRICANE KATRINA! bearing down to no apparent dramatic purpose whatsoever. I saw a pygmy and a brothel and a Russian beauty and a boat and lightning strikes and a broken leg and a war and ... Cate Blanchett kept getting older while Brad Pitt kept getting younger and by the time Benjamin Button met his daughter she was an adolescent and so was he ... and it was just one melancholy development after another and ... how in the world am I supposed relate to any of this disjointed, stupefying nonsense? Here's the movie: Benjamin Button's friends and family grew older and died as he grew younger and died. Period, that's it, no more, no lessons learned, no insights gained, no emotional connection, not even any marveling by the world of science at what was happening to this unique individual.
Well, OK, this happened too: Some young man died in WWI so his blind father built a clock that ran backwards and I never figured out how this related substantively to the rest of the movie. I do know, though, that it is not the nature of New Orleanians to replace ornate, historic, quirky old railway station clocks with digital monstrosities. Bleh. I truly regret that I invested time in this mistake of a movie.