A story of a man's life, told backwards, with both lots of good and some not-so-good at all

Rating: 7/10 (30 December 2008)

David Fincher is a truly gifted storyteller, probably one of the most talented and inspired that have come from that much hallowed age-group of early 1960s born American filmmakers (i.e. Soderbergh, Tarantino, Linklater) that rose to prominence in the 1990s with their groundbreaking work. It's a shame then that one year after directing a picture like Zodiac, where with a 157 minute running time (almost the same as this film) not a minute was wasted, he should have a film like The Curious Case of Benjamin Button: filled with so much promise, delivering in some brilliant bits, it's overloaded with a particular storytelling device that flat out doesn't work and doesn't help mask what also doesn't work in the actual story itself.
I say this admiring this picture, admiring Fincher's work, the cinematographer immensely, the make-up artists and especially the visual fx crew (who, by leaps and bounds, should get the Oscar this year if it means much in those circles), in criticizing it heavily. This is one of those pictures one *wants* to work wonderfully so much that its bloated length is the cause of a central problem: the script. While not entirely the fault of co-adapter of Fitzgerald's story as a quasi-remake of Forrest Gump (the similarities are many, too many for here to note), the framing device used to wrap the story of Benjamin Button around - his story told from a diary he wrote read by his daughter (I'll get to that later) to her mother Daisy, who lies dying in a hospital bed in the middle of an oncoming hurricane (also get to this later) - is relentless and pointlessly repetitive. Imagine how annoying it would have been if Winona Ryder's old-lady version of her character from Edward Scissorhands kept popping up to tell the story and you'll get the idea of how it a) just is mundanely acted overwrought by Blanchett and Ormond, and b) it doesn't progress the story save for one or two of the flash-forwards.
And as for the actual story of Benjamin Button, born on the night of the end of World War 1 as a baby aged 90 years old and aging backwards until he's a little boy with old-man dementia and Alzheimer's? It is, as you watch it, pretty entertaining, at best engrossing, and provides the viewer with so many rich ideas that are only followed upon a couple of times. Button lives a fairly uncomplicated life for someone who should be, by the look of the trailer, to have something extraordinary happen: he becomes a sailor when he turns 17, he sails the world bit, befriends and has an affair with a Brit (Swinton), does some minor combat duty in the Navy in WW2, and then has an on-off again relationship with Daisy, and then that is mostly the rest of the picture.
Like in Forrest Gump, to make a quick comparison, Button has some of that whimsical fortune put upon him, brought on by a slightly sad circumstance: instead of Gump becoming a shrimp boat captain by a promise of a dead war-buddy, Button is abandoned by a father who runs a big Button-making corporation (Button's Buttons, cute, huh?), to which Benjamin is the sole heir. Only, we don't see him work at the factory, he sells it at one point for extra cash, and it doesn't have much prominence in the story. Maybe Roth or Fincher or whomever thought buttons wouldn't be very interesting to the story. But, hey, why not try it? This is a case where the parts are better than the whole, if not greater.
Some sequences are brilliant, really wonderful, like Benjamin's explanation of all the clockwork-type of events that lead up to one of those life-changing accidents for Daisy, or when we see Benjamin walk for the first time, or even just simple things like bits of montages. It also goes without saying it's a technical marvel, as mentioned, and is gorgeous to look at - just as, I should add, it's two stars, who give very good performances (albeit not as good as Jesse James or Bob Dylan last year respectively), as people who have to cope with aging with each other, and have to grapple with death and the lingering sense of oncoming loss that leads to a decision 3/4 of the way through the picture that should be better handled, but isn't.
The way I'm describing it, from the daughter 'twist' that shouldn't be one at all and is handled like one of those mean contrivances in movies that is unbecoming of a production like this let alone Fincher's, or the Katrina angle (which I wager was Brad Pitt's idea, noble but out of place), or just little things in the story that don't work, you'd think I would rate this lower. But it is a kind of flawed marvel, a work of mainstream movie art that is tainted by an excess of unnecessary storytelling in a film that requires that it be strong throughout. It takes a lot of guts to pull off a picture like this, and I'm glad Fincher made it. That it's not something I'd watch ever again from start to finish goes without saying.