Nearly two and a half hours pass before The Curious Case of Benjamin Button hits you with any real warmth or poignancy and that’s an awfully long row to hoe in order to finally feel the way the lush trailer promised. The real failure of the film isn’t due to its frustrating lack of a central story and emotional through-line, or even two very unappealing love interests. It fails because wistful isn’t a theme, and other than a series of episodes under the impression they’re more important than they really are, Benjamin Button simply isn’t about anything.
Benjamin (Brad Pitt) is born the size of a baby but the rest of him is an old man in his eighties riddled with arthritis, cataracts and wrinkled skin. His mother dies during child birth leaving his father emotionally devastated and in no condition to deal with his seemingly deformed son. He leaves the baby at the doorstep of an old folks home run by Queenie (Taraji P. Henson) who, under the belief the child will die soon, takes little Benjamin under her protective wing. Benjamin doesn’t die, though. Instead he grows younger and younger with each passing year.
Benjamin’s mind is still that of a child’s, so he learns to read and write like any toddler must. And while he’s smallish like a child, in every other respect he’s an old man in need of eyeglasses and a wheelchair. Eventually, over the years as he grows younger, he will grow into the fine physical specimen we call Brad Pitt.
What would be a normal person’s late teens are Benjamin’s mid-to-late sixties, and this is when he begins to flex the normal teenage independence that starts him on a life of world travel and into the arms of his two great loves. The first is Elizabeth Abbott (Tilda Swinton), a fortyish, British woman in a loveless marriage. The second is Daisy (Cate Blanchett), whom Benjamin meets while he’s an old man and she’s a young girl. Over the years their paths cross again and again until they finally meet in the middle where romance won’t involve a felony.
The story opens at Daisy’s death bed in a New Orleans hospital as Hurricane Katrina is set to strike. With her daughter (Julia Ormond) at her side, Daisy produces an old diary that contains Benjamin’s memoirs written twenty years earlier. Before she passes, Daisy would like to hear Benjamin’s story once more and so we welcome the framing device that will take us through the rest of the film.
The film’s fatal flaw is the lack of an emotional connection between Pitt and his female co-stars. Tilda Swinton couldn’t exude warmth holding a flamethrower and what Benjamin sees in her is never all that clear. She’s meant to represent the Older Woman who teaches him to love, but doesn’t display even a hint of the tenderness that would help us make sense of the special place she holds in his memory. Blanchett’s Daisy is no better. For the first half of the film she’s brittle and self-involved. For the second half she’s just brittle.
What’s mostly missing, however, is a point. The first couple hours are made up of episodes in Benjamin’s life. As stand-alone blackouts each might work as a whimsical fable, but the lack of a central narrative combined with the self-importance of it all wears thin after a half-hour. The visuals are beautiful, the acting is excellent, but the wisdom and insight is shallow nonsense. Nothing we learn from Benjamin’s ceaseless voice-over ever reaches beyond the depth of a fortune cookie.And what does it say about the film that it wouldn’t have been all that difficult to tell the exact same story without the gimmick of our protagonist aging in reverse? Benjamin is only different from us in how he ages. Other than that he looks normal and goes through all the normal psychological phases of life. In other words, it is all much ado about nothing. The tragedy of Daisy and Benjamin’s love affair is no tragedy, at least not anymore tragic than anyone else’s. Eventually age and death take everyone away from us. You grab what time you have and make the most of it. Daisy and Benjamin had thirty of forty good years available to them. So what the hell’s all the hand-wringing about? That’s not tragedy, that’s life.
Had the story been less ambitious and merely used Benjamin’s condition as a metaphor to help us understand and appreciate better the blip of time that is our life, something that connected more on an emotional level might have come from it. Unfortunately, the film misses even that as it overshoots aiming for much larger ambitions. Eric Roth’s script relies heavily on two lazy devices that are quickly becoming outright cliches. This idea that adultery liberates and rejuvenates or is somehow acceptable and without consequences between two people who can’t be together has moved beyond offensive and straight into boring. There’s also the the tiresome portrayal of black people as happy, simple folk able to impart life-changing wisdom at the drop of a hat. Why, because they’re black? A positive stereotype is still a stereotype. Instead of well-rounded, complicated human beings we get condescending fonts of exposition and homespun humor little different from the servant roles Hattie McDaniel played in the thirties and forties.
Benjamin Button very much wants to be warm and rich and hit home in the heart department. The world created by director David Fincher is meticulously designed for just that and the special effects are equally impressive because you don’t notice them. But all we have here is an awfully lovely shell without a thing in the center.