The Curious Case of Benjamin Button: B-

Cate Blanchett, one of the screen’s most radiant talents, gives one of the year’s most painfully careful performances—and she is seconded only barely by Brad Pitt who, as a man who is born old and dies young, struggles not with his beautifully-done ageing/de-ageing make-up, but rather with the void of personality that it covers up. Technically, it is a feat of perfectly adequate internalizing. But internalizing is not what is called for—no, not in this David Fincher-directed, Eric Roth-scripted, “epic.” A lazy Southern drawl is all well and good, but if Forrest Gump and its star taught anyone anything, it is that characters so defined and compressed within their disabilities so as to become observers in their own star vehicle are barely characters at all, and are so thereby barely worth watching.

But I digress: Mr. Pitt is pretty enough to look at; Ms. Blanchett, too. They have barely any chemistry, but due to Fincher’s overt technical styling, emotion is nonetheless wrung from their every “wrenching” scene together. We wonder, in the beginning, at the strangest of an old man falling in love with a little girl…only for the situation to be reversed much later on—but we soon forget. Movies like this are not for the mind, but for the heart. And yet the heart is done so little service! Roth’s screenplay frames itself as the tale of a young boy’s journal, now in the possession of an old woman, being read by a middle-aged child, and has yet the further audacity to set the present action during Hurricane Katrina. Yet he also has the audacity to create two quite-lovely sequences, both involving the rhythm and power of time, that are the small-scale delights of love and loss that the overall film could never be. (One wonders, regardless, how F. Scott Fitzgerald’s short story ever became so rounded and tragic a film as this—when it started out as so hardened and whirling a satire as it was.)

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button is a curious case indeed: characters there within go through major emotional upheavals and find themselves, either secretly or with great show, tossing about on a sea of passions—and yet the most minor of characters, so trapped and flat in conception and in physicality, are the ones presented with the most sincerity (to wit: Tilda Swinton, showing up for just a few minutes as an aristocrat suffering from lovelorn dislocation, outpaces her female counterparts easily with grace and elegance in communicating inelegant emotions); and though the theme that hangs over the narrative like a silken funeral shroud is one of haunting existentialism (it assumes both that a life lived backward is one lived in vain and that those loved while living backward are loved only to be lost), no melancholia is rightly present scene-to-scene—worse, more often a finely-preened since of blah, of softly-chewed and finely-spun nonsense, persists. In short the film lives, on screen anyway, for almost three hours—and yet it so rarely feels alive.