Another Curious Case of Over Hype?

Rating: Null/10 (3 January 2009)

This is not a bad movie, but, like There Will Be Blood last year, it's not as good as it's been hyped up to be.
Granted there are good performances from the leads, Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett, excellent support from the likes of Tilda Swinton and Taraji P. Henson (fabulous in last year's Talk to Me. I have no idea why she wasn't nominated for something) and the make up and special effects that are used to age Brad Pitt are brilliant, and yet, and yet...... I can't get that enthused about it, try as I might. The movie takes far too long to draw the viewer in. The first half an hour is really inexcusably slow. And, like so many films of the last two years, it is simply too long.
The basic premise, as surely everyone knows by now, is that Benjamin Button (Pitt) is born an old man and ages backwards. Now if that was the backdrop for some profound adventure, it might be more interesting, but the whole basis of the film is simply that, a man living backwards. He goes through much the same life circumstances that everyone else does (or did at that time), watching friends die, getting a job, war, fatherhood etc. He just does it in the wrong order.
I'm sure we all know the aphorism that youth is wasted on the young? That's certainly one of the ideas at work here, that as Button 'youngs' as opposed to 'ages', he can use the wisdom of age to enjoy his youth, while at the same time tragedy waits in the wings, because, after all, how can he burden the woman he loves with having to watch him grow younger while she grows older? How can he expect her to care for him? Certainly one of the underlying messages, is that you take the hand life dealt you, and make what you can of it. OK. So far so good.
There are certainly some very nicely constructed scenes in this movie; Cate Blanchett's Daisy becoming a dancer then suffering a terrible accident which changes her life; or Button serving as a merchant seaman on a tugboat during WW2. (The zinging bullets when they are attacked by a submarine will have you diving under your seat, it's that well done.) But the scenes in the hospital in New Orleans as Daisy lies dying with Hurricane Katrina approaching, are marred by a rather ordinary performance from Julie Ormond as Button's daughter Caroline, and by Blanchett being forced to mutter through so much aging make up that I struggled to hear quite a lot of her dialogue. More could have been made perhaps, of the profoundly disquieting effect that discovering her weird ancestry might have had on Caroline. It's very underplayed.
Benjamin Button is one of those slightly off kilter movies where you wait for the drama to build and the crescendo to approach, and it never quite does. It's a fantasy about a man aging backwards, and that's about it. Beautifully made, nicely constructed and very well acted, but nowhere near as profound as it would like to be.
We went to see this on Christmas day when it opened, a rare outing for our whole family (both genders and an age range of 18 to 60.) We all enjoyed it, yet I think I wasn't the only one who felt that it wasn't quite what it could, and should, have been. Personally I don't feel it is Oscar material, except for achievement in make up where it's streets ahead of anything else I've seen this year (it's hard to tell where the computer effects end and the make up begins, which is exactly as it should be: seamless.) But as best picture? No. Wallee was a far superior movie.