The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (2008)

Finally! One day to go, and I can now official say that I have seen all of the movies up for Best Picture. It's nice to cross this one off the list.

That said, it's . . . alright. I'd like to say that it's more than that, but it's not really. While the scope of director David Fincher and screenwriter Eric Roth's adaptation of the Fitzgerald short story is epic, nothing about the finished product really is. Fincher continues to be one of the most exciting visual directors working today, and while Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett turn in fine performances as Benjamin Button and his true love Daisy, there's nothing in the emotional payout or the story to earn the label of epic.

Part of the problem is that the formula the plot line follows bears more than a little resemblance to Roth's previous Academy favourite, Forrest Gump. Which, when thought about objectively, is nothing more than an alright movie itself: a likable protagonist in unlikely circumstances set against major events across the 20th century and with a circuitous love story running through the middle. And yet, the best part of movie occurs when Pitt and Blanchett are finally freed up to be their approximate ages instead of covered in prosthetics and make up (for the record, her youth make up is far more impressive than his old man make up). I imagine it's difficult to fully inhabit a character who is also a construct.

The decision to move the story to New Orleans seems a strange one as well. They use the beautiful old city admirably, but using Katrina as a framing device is questionable at the very least. Factoring in that poor Julia Ormand, reading the story to her mother on her deathbed, has to learn and digest two idiotic decisions in short order, and it feels, at the very least, unsettling. Confidential to the producers: maybe you could have gotten her some blue contacts? Just a little biology related thought.

At the end of the day, it's Fincher and Roth's refusal to draw any conclusions or apply anything more than a broad "life is sad sometimes" moral to their story that stops it short of being the epic they were obviously seeking to create. It's certainly a technical masterpiece. Maybe next time they can remember the heart. B-