By the time the credits rolled at the end of THE CURIOUS CASE OF BENJAMIN BUTTON I had totally empathy with the title character. I felt as if I too had lived a life of four score years and five over the course of this marathon two and three quarter hours long film.
TCCBB is an extraordinary tale of a very ordinary life lived in reverse. For reasons that are never explained or explored Benjamin (Brad Pitt) is born in New Orleans in 1918 looking like an 85 year old baby and, over the course of the story he ages backwards growing physically younger but mentally older.
His mother dies in child birth and his father is so repulsed by his son's appearance that he abandons him on the steps of a retirement home run by Queenie (Taraji Henson). She adopts him and Benjamin spends hs childhood as a wrinkled wizened wheelchair bound old man surrounded by equally aged adults not long left for this world. It's here that he first meets Daisy (Cate Blanchett). She's the granddaughter of one of the residents and the little girl who's destined to become the love of his unconventional life.
TCCBB is not a film much concerned with looking beneath the surface of the story. To a large extent what we see is what we get, but this relationship is an exception. In a time obsessed with internet paedophiles it is a little unsettling to watch an elderly man playing with a young girl even though we know that mentally he is her contemporary. Director David Fincher ("Fight Club", "7even", "Zodiac") uses this disconnect between age and appearance to put a fresh spin on the age-old theme of true love being hard to find. Benjamin is sure the moment he first sees Daisy that she is the one, while 11 year old Daisy is too immature to conceive of such a concept.
Given the strength of his feelings for her he's left with no choice but to wait for that elusive moment when their ages and emotions meet in the middle and she becomes mature enough to appreciate there's more to life than simply living for the moment but before he regresses to teenage self-centredness.
In the meantime Benjamin sets out to make something of himself and see the world but, unlike the titular hero of "Forest Gump" with whom this story shares some faint echoes, nothing very extraordinary happens to Button. Considering the tumultuous times in which he lives the outside world intrudes only rarely into Benjamin's life. Though the story is bookended by World War One and Hurricane Katrina and punctuated by the Second World War, none of these events have any direct impact on him.
More worrying is the film's failure to address the issue of race. Benjamin's adoptive parents are black and the seniors they care for are white yet none of these Southerners old enough to remember the Civil War has any observation to make on the arrangement. In Benjamin Button's America the races live in totally harmony which, even a cursory reading of the history of civil rights would suggest, is not the way many blacks experienced the first 50 to 60 years of the 20th century.
The most impressive aspect of TCCBB is the technical one. Common sense tells us that can't possibly be Brad Pitt playing the shrunken septagenarian Benjamin Button but that is exactly what we are seeing on screen. It's a safe bet that a large chunk of the production's reputed $175 million budget went on creating the special effects that allow Brad to be Benjamin for the majority of the story and do it so convincingly that our eyes do indeed deceive us. The Academy got it right in awarding Oscars for some of the more technical categories and passing it over for acting and directing.
Watching TCCBB is like taking a long soak in a warm bath - it'll send you to bed feeling relaxed and rather wrinkly but it's unlikely to intrude into your dreams.
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