The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
January 3, 2009
David Fincher expands a short story by F. Scott Fitzgerald and turns it into a monumental film about time, fate, coincidence, and true love, spanning nine decades in the unusual life of a man who ages backwards. With tremendous special effects and makeup, Fincher turns Brad Pitt into Benjamin Button, born a baby but aged past 90, who, as he grows taller, begins to grow youthful, so as he matures into beauty, everybody around him withers into old age and dies. The concept works best early in the film, when the hideous baby is left at a New Orleans old age house and as he grows up and becomes more physically fit, friends appear just before death, but past the two hour mark, as his life-spanning love for Cate Blanchett begins to crack under the impending inevitability of his regressing to childhood, the tragic overtones come to overwhelm the sometimes fantastical and haunting story arch. With more than a slight resemblance to “Forest Gump”, which had a similar voice-over structure, decades spanning love story, and maturation of a crippled “child” into a globe-trotting adult (both films were written by Eric Roth), this is the kind of ambitious, gorgeously shot epic that wins the favor of Oscar voters for shear emotional overload, but it's neither as fun, or as well acted as 'Gump', and if it takes home the Oscar, it'll be by default only, in a year where anything more original than a man aging backwards was hard to find.
By Adam Suraf