Maybe Brad Pitt Should Stick to Zippers

Rating: 6/10 (29 December 2008)

I read a book a couple of years ago called "The Confessions of Max Tivoli," about a man who ages backwards. The book was nothing special, a moderate diversion at best, but what it did do well was explore the emotional and psychological conflicts the main character faced as he watched everyone around him -- including his love -- lose their youth while he gained his.
That same kind of conflict is the missing ingredient in "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button," and without it, this wisp of a story doesn't add up to anything. This film is a three-hour journey with a blank slate of a character who doesn't seem to react much to the things that happen to him. Yes, Benjamin Button ages backwards, but the film never establishes how Benjamin's life is any different because of this quirk than if he had aged traditionally. The gimmick offers a lot of excuses for cool special and makeup effects, but otherwise this is just a long and rather boring episodic story that doesn't have anything to say about its characters.
It's time for the world to face that fact that Brad Pitt is simply a limited actor, and it's a mistake to put him at the center of any film that relies on a complex performance to make it work. The same thing was wrong with last year's "The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford," but that film worked despite Pitt's presence, largely because good actors were cast in all of the other roles, and they created interesting characters to compensate for the dull one at the film's center. The same is not so here. The only other actor who gets a meaty role to play is Cate Blanchett, and though she looks lovely, she's simply not given the material with which to create a memorable performance. Taraji P. Henson, who plays Pitt's mother, just does the strong Southern mom routine that Sally Field already created in "Forrest Gump." The best performance comes from Tilda Swinton, who has a tiny role as an enigmatic woman who shares some intimate moments with Benjamin. She was so fascinating that I would rather have left the movie I was watching to follow her story instead. That's never a good sign.
It's hard to believe that the David Fincher who made last year's endlessly fascinating "Zodiac" helmed this film as well. While "Benjamin Button" is nowhere nearly as maudlin as it could have been (and probably would have been in someone else's hands), it's downright gloopy compared to Fincher's other works. The sentimentality is not helped by Pitt's thunderous voice over narration that's full of machine-made homilies, the kind that start with phrases like "The funny thing about home is...." or "Sometimes the people that mean the most to us...." The film is as technically accomplished as they come, every scene pretty as a picture. But one wishes that Fincher and company had spent a little less time making their film look nice and more time fleshing out a story that would engage our interest for nearly three hours.
Grade: B-