Brad Pitt plays the title character in The Curious Case of Benjamin Button.

Merrick Morton

The bittersweet romantic fantasy The Curious Case of Benjamin Button is one of the most curious movies of the year, revolving as it does around a man who ages in reverse — born as a wizened man in his mid 80s and growing progressively younger as the years pass.

It’s an intriguing idea, based extremely loosely on a short story by F. Scott Fitzgerald, and directed by David Fincher, a curious choice as well in that his previous films have been action and suspense oriented. Seven, Alien 3, Panic Room, Zodiac and Fight Club are his, the latter starring Brad Pitt who has the title role in Benjamin Button … or at least the middle Benjamin Buttons. The character is also played through the years by three children plus an infant as well as by two older actors. Because Benjamin’s looks change so often, until he begins resembling Brad Pitt, it’s difficult to make a connection to the character. That’s part of the problem with nearly the first half of Benjamin Button. It’s a tour de force exercise for Pitt, but it’s not until Pitt, who has been nominated for a best actor Golden Globe award, starts looking like Pitt and the central love story comes into focus midway through this 2-hour-and-40-minute movie, that the story begins taking hold.

Much of the first third of The Curious Case of Benjamin Button — at least after his birth and abandonment on the steps of an old-age home by his distraught father — is really not all that interesting. The baby is taken in by a black woman named Queenie (Taraji P. Henson, doing a good imitation of Butterfly McQueen in Gone With the Wind) who works at the rest home; she immediately falls for Benjamin’s wizened little face and raises him as her own. Everyone believes the baby is destined to die very soon. But he rallies and, as the years pass, grows progressively younger.

The film is actually told by Benjamin himself, or at least his voice is heard on the soundtrack as a woman (Julia Ormond) who is tending to her dying mother in a New Orleans hospital begins reading from his diary which her mother has kept. As she reads, she discovers that the diary contains not only startling facts about Benjamin, but about Benjamin’s relationship to her mother, Daisy (Cate Blanchett, encased in old-age makeup for her deathbed scenes) and about her own history.

Benjamin was born in 1918, on the day everyone in New Orleans was celebrating the end of The Great War, and Fincher has filmed many of the early scenes with a brown patina overlay that give them the look of slightly faded photographs. As the story rambles around the world with the folksy Benjamin recounting his adventures — working on a tugboat skippered by Captain Mike (Jared Harris), finding love with an unhappily married British woman named Elizabeth (Tilda Swinton) during a stopover in Russia, landing in the middle of a U-boat attack on an Allied convoy in World War II — the episodic film has moments that recall Forrest Gump. Indeed, it was written by Eric Roth, who wrote the script for Forrest Gump. Yet Benjamin Button doesn’t have the heart or open-faced naïvete of that film, nor the same kind of charismatic character at its center. At least not at first.

For a story dealing in fantasy, it’s surprising that there’s not a whole lot of humor. Funniest is a running gag in which an old man at the rest home tells about the many times he had been struck by lightning … the film then immediately switching to scratchy black-and-white footage in which the man is blasted by another bolt.

Eventually Benjamin meets his childhood friend, Daisy, who was a frequent visitor to the rest home when he looked old. But now she is lithe and willowy, a ballet dancer in her 20s. It is now the late 1940s and Daisy has made inroads on Broadway, appearing in the closing ballet segment of Carousel, which Benjamin, now looking to be in his early 30s, attends. Hoping to make a connection with her after the show, he discovers sadly that Daisy has moved on in her life and has a new set of friends.

But fate intervenes and eventually Daisy and Benjamin discover the romance that they were destined to share … at least until he continues to grow younger as she ages. From the point that Daisy and Benjamin “meet in the middle” agewise, Benjamin Button is at its most interesting and its most poignant. As they try to hold their relationship together, Daisy especially realizes that time is pulling them apart. It is in their moments together that Pitt and Blanchett, who previously played the married couple in the midst of tragedy in the film Babel, connect to each other and to the audience. Theirs is a haunting, melancholy romance that resonates solidly and makes The Curious Case of Benjamin Button more than just a curiosity.

***The Curious Case of Benjamin Button

Starring: Brad Pitt, Cate Blanchett.

Rated: PG-13, contains violence, profanity, adult themes.

mjanuson@projo.com