A pretty disappointing film, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button had every right to be one of the best American films of the year, but instead settled for throwaway dreamy, inspirational life story, lost love trash. The only impressive thing in this film is the digital transformation of Brad Pitt into a lifetime’s range of ages, which is really impressive. I knew beforehand that the screenwriter for this film was the same as the one for Forest Gump. This doesn’t mean much to me, because I’ve never seen that film all the way through, but of what I’ve seen, it’s not the best association.
Some Spoilers
A big problem with this film for me isn’t that it didn’t address things that it should have with such an interesting premise, but that it does address these things in such an insignificant way. The idea that Benjamin Button would fall in love with someone who looks the same age as himself for a brief period of time before they diverge into complimentary stages of life is great, but they the tension in that idea off the hook when Button simply gives up and says, paraphrasing, ‘I can’t live with the idea that you (Blanchett) would have to raise me and our child’ and then leaves her pregnant. This is the confrontation that I had been waiting for for the entire film! I wanted to see an old woman going on dates with a teenage boy and then has to defend why this is okay. I also wanted to see Benjamin Button as a young boy get questioned about why he isn’t going to school, or if he goes to school, why he is more mature than the other kids in school. I wanted to see a young boy playing with other young boys, yet while his friends are excited and carefree, Button knows, precisely, the amount of time that he has left.
And I’m not just upset about a bunch of things that I hoped would be in the film but weren’t there, I’m also upset about the things that I did want to see, were shown, but were poorly done. Like Benjamin’s early life. It is basically defined by his infatuation with a young, pretty red-headed girl. The relationship between the importance of learning and swallowing knowledge as an adolescent versus his dementia ridden, mushy brain should have been an essential part of this story. Instead, the film shows him getting a job, liking a girl, loving his mom, having some friends, with consequence and without anyone questioning his condition after becoming aware of it. They would just nonchalantly say something like, ‘oh, you’re aging backwards, how unusual.’
Not only this, but it is trying very hard to be a movie about everything and ends up as an overpolished Oscar-push. It has tons of great themes: lost love, death, birth, war, battles, time: but all of these appear in such cliched forms. I loved Fincher’s Zodiac and it probably has a lot of the blame for my harsh reaction to this one.