The Curious Case of Benjamin Button could not have existed without Brad Pitt, and I mean that not only commercially (though it is difficult to see a major studio bankrolling this picture without a top-tier star attached), but artistically as well. The present day Pitt is the film's big reveal, what the audience is led to anticipate for the first two-thirds of the film's run time, and when he does arrive, Cate Blanchett's Daisy sums up the moment with almost hilarious economy: "You're perfect." After two hours of watching Pitt shed special effect after special effect, turning him from a prematurely-pruned toddler to a long-haired Donald Rumsfeld look-alike to a, well, 60 year-old Brad Pitt, the moment the man himself does arrive has the punch of every magazine cover that has ever borne his image behind it, eliciting a Pavlovian response that is much a comment on the demi-religious nature of celebrity worship as anything the picture itself might intentionally hope to raise. That most of the film's final third closely tracks a Calvin Kline ad – sailing, moonlight trysts on the beach, Brad Pitt – only cements the effect.
I liked Benjamin Button; many did not. All of the criticisms are deadly accurate: it's three hours long (nowadays a sub-Lawrence of Arabia film can only presume upon an audience for two); sharing a screenwriter with Forrest Gump, it sometimes too closely tracks the former picture, though Pitt never shakes hands with FDR or anything; and it seems almost perilously naive about issues of race given its setting in Jim Crow-era New Orleans. Yet none of these flaws are fatal, and none undermine what is essentially a simple love story, albeit one with quasi-sci-fi underpinnings and the sweep of much of the twentieth century behind it. Director David Fincher, who delivered his masterpiece last time out with the vastly underappreciated Zodiac, brings his impeccable eye for composition and visual detail to bear here, though the ostentatious trickery that marked his mid-period work (Seven, Fight Club, Panic Room) is largely absent. All in all, I imagine that once the intense scrutiny of awards season has faded (and after the equally problematic Slumdog Millionaire has claimed its Oscars), Benjamin Button will be more kindly reassessed as a small picture ensnared in the body of an epic. That it sheds the lugubrious trappings of self-importance as its runtime wears on – and distinctly improves as a result – is either the film's slyest metaphysical conceit or an extraordinarily happy accident.
