Episodic Script's Lost Opportunities Prevent Emotional Involvement

Rating: 6/10 (3 January 2009)

"The Curious Case of Benjamin Button" is blessed with impressive special effects in the aging of Brad Pitt, and a clever MacGuffin: a man's body ages backward, from old age to infancy. The movie's episodic structure and the script's lack of depth prevented me from forming any emotional reaction to the material, though. It ended with a whimper and I left the theater unmoved.
The film is episodic: a character comes on, has his moment in the spotlight, delivers a soliloquy, and then departs. The characters are eccentric in a way that serves no larger purpose than for them to be eccentric. One such character designs a clock that runs backward. Another has been struck by lightening seven times. Another character is very fond of hummingbirds. Another character tried to swim the English Channel but was thwarted by bad weather. None of these characters meet or interact. They stand alone in the narrative spotlight, depart, and then another eccentric character takes their place. Their stories add up to no larger point. "Ain't Life Funny" seems to be the film's main point.
The aging of Brad Pitt is praiseworthy and will be the most remembered feature of this film. Unfortunately, during several brief but key scenes, the filmmakers inexplicably decided to jettison the aging techniques and cast another actor in Brad Pitt's role. Many viewers reported losing their emotional attachment to the film at that point.
In characterization and performance, Brad Pitt's Benjamin Button is little different from Tom Hanks' Forrest Gump. He's a blank slate, a wise idiot, who says little, reacts mildly, and drifts through a lifetime of meeting random eccentrics. There's material here that BEGS to be plumbed by a worthy script. Does the scriptwriter really want to give Benjamin NOTHING to say about aging backward? No outrage, no poetry, no cri du coeur, no "God, why me?" There are important scenes between Benjamin and his parent. The scriptwriter does nothing with these scenes.
Other characters are also clichés. Benjamin's adoptive mother is a one-dimensional saint who says more about white guilt than about any real life black woman. Cate Blanchett, as Benjamin's love, is never developed. Their relationship is also never developed. This is meant to be an epic love that withstands the test of time in a way that no other love has ever been asked to do. And it's boring.
Really  the chances that anyone will ever again write a love story between a man who is aging backward and a woman aging forward are pretty slim. Why couldn't the script writer have at least tried to give voice to the extraordinary agonies and ecstasies, fears, hopes, and unique vows and commitments that would have arisen from such a love? Was the script struggling so hard to get the audience to buy its unique premise that they didn't want to draw attention to its implausibility by having any characters talk about it at all? Or is this just a post-verbal script, in which the frequently repeated phrase, "I've been struck by lightening seven times" is supposed to do all the work of expressing every feeling that every character feels? There was one scene that works beautifully. Benjamin, perhaps ten years old, but looking like a seventy-year old, hides under a table with a little girl. They are lit by candle light. I may look like an old man, but I'm not one, he says. That moment is poignant. There should have been more moments like that, instead of just another dead-end episode with yet another eccentric character.
Hurricane Katrina is also harnessed and not made much use of. The hurricane is never seen, which is a shame, because nothing is more cinematic than a hurricane. Rather, shots of TV screens showing radar images of Katrina's path are shown. I have to wonder at a director who would choose TV shots of weathermen talking about radar over actual footage of frothing waves, wind-whipped palms, and houses being ravished by tides.