The Curious Case of Benjamin Button - 3 1/2 smiles

“The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” is a fairy tale and either you accept it on its own terms or it doesn’t work. One element that helps is the high quality of acting although Brad Pitt, while beautiful to look at, is a weak link. Another is its attention to historical detail though the story seems to skim through these periods much too quickly. The film opens in August 2005 in New Orleans, with Hurricane Katrina on the fringes of everyone’s awareness. Lying on her deathbed is an 80-year old woman named Daisy (Cate Blanchett), whose daughter, Caroline (Julia Ormond), is nearby. To pass time, Caroline reads from the diary of a man named Benjamin Button (Brad Pitt), whose life repeatedly intersected with that of her mother. When Benjamin is born in 1918, he is an old man – the size of a baby but afflicted with all of the problems of old age. When the birth kills Benjamin’s mother, Benjamin’s father abandons him. He is found and raised by Queenie (Taraji P. Henson). By the time he is five or six, he has grown enough to appear like a bald, stooped-shouldered old man. And with each passing year, he becomes younger. His path first crosses Daisy’s when he is 13 and she will become the love of his life.

The film is structured in three major segments. The first is Benjamin’s childhood, where we see the unconditional love of his adopted mother has a lot to do with Benjamin being so well adjusted. The second occurs just before, during and after World War II. Benjamin has an affair with a middle-aged British woman (Tilda Swinton) in Russia, serves aboard a tugboat that manages to sink a German sub and returns home looking younger than when he left. The third section follows Benjamin into his ‘old age’ where he learns about happiness and sacrifice. Cate Blanchett brings vitality and animation to Daisy and the supporting cast, including Taraji P. Henson, Tilda Swinton, Jared Harris (as the captain of the tugboat on which Benjamin works), and Julia Ormond, make the most of limited screen time. Brad Pitt, while effective, is not totally successful in his portrayal of a man at odds with time. When Benjamin looks old, Pitt plays him as old. You don’t get the feeling he is a young man trapped in an old body. And when Benjamin looks young, Pitt plays him as young, not as an old man peering out of a young man’s eyes. And since believing Benjamin’s predicament rests with Pitt, the movie might not be as successful for some. Nonetheless, director David Fincher and screenwriter Eric Roth want you discuss nothing less than issues of life, death, happiness, sacrifice and fate after you’ve seen “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button.” 12/31/08