"Benjamin Button," framed as a flashback in the mind of an elderly Daisy (Cate Blanchett), starts off near the end of World War I. A blind clockmaker (Elias Koteas) is commissioned to build a large timepiece in New Orleans. In the middle of his work, the clockmaker learns that his son has died in the war; in his grief, he designs the clock so it runs backward, hoping this will restore lost time. It seems he's also something of a metaphor-maker.
Around the same time, a baby is born who seems to be an old man: he's got the physical features and mannerisms of somebody about 80 years his senior. Benjamin's mother -- for the baby is he -- dies in childbirth, and the mortified father leaves him on the steps of a nursing home, where an employee named Queenie (the superb Taraji P. Henson) adopts the baby as her own.
As the years pass, we bear witness to a simultaneous collapsing/unfolding act: Benjamin is an old man with a young heart, and everyone mistakes his child's mind for senility. He's a man in late middle age who finds work on a tugboat and starts having adventures. He's a man in the prime of life, carousing with friends and getting into places that would never let him in based on his year of birth. He's a teenager, a chid, an infant, while everyone around him grows decrepit.
Benjamin, you might have heard, is played by Brad Pitt, who gives us an even-tempered character, at times inscrutable in his transparency. You find yourself wondering whether a man who grows younger as the twentieth century ages poorly around him can really be so easy to understand. He's out to have a good time, and that's it. Benjamin is almost too much the everyman -- there's nothing exceptional about him that we can see, except for the backward-aging thing. Some actors can suggest an ocean of subtle feelings underneath an implacable face; Brad Pitt isn't one of them.
To give credit where credit is due, Fincher shot the movie beautifully, experimenting with framing and filming techniques that we've never seen from him before. The film was shot in such a way that it makes you feel like you're looking at old photographs -- it's not exactly what Kubrick did with "Barry Lyndon," but it produces the same feeling of mild unreality. Also uncanny were the motion-capture effects used to render Pitt as an old man and a boy. Fincher won't win an Oscar for "Benjamin Button," but if his next movie is as much of a step forward as this one, that could be the film that takes the trophy.
As technically accomplished as the movie is, though, it's missing something. Fantastic visuals, a century's worth of glanced-at historical events and one intriguing conceit can't substitute for compelling personalities, and Benjamin Button is the absence at the center of the film. Cate Blanchett does the best she can as the time-crossed love interest, but Daisy, like Benjamin, is more of an idea than a character. (On the other hand, Jason Flemyng turns up as Benjamin's estranged father, and I would have liked to have seen more of him.) Truth be told, more than one scene in the movie left me a bit bored.
Fincher's movie reminded me unavoidably of Robert Zemeckis's "Forrest Gump," another "romp through the decades with a sympathetic manchild" movie. Tom Hanks's Forrest was slow, not reverse-aging, and he got to stand a lot closer to the center of history than freewheeling Benjamin Button, but otherwise the characters had a lot in common; the main difference is that Hanks made you feel something, while Pitt is just up there on the screen, laying waste to entire civilizations with his cheekbones. Scenes like Benjamin at the end of his life, developing the diseases of an old mind in a young man's body, can't help but be poignant, but credit for that should go mostly to F. Scott Fitzgerald.
"The Curious Case of Benjamin Button" raises some interesting ideas about how movies can treat time itself -- it appears here as almost a character in its own right. Fincher also has the audacity to present Hurricane Katrina as a cleansing event, and it's sort of nice to see that tragedy used as something other than a blunt, easy source of trauma, or a stepladder from which to shoot at political targets. Still, a movie's characters have to be at least as strong as its ideas, or else, as happens here, you'll feel disconnected from everything that takes place onscreen. I had a good time at "Benjamin Button," but ultimately it wasn't a movie that really made me feel anything.
