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 I don’t know about you but I like to think of myself as the type of guy who isn’t easily swayed by what commercials tell me to do or how good they try to make any given product appear. I like to make up my own mind. Naturally, movies fall into this same category. So why then, the question must be asked did I go see The Curious Case of Benjamin Button: a movie whose lengthy title should serve as a hint to the length of the movie itself?
When I first saw a preview for this film I thought it looked interesting but probably wouldn’t be the greatest since it was so heavily hyped and movies that are heavily hyped are, in my experience, the ones that need the most hype so people will actually see them.
Then I started seeing all these commercials telling me how enchanting and mesmerizing it was and I thought ‘well, it is a David Fincher film and I sure did like Fight Club and Seven, the other two films he did with Benjamin Button lead Brad Pitt…oh what the hell I’ll see the damn thing.’ The about four hours later (assuming a combined total of one-hour commute to and from the theater and a roughly three hour-long motion picture) I thought ‘eh.’ In other words, I probably should have trusted my initial instincts. The following explains why:
Setting aside the initial special effects and make-up magic that made Pitt look like a freaky little old man and the various inspirational but repetitive dialog pieces like “You can be mad as a mad dog at the way things went; you can swear and curse the fates - but when it comes to the end, you have to let go”, for example, there really wasn’t that much to Benjamin Button. I mean, the guy was basically a cross between Forest Gump, Simon Birch and that weird dude from Slingblade living in a New Orleans home with the cast of Cocoon. And not even that much happened plot-wise.
This is basically the story: a kid is born old-looking, people are creeped-out, little girl (Daisy, played in older form by Cate Blanchett) is nice to wrinkly child, one assumes they’ll fall in love at some point, Button goes on a tugboat and sees the world while girl dances in New York, Button keeps getting younger (looking) as he ages, people get more confused than creeped-out but settle for clever one-liners as an explanation rather than concrete medical evidence, Button and Daisy hook up (see: Forest and Jenny) and have a kid, Button walks out on family so as to not creep-out child later in life when she has to change her dad’s diaper all in three short hours. So that’s my opinion. This one is a solid QUEEN. It’s probably not worth the full price of admission except in terms of quantity. Pretty neat special effects and some alright, but not Oscar-worthy, performances and the occasional inspirational quote for those who have a need of such things and the ability to glean them from the depressing trend of constantly reminding us we’re all getting old and dying the filmmakers chose to take.
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