Technical gimmicry fine, acting OK to very good, but what a BORE!

Rating: 2/10 (2 March 2009)

Contains spoilers everywhere. Any resemblance between this movie and Scott Fitzgerald's slight, whimsical short story, which, from its peculiar perspective, allowed its author to make some wry comments about filial piety, marriage and family ties, is non-existent.
This is one of the most tedious films I have ever sat through. Spoiler:Particularly insulting, was the spelling out of all the minute factors which led to Daisy's accident.
For the script to borrow only a single motif from Fitzgerald, namely, a life lived from old age to infancy, and then steal his title would be bad enough. But to purposely make your film an "over the years" biography with the history of America for backdrop and then get ALL the details(big and little) wrong is preposterous. The numerous "goofs" made in the film have been recounted elsewhere on this site. But what dwarfs comparison is the blatant ignorance about race relations in America for most of the twentieth century, especially in the South. Spoiler:Presenting an openly inter-racial couple in the Jim Crow South in 1918 would have been impossible. Afterward, a white baby is adopted by a black couple. OK. Even if we accept Benjamin as theirs,what follows is impossible. This apparently black man is discovered by a white grandmother concealed under the table with her grand-daughter, without any consequences. (An actual child, Emmett Till, was lynched for whistling at a white woman.) Queenie's dialect is black; her "son's" is not. The entire relationship between Benjamin and Daisy, or Benjamin with the old white people in the nursing home in the 1930's and '40's would have been impossible, given the premise made by the screenwriters. A white tugboat captain fraternizing with a black man?(Benjamin still thinks he is Queenie's son or her sister's at that point)Let alone taking him to a white brothel?In the pre-WWII South? Get real!
An old lady in the nursing home plays a superb Scott Joplin rag on the piano. Possible, but not likely. Composer Virgil Thompson once snapped on TV that, when he was a child, respectable (white) women in Kansas City did not play "The Twelfth Street Rag," because they somehow knew what went on on Twelfth Street.
Somebody said this already on the goof site: Tugboats on the high seas? In WWII combat? Impossible.
If they decided to make an over-the-years movie of America, how could they have been so stupid or so arrogant as to set it in eras which members of the audience had to know better than they did? Watching this movie was like having an accident you witnessed described to you by someone who obviously never saw it.