The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
A love story for his ages: 'Button' takes Pitt from old man to glowing youth
In "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button," Brad Pitt ages in reverse, from Methuselah to Robert Redford to infancy in about 2 1/2 hours. When Benjamin is 60 he looks 20, and we have on our hands the perfect movie for a time of enhanced age-defiance. And David Fincher, the movie's director, is a cosmetic surgeon of sorts, exacting a spectacularly artificial work of beauty. Watching a smooth face emerge from so much bunched and ruched skin is like seeing a piece of ripe fruit emerge from its husk. "Benjamin Button" is several hours of meticulous peeling - but not of a grapefruit but a grape.
Movie magic places Pitt's shriveled face on a tiny geriatric stunt body that somehow is never hideous. Sometime in 1918, Benjamin's disgusted father (Jason Flemyng), a New Orleans button baron, logically leaves his wizened bundle of joy on the steps of a retirement home. Its resident caretaker, a petite but assertive black woman named Queenie (Taraji P. Henson), takes a peek inside the blanket, recoils in surprise, but decides to raise him as the miracle baby he is. She bathes him, loves him, scolds him both as if he were her own son and another wrinkled mouth to feed.
There is some wonderful comedy in these sequences, particularly where Henson gets to perform a kind of exasperated compassion at the expense of her charges. She performs well beyond the limits of her allotted stereotype. Fincher also has a very good time sending his camera lurking around the house, getting close to the residents before they vanish. The movie sporadically reenacts a codger's tale of the seven times he was struck by lightning as an amusing silent-movie flipbook.
Benjamin, of course, watches his old friends fall apart while his physical enhancements confound everyone. "What elixir have you been drinking," asks one woman. His brothel trips suggest hookers are his Metamucil. By 1936 Benjamin is 17 going on 63, and the country certainly progresses with him. But we never see it. With creeping disappointment, you begin to realize that Fincher is engaged in gated-community filmmaking. The decades pass, and current events fail to make an appreciable dent on this man or this movie. Benjamin leaves Queenie, and, after some time at sea with a tugboat operated by a robustly nonsensical Jared Harris, he spends most of the war years in a Russian hotel attending a series of midnight rendezvous with Tilda Swinton, as a married Englishwoman.
These are lovely, delicately acted, superbly orchestrated sequences. Fincher appears to have let some steady warmth into his formal exactitude. "Se7en" and "Fight Club," both with Pitt, and last year's "Zodiac" are Fincher's dystopic signatures. But if this movie is uncharacteristically radiant (and, my, is it), then it's also aloof and unexpectedly ordinary. "Benjamin Button" shares its title with a 1922 F. Scott Fitzgerald short story. The film is not remotely as strange or coarse as its source. Fincher and the screenwriter Eric Roth have given the Fitzgerald story a glamorous facelift, focusing their film almost entirely on Benjamin's relationship with Daisy, the ballerina whom he adores. She happens to share her name and loveliness with Fitzgerald's most famous heroine. Cate Blanchett plays the part with resplendent, if unnatural serenity. She's not a woman here. She's a corsage. The movie gets as lost in them as they do in each other, which is more of a drag than watching Pitt and Blanchett should be. But it elevates their love to an impossible height. It's bigger than the Kennedy assassination, the Civil Rights Movement, Vietnam, and disco. Yet as romance, it never feels that momentous.
If this story of a kind of American savant's travels and travails sounds familiar, Roth also wrote "Forrest Gump." The movies are twin picaresques. In some ways, "Gump" was the riskier film since it acknowledged, however reductively, the world churning around its hero. When the Beatles' performance of "Twist and Shout" on "Ed Sullivan" plays during a montage of Benjamin and Daisy's homemaking and lovemaking, you wonder whether they can truly hear it.
There would probably be no reason to notice the movie's sense of disconnection were Hurricane Katrina not nipping at its heels. The story is told in flashbacks that spring from Benjamin's diary, from which old Daisy's grown daughter (Julia Ormond - she lives!) reads aloud at her mother's sickbed. The storm and its waters eventually join WWII, that Beatles song, and the codger's fabled lightning strikes as part of the film's ornamental finery. For all its astounding physical scale, the movie's force of vision is small. This Katrina wouldn't disturb a snow dome.
At its most profound, "Benjamin Button" isn't about anything more important than Pitt's very handsomeness, which, for a surprising stretch of time, is a wonderful subject for study. There is a sad scene that requires him to leave a room, and the sheer fact of how young he seems really is breathtaking. I almost gasped at one point. His acting here is entirely static and observational. It's exactly what Pitt did as Death in "Meet Joe Black": He just sits there. And yet this time there's something alluring about that: He's sitting to have a filmmaker take an elaborate photo. That's a painstaking process, but it's the one portrait Fincher gets completely right.
Wesley Morris can be reached at wmorris@globe.com. 