Pitt The Elder, Pitt The Younger

A baby is born looking like a tiny, wizened old man: deaf, half-blind, with wrinkled skin and arthritic joints. But as the years pass, he grows steadily younger. He becomes a sailor, traveling around the world, from Florida to Russia and doing a tour of duty with the U.S. Navy in World War II. He inherits a thriving factory and becomes a rich man. He visits brothels. He has an affair with the wife of a British diplomat. He marries a beautiful dancer, and they spend the first few months as husband and wife essentially living in their bedroom. They have a daughter. He gets steadily younger as his wife gets older and leaves them to “find himself,” traveling through India and Tibet. Eventually he becomes a boy again, then a baby, but is so senile that he forgets everything he’s experienced.

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button tells an incredible story, and yet I found myself oddly unmoved by any of it, held at arm’s length by David Fincher’s surprisingly impersonal direction, the overly episodic, narration-heavy script, the fussed-over production design, an opaque central character, and a tiresome framing story set, bewilderingly, in a New Orleans hospital in the hours before Hurricane Katrina. To steal a metaphor from Mad Men, the film is a gold violin: it's beautiful, but it doesn't make any music.

What message are we supposed to derive from this peculiar movie? “You never know what’s coming for you,” says Queenie, the Magical Negro who adopts the infant Benjamin when he’s abandoned at an old folks’ home by his father — a sentiment that echoes that line about life being like a box of chocolates from Forrest Gump, which, like Benjamin Button, was scripted by Eric Roth. The line feels like the film’s thesis statement, but in fact, you do know what’s coming: you know Button will continue to get younger and more beautiful, that his wife Daisy (Cate Blanchett) will get older (but will still keep her looks), and that they’ll soon drift apart because of it. Either way, I’m not convinced that a platitude like “You never know what’s coming for you” is enough of a hook to hang a nearly three-hour movie on.

Other than the reverse-aging gimmick and the character name, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button has very little in common with the F. Scott Fitzgerald story that inspired it. In the original, Benjamin’s father does not give his child up for adoption, his marriage (to a woman named Hildegarde instead of Daisy) is covered in four brisk pages, and instead of setting out to sea, Benjamin enrols in Yale. Like the film’s Benjamin, though, he does eventually enlist in the military, and participates in Teddy Roosevelt’s charge up San Juan Hill. The tone of the short story is as gnomic as the film’s, but it seems more in touch with the strangeness of Benjamin’s situation and presents life with his unique medical “condition” as more of a nightmare version of existence, one that keeps him from ever fully making friends or establishing comfortable relationships with his father, his wife, or his son. There is nothing in Fincher’s sentimentalized film to match Fitzgerald’s troubling yet poetic concluding paragraphs as Benjamin, now an infant, loses all his memories of “his brave days at college, of the glittering years when he flustered the hearts of many girls” and sees only “the white, safe walls of his crib... and a great big orange ball that Nana pointed at just before his twilight bed hour and called ‘sun.’”

The makeup and computer effects that put Brad Pitt’s head only a tiny, aged body — and then gradually age him back into a smooth-faced 20-year-old — are seamless, and Pitt sells the film’s conceit with some excellent physical acting. Cate Blanchett, as the love of Benjamin’s life, looks fantastic, although her performance is undermined by Fincher’s extensive use of CGI — when you see her dancing, you can’t help but wonder if that’s actually Blanchett up there onscreen, or if Fincher has merely composited her head onto an actual dancer’s body.

Maybe that’s why Benjamin Button seems so emotionally remote: it’s not the story of a man’s amazing life; it’s a movie about a walking, talking special effect. Compare this film to Man on Wire, the awesome recent documentary about acrobat Philippe Petit’s 1972 tightrope walk between the Twin Towers in New York City. You’re seeing something miraculous actually happening in front of you in Man on Wire, and it’s so beautiful you want to cry. Petit is now 60 but he doesn't look a day over 30 — could he be aging backwards as well?