Mini-Review: The Curious Case of Benjamin Button

“The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” is a curious little movie. Well, maybe “little” isn’t the right adjective. Other words spring to mind more readily, words like “gargantuan,” “titanic,” or, to be more straightforward about it, “really, really, really long.” “Benjamin Button” sprawls out for two hours and forty-six minutes, and it feels every bit as long—if not a couple hours longer.

I admit to having a bit of a prejudice against long movies. They smell like pretension. For a director to lavish two hours and change on his movie means he thinks very, very highly of himself and his art. I ask: no matter how great your story is, does it really merit two hours of my time? My time is precious. I could be doing something valuable, like learning to play the flute, or baking a nice carrot cake. Now, I grant there are exceptions. “The Godfather” was nearly three hours, but it was worth it.

“Benjamin Button” is no “Godfather.” Heck, it’s not even a “Godfather, Part III.” It’s a nice movie that’s been overblown to grotesque proportions, like a water balloon stretched to the bursting point. Filled with sludge, I might add.

The movie’s central conceit is that the main character, the titular Benjamin Button (played by Brad Pitt) is born old and gets younger and younger. He sprouts hair from his bald dome, grows a new set of muscles, and loses his fondness for “Wheel of Fortune” and all-you-can-eat buffets. Well, I’m kidding about that last part. The rest is God’s honest truth. We follow Benjamin as he grows from a gnarled and warped centarian into a strapping Brad Pitt.

It’s an interesting idea, and director David Fincher pulls it off wonderfully—for the first act of the movie. That first hour is tinged with the wonderful, the magical, and the grotesque. We’re bombarded with fantastic images: a 100-year-old baby, a clock that runs backwards, an empty hotel in the midnight sun. It’s feels like some kind of Latin America magical realist novel brought to life.

Benjamin begins—or ends?—his life in a New Orleans old folks’ home. Unlike in the latter half of the movie, here Fincher really explores the possibilities of Benjamin’s curious condition. What would it be like for a young boy to live in the shell of an old man? Who would take care of him? Who would befriend him? Where would he find a job, find love, find sex? That last one is answered quite a few times. I still haven’t decided whether I found those scenes disgusting or hilarious.

Then we get to part two of the movie and things fall apart. Benjamin spends the first part of his life as a sailor, but it’s not till he ends up on shore that the movie goes adrift. The aging-backwards thing goes out the window. Sure, perhaps Brad Pitt’s face gets a little less lined, and some of the gray vanishes from his hair. But it’s still Brad Pitt, mostly unchanged. The idea that he’s aging in reverse is completely ignored during the movie’s middle third.

Instead of the magical realism of the first hour, we get stuck with a drearily pedestrian love story. Man-boy meets girl, man-boy loses girl, girl goes to New Orleans to find man-boy, man-boy goes to New York to find girl…you know it all by heart. Benjamin will spurn his love, Daisy (Cate Blanchett), because that’s the way it’s always done. He will feel guilty about it. And he will track her down and have passionate make-up sex.

Never let it be said that I’m not generous. I lay the blame at the feet of everyone involved, from Fincher on down. Fincher’s guilty of allowing the movie to drag. Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett, for their part, make a singularly uninspired couple. I think Pitt’s trying to play an Everyman. Someone ought to tell him there’s a reason nobody wins an Oscar for playing Everyman: he’s as boring as hell. We know Everyman. We live down the street from him, or work with him, or see him every day at the grocery store.

Somehow, the final third of the movie lags even more. It’s so damn slow, you expect the film to start running backwards, rather than Benjamin’s biological clock. When Benjamin leaves Daisy because he can’t take care of their kid—him being on his way back to childhood, after all—I thought the movie was over. When he meets Daisy again a few years down the road, I thought that was the end of the movie. When Daisy discovers a ten-year-old Benjamin at the hospital, I really, really hoped the movie was over. And when Daisy starts taking care of a diaper-ready Benjamin, I was praying for God to put the film out of its misery.

Finally, he did. Benjamin’s dead—how, I won’t say, but it’s singularly disappointing given all the possibilities—and so is Daisy. Wow, what a trip that was! And it only took two hours and forty six minutes. Next time, I’ll just make a carrot cake.