Full Review: The Curious Case of Benjamin Button

I have been excited to see The Curious Case of Benjamin Button for weeks. The ads looked gorgeous, it has actors in it whom I can happily ogle watch for hours upon hours, I am generally a sucker for costume or period dramas (especially of the early 1900s sort), and yes... I had high hopes.

Honestly, I cannot remember the last time I was this disappointed in what could have been a very fine film. To put it simply: it is very capable, but it is entirely pointless. The acting is great, the set design is sumptuous, and overall it looks very good. Somewhere in the 17th hour of runtime, however, you realize that Benjamin is merely a flaccid foil for the much-more-interesting people around him, that Daisy is an annoying bitch, that your bum has gone numb, that your brain is going numb from the inane voice-overs (all done in a maddeningly slooooooooow monotone), and that even after all this time, all this exposition, you still know absolutely nothing about any of these characters. Nor are you all that interested in changing this fact.

Generally, the movie gives you no reason to care... and you know what? I followed its advice, and didn’t. For the last 45 minutes, maybe, it does finally hit its stride and for a bit actually offers you some kind of emotional incentive to pay attention... but it’s a pretty long slog to get there. And by that point I was almost too annoyed to care. The set-up (guy ages backwards) is a positively FASCINATING opportunity for a psychological case-study -- or at least some mention of how this defect affects one's conception of the world -- but no. That would be far too much depth.

That being said, Benjamin Button is very, very pretty to watch. It’s slow as hell and almost entirely brainless, but man, they must have spent a lot of money on its production. Even the smallest details are exquisite and well-composed. Whole tableaux are art-installations through which the camera wends, and the director (David Fincher, light years away from the tight, effective film-making of Seven) clearly has fun with emulating an old-film “look” and the nostalgic nuances sepia tone can bring. Too bad, then, that the people and actions that fill up this beautiful space are so vacant.

If you are in the mood for gorgeous, easy-to-ignore background noise, Benjamin Button works quite well (file it next to Girl With the Pearl Earring, Snow Falling on Cedars and The New World in that category). It’s just not that compelling as a piece of cinema worth focusing on.

This gets my award for “Biggest Frickin’ Disappointment Of The Year”. Good job!

5/10

PS: For Pitt oglers, the scenes where the special effects manage to anti-age him back to his A River Runs Through It young gorgeousness are quite a treat. To refresh your memory. Gosh, that man was pretty.