The Curious Case Of Benjamin Button

(Spoiler Alert)

Everything I heard about this film made me not want to see it.  That includes the general boredom that everyone I knew expressed with it, the reviews from well-know critics, and even its own promotional material.  The plus side of all that negative press, however, was that when I finally rented the film a couple of nights ago my expectations were really low and it almost couldn’t help but meet them.  So, all in all, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button was a pleasing grand romance that would have benefited from being half as long and some drastic streamlining of the story. 

 

One of the most common criticisms leveled at Benjamin Button was that it was just like Forrest Gump, but not quite as good.  After having watched the film this criticism surprises me.  Sure there are people working on boats, going to war, etc., in both films.  But for the most part this comparison is mostly superficial.  Even if the films use similar methods, the end result is wholly different.  If Forrest Gump is a kind of extended buildungsroman with an ambiguous but uplifting ending, Benjamin Button is a tragic romance.  If the more recent film’s execution is less successful, that romantic element is at least vastly more appealing (to me) than Forrest Gump’s feel-good catalogue of twentieth century events. 

 

The reason that Benjamin Button is less entertaining than Forrest Gump (or a lot of films, for that matter) is because it seems to have lost its focus from the first scene.  It starts out with an elderly Daisy (played by Cate Blanchett) telling her daughter the story of Benjamin Button’s life through the journal he left behind.  Eventually we learn that the daughter’s father is actually Benjamin Button himself, but this does little to endear her to the audience.  She, like so many of the characters, seems to be included merely for expository purposes and, while the filmmakers would have had to be more creative in setting up the story, the film would have benefited from removing her.  This pattern gets repeated throughout the film.  Every time Benjamin Button and Daisy get together, or almost get together, the story soars.  Unfortunately they’re off doing other, irrelevant things for a lot of the film.  Benjamin’s romance with Elizabeth (played by Tilda Swinton), is good because it sets the stage for his later encounters with Daisy, but nearly everything that led up to that romance was extraneous.  So he’s from New Orleans, went to war, etc., etc.  The audience didn’t need such extensive background on Benjamin, nor most of what happens later.  In the end all that stuff could have been boiled down to a few minutes and while still producing similar—or rather, better—results. 

 

Unlike some films, this one doesn’t need all the filler.  It’s over two and half hours long. If it had been cut down by an hour it would have been more poignant and the admirable performances by most of the cast wouldn’t have lost.  Instead, I kept thinking the whole time how I really liked the idea of the story, but was wasting my time watching the whole movie.  Ultimately, that idea was powerful enough to keep me entertained, while wishing at the same time that it had been rendered more affectively.