Give me Gump any day...

Rating: 2/10 (8 February 2009)

Okay, this might be difficult for some to hear, but just bear with me: the fact that "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button" is getting such high praise is indicative of how shallow and easily entertained Americans have become. Not one time in the nearly three hours of watching this film did I ever become emotionally involved with Benjamin Button or any of the other characters, something which is extremely important if you are trying to keep the audiences' attention for that length of time. The potential was there, with a long and winding story rivaling that of "Forrest Gump" (no surprise there, as Eric Roth worked on both), but there were several reasons why this film fell flat where the other found its way into the Pantheon of great films.
The main reason, as I mentioned before, is the lack of emotional involvement with any of the characters in the film. When making an epic movie, or any movie for that matter, the goal is to make the audience invested in characters. Love them, hate them, feel sorry for them, whatever, but the goal is to make us react emotionally to the people we see on screen. In "Benjamin Button", the only thing that gives us a slight reason to be interested in the main character is his strange predicament. We begin with a Caucasian child who is born old and decrepit, and as a result abandoned by his well-to-do father. He is found and taken in by a kind African American woman who works in a rest home, and in the subsequent years he begins to age in reverse. The issues surrounding such a situation could convey potent insight into aging, race, ageism, love, marriage, parenting, being a step-child, etc. What we get, however, is a stoic child who drifts easily through childhood into adulthood without ever experiencing any particular challenges and/or failure (any of the things that might, I don't know, build character). The patented blank gaze of Brad Pitt (think of his role as Death in Meet Joe Black) accompanies us through year after year of rest home domesticity until our main character finally decides to leave town. But what a town it is! He is never heckled, ridiculed, or treated differently than any other person despite his bizarre physical condition, his creepy fixation on the daughter of a resident of the rest home, or the fact that he is a white child being raised by a black woman. There isn't even a single incidence of racial bias despite all the interracial relationships in the film. I didn't realize that everyone in New Orleans in the early twentieth century was free of racism and xenophobia. What a great time it must have been! The next section, which include all of his years spent traveling, include a random assortment of characters, some more developed than others, but none who contribute anything particularly meaningful to the plot. As a matter of fact, the whole section involving the wife of the British spy (Tilda Swinton) could have been completely left out and it wouldn't have made a difference to the film as a whole. And the same goes for the watered down version of Lieutenant Dan, Captain Mike (Jared Harris). Whereas the narration gives us a hint of emotional connections to people and places, or even the occasional philosophical tidbit of insight into the nature of man, the acting completely fails to convey these things. Even in the scene where Captain Mike dies, Benjamin sits coldly by watching it all transpire. In fact, that seems like all Benjamin ever does. He watches, not necessarily thinking or studying or learning, the emotional equivalent of a camcorder.
The last place to look, and the sole idea supposedly driving much of the film, is his eternal love for Daisy. Forget for a moment, if you can, the creepy early encounters between a wrinkled old/young Benjamin and the Lolita-esquire Daisy, and focus on the adult interactions between the two. There are a bare minimum of scenes including any wooing, chivalrous acts by Benjamin, or emotional connections between the two (which is typical of male-female relationships in F. Scott Fitzgerald's works, such as the short story this film is based on, but still). Does she ever express any desire to do anything besides jump his bones? While sex on a gazebo, or sex on a boat, or sex on a beach might show us how physically passionate they are towards each other, it does nothing to indicate any deeper emotional connection between the two. It goes from awkward to entirely sexual and then back to awkward again, or, from our angle, disturbing to arousing and back to disturbing. That's not the kind of enduring love that great movies are based on. By the time Forrest finally consummated his love for Jenny, we could feel it, yearn for it, and appreciate it the way he did because we had seen all he had gone through to finally win her heart. This is exactly what is missing in "Benjamin Button".
I understand what the film makers were trying to do. They had an interesting concept to build on, they certainly had a big budget, and they hired popular actors to fill most of the main roles. But somewhere in the casting, direction, or writing, they forgot what the main point of a movie is: to make us care.