The Curious Case Of Benjamin Button (12A)

Alison Rowat's Review

Ugly as an old pot. It’s not the first thought to pull up a chair and sit down when Brad Pitt enters a room, yet it’s how one of his fellow characters describes the star in The Curious Case of Benjamin Button.

This is Pitt, the actor sculpted from alabaster, as you’ve never seen him before, and this is filmmaking of rare ambition: epic, soaring, romantic, and utterly gorgeous. At a time when Hollywood rushes for the safe option, David Fincher’s ambitious picture aims for the moon.

That praise and its 13 Oscar nominations aside, “BB”, based on the F Scott Fitzgerald story about a man who ages backwards, might prove too rum a deal for some. It’s not so much the near-three-hour running time as the folksy tone of Eric Roth’s screenplay. Yep, that’s the same Eric Roth who won an Oscar for Forrest Gump. (He was also, to be fair, responsible for Munich and The Outsider.)

At the mention of old Forrest and his saccharine charm, alarm bells the size of Big Ben might be ringing in the mind of the wary cinemagoer. Sure enough, there are times when BB comes across as Gump with a PhD, but don’t let that put you off. As with Tinker Bell, once you believe in the dazzling world Fincher has created, the movie begins to fly.

And what a spectacle he lays on. There are special effects here so cutting-edge that cinemas ought to supply sticking plasters with each ticket. The story itself is told using the ancient means of flashback. In New Orleans, as Hurricane Katrina rushes closer, an elderly-looking Cate Blanchett (playing Daisy) lies in hospital. While she drifts in and out of sleep, her daughter reads aloud from the memoir of one Benjamin Button.

Button (Pitt) has arrived in the world just as the First World War is ending. Abandoned on the steps of a nursing home, he is taken in by Queenie (the Oscar-nominated Taraji P Henson). It is Queenie who pronounces on the baby’s pot-like lack of bonniness. One glimpse into the shawl explains all: the new-born Benjamin looks like an 80-something. The sight is a gob-dropper, even more so when the shock subsides and one can see, under the wrinkles, an unmistakable likeness to Brad Pitt.

Fincher (Seven, Fight Club, Zodiac) and his technical team have worked miracles with the special effects. As Benjamin grows younger, Pitt’s head is planted on a succession of bodies. It sounds like some awful, souped-up version of Frankenstein, but it works.

Pitt’s gentle, painstaking performance aids the illusion immeasurably. Down the years, as the idea for a film of BB was passed from desk to desk, many actors were rumoured to be up for the lead role, Tom Cruise and John Travolta among them. Pitt, however, is the perfect choice.

A lesser actor could have hid behind the special effects, but instead Pitt transcends them with a knowing look here and a line delivered just right there.

It’s a remarkable achievement on his part (he’s up for best actor), and Fincher’s (best director), for taking on the tale. If they gave a Spielberg award at the Oscars for blending technical endeavour with magical storytelling, Fincher would be up for that too.

As Benjamin gets younger we see him meeting Daisy and going off to seek his fortune. On his travels he meets a diplomat’s wife (the ever majestic Tilda Swinton), a tug-boat captain, a captain of industry with a towering secret, and a boxcar-load of other characters.

Throughout it all, Queenie and Daisy remain constant in his life. It’s the otherwise admirable Queenie who gets to utter the most Forrest Gump-like of all the Forrest Gump-like lines in the script. Her mantra is: “You never know what’s coming for you.” Or as Ma Gump might have said, a script is like a box of chocolates; you never know when you’re going to get the nut cluster.

Daisy prefers to let her grace and beauty do most of the talking. Blanchett makes a drop-dead elegant heroine, ageing with dignity while her beau becomes ever younger. “My God,” she says on meeting him after a spell apart, “look at you. You’re perfect.”

And he is. Until this movie I had never bought into the notion of Brad Pitt as Adonis. His beauty seemed in the strictest sense skin deep, nothing remarkable in an industry full of pretty people.

But in Fincher’s film there is a point at which you look at him and the only rational response is to gasp. He looks, as Fincher intends, like the perfect embodiment of youth and vitality.

Captured at the precise moment when, as the Stevie Wonder song has it, the wheel of life has turned his way, he is a thing of joy and wonder, a marvel to behold – a lot like Fincher’s picture.

Paul Greenwood's Review

Director David Fincher has made some of the finest, sharpest films of the last 15 years, from Se7en through Fight Club to Zodiac, so it's slightly unfortunate and ironic that his first Oscar nod comes for such a flabby disappointment as The Curious Case of Benjamin Button.

Adapted from a short story by F Scott Fitzgerald, the film has picked up an astonishing 13 Oscar nominations, including Best Picture, director and actor for Brad Pitt in the title role.

In terms of its technical achievements, Benjamin Button deserves every one of the nominations it has received. There’s artistry in every frame but it’s a hollow experience, lacking warmth beyond that which is generated by its gorgeous, sepia-toned cinematography.

For all its beauty and magic it never comes close to being captivating and is woefully lacking in substance over the course of a ludicrously indulgent running time.

Benjamin Button is born in 1918. His mother has died in childbirth and his father leaves him on the steps of a care home, unable to cope, because Benjamin is actually a baby in the body of a 90-year- old man.

He grows up in the home, spending his early years struggling as a child in an old and wasted body, encountering death and the confusions of youth, his body growing younger all the time.

The special effects utilised to realise Benjamin’s situation are astounding, and it’s impossible to see the join between what is Pitt and what is CGI.

It’s at the home that he meets Daisy, a young girl with whom he bonds because, even though he looks like an old man, he still has the mind of a child. Benjamin’s relationship with Daisy (played as an adult by a brittle Cate Blanchett) takes up much of the midsection, and this is where the film really gets bogged down.

It’s supposed to carry the central theme, the agony of watching those around him grow old and die while he himself gets younger and stronger.

Benjamin and Daisy have only the shortest of windows when they’ll both be of a similar age, but there’s no poignancy to their love. We spend an age with them simply shacked up together, barely experiencing anything, only to rattle through Benjamin’s latter life, when he has the wisdom of years in a child’s body which should have led to some of the most interesting material.

Worse still, it repeatedly cuts back to a present day hospital, where an elderly Daisy is on her death bed, having Benjamin’s journal read to her by her daughter while, for no good reason, Hurricane Katrina is closing in.

It’s a film all about the desire to turn back time, to cheat death, but what should have been a touching meditation on ageing is rendered impotent by its focus on such an empty character.

Pitt does well to rein in his usual mannerisms, but he faces a losing battle trying to bring to life a character who is just not interesting or rounded enough for us to want to follow on his journey. Indeed, his only journey is a physical one as he bounces around from place to place. There’s no change, no conflict and therefore no investment.

It’s much too episodic in nature, offering slices of Benjamin’s life as he travels the world, interacting with people far more interesting than he is. In that sense, the Forrest Gump comparisons are unavoidable, even more so when you consider that screenwriter Eric Roth is responsible for both.

In terms of storytelling, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button is basically an episode of Star Trek crossed with the ravings of Karl Pilkington. And while that does sound like a fun combination, it certainly shouldn’t form the basis of a major motion picture from a highly acclaimed director.