The Curious Case of Benjamin Button Movie Review

“The Curious Case of Benjamin Button,” which occupies around 25 pages in the collected works of F. Scott Fitzgerald, is a slender piece of whimsy, a charming fantasy about a man who ages in reverse, descending through the years from newborn senescence to terminal infancy. As Fitzgerald unravels it, Benjamin’s story serves as the pretext for some amusing, fairly superficial observations about child rearing, undergraduate behavior and courtship in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

From this odd, somewhat unpromising kernel, the director David Fincher and the screenwriter Eric Roth have cultivated a lush, romantic hothouse bloom, a film that shares only a title and a basic premise with its literary source. “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button,” more than two and a half hours long, sighs with longing and simmers with intrigue while investigating the philosophical conundrums and emotional paradoxes of its protagonist’s condition in a spirit that owes more to Jorge Luis Borges than to Fitzgerald.

While the film’s plot progresses, with a few divagations, in a straight line through the decades of Benjamin Button’s life, the backward vector of that biography turns this “Curious Case” into a genuine mystery. And the puzzles it invites us to contemplate — in consistently interesting, if not always dramatically satisfying ways — are deep and imposing, concerning the passage of time, the elusiveness of experience and the Janus-faced nature of love.

Above all, though, “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” is a triumph of technique. Building on the advances of pioneers like Steven Spielberg, Peter Jackson and Robert Zemeckis — and on his own previous work adapting newfangled means to traditional cinematic ends — Mr. Fincher (“Fight Club,” “Zodiac”) has added a dimension of delicacy and grace to digital filmmaking. While it stands on the shoulders of breakthroughs like “Minority Report,” “The Lord of the Rings” and “Forrest Gump” (for which Mr. Roth wrote the screenplay), “Benjamin Button” may be the most dazzling such hybrid yet, precisely because it is the subtlest. While he does treat the audience to a few grand, special-effect showpieces, Mr. Fincher concentrates his ingenuity on the setting and the characters, in particular — and most arrestingly — on the faces of his stars, Cate Blanchett and Brad Pitt.

Ms. Blanchett is Daisy, a dancer, bohemian and all-around free spirit who ages gracefully, before our eyes, into a stately modern matron and then into a wasted, breathless old woman. Mr. Pitt, for the most part, plays Benjamin, who is born, looking like a man in his 70s, into a prominent New Orleans family in 1918. I say for the most part because near the end of the movie Mr. Pitt is replaced by younger and younger children and also because, at the beginning, he is evoked by an uncanny computer-generated confection that seems to have been distilled from his essence. This creature, tiny and wizened, is at once boy and man, but in every scene the ratio is readjusted, until the strapping figure of a familiar movie star emerges, gradually and all but imperceptibly.

The inner life of Benjamin Button, abandoned at birth by his stricken father (Jason Flemyng) and raised by the infinitely kind caretaker of a nursing home (Taraji P. Henson), is harder to grasp than his outer appearance, in part because Mr. Pitt seems more interested in the nuances of reticence than in the dynamics of expression. It’s true that Benjamin’s condition imposes a certain detachment: he is at once innocent and ancient, almost never who he appears to be.

But even though Mr. Pitt’s coolness is a perfectly defensible approach to this character, his elusiveness, from one film to the next, is starting to look more defensive than daring. His recent performances have been devoted mainly to the study of his own magnetism, a quality he earnestly explores in “The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford” and playfully subverts in “Burn After Reading.” It goes without saying that Mr. Pitt has charisma to burn, and he is a capable and inventive actor, but he will only be a great one if he risks breaking himself open on screen as he did, briefly, in “Babel.”

And so, while Benjamin’s progress through life drives the narrative of “The Curious Case,” he is (as the title suggests) more an object of contemplation than a flesh-and-blood (or bit-and-byte) candidate for our empathy. His jaunt through the 20th century is certainly fun to watch, with an episodic rhythm that recalls old movie serials or, even more, the endlessly dilated adventures of newspaper comic-strip heroes. After some initiation into the pleasures of the flesh and the bottle in the city of his birth, Young Button (Old Button) hires onto a tramp steamer. He tarries a while in Russia, sampling caviar and adultery (with a superbly soignée Tilda Swinton) before World War II intrudes.

Later there will be sailboats and motorcycles as the ambient light turns gold along with Mr. Pitt’s hair. There will not be much in the way of big events or public happenings — Benjamin Button is, finally, no Forrest Gump — and though he is a white Southerner raised by a black woman, he seems untouched by racial turmoil or by much of anything beyond the mysteries of his peculiar destiny.

But the movie’s emotional center of gravity — the character who struggles and changes and feels — is Daisy, played by Ms. Blanchett from impetuous ingénue to near ghost with an almost otherworldly mixture of hauteur and heat. The story of Benjamin’s life is read to Daisy by her daughter (Julia Ormond) in a New Orleans hospital room in 2005, just as Hurricane Katrina is approaching the city. The imminence of the storm is a superfluous and unduly portentous device, since Katrina brings to mind precisely the hard, real-life miseries the movie has done everything in its power to avoid.

That power, though, is something to be reckoned with, and it resides in Mr. Fincher’s ability to use his unbelievable skills to turn an incredible conceit into a plausible love story. The romance between Daisy and Benjamin begins when both are chronologically pre-adolescents and Benjamin is, physically, a codger, but the initial element of pedophilic creepiness in the relationship gives way to other forms of awkwardness. Their love is uniquely perfect and enduring. At the same time, like any other love — like any movie — it is shadowed by disappointment and fated to end. In the case of “Benjamin Button,” I was sorry when it was over and happy to have seen it.

Rating: 3 & ½ Stars on 5

“The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” is rated PG-13 (Parents strongly cautioned). It has some scenes of sex and violence.