Buttoning Down the Hatches to Write

I can picture parts of a Slumdog Millionaire review, but not a beginning or an end. However, I made myself sit at the computer while doing laundry this afternoon, and somehow a review of The Curious Case of Benjamin Button came to be.

I dragged my feet on seeing this and finally went more than a week after Oscar nominations were announced. I can't remember the last time I hadn't seen all the Best Picture nominees before the reveal of the final five - pathetic for me. I wish the wait had been worth it. I wish I liked Button as much as Sandra, my cousin Tom, and later my parents did. Nope.

I'll say this much: It's the better Brangelina film of 2008.

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button represents a case of grand moviemaking gone curiously stillborn.

About an hour and a half into this Oscar-nominated epic, I wrote, “This is supposed to be a big, great, sweeping, magical film, and yet … this movie is inert.” That I could compose that coherent a sentence while watching this time-traveling drama proves how unengaged I felt. When Cate Blanchett and her Australian counterpart, Tilda Swinton, were on screen, I found Button involving (as long as Blanchett wasn’t slathered in makeup). Otherwise, David Fincher’s direction needed more vigor to keep boredom from pervading my thoughts.

That’s right. This is David Fincher, the same Fincher who made Fight Club and Zodiac. While those films mesmerize and energize, Button is, all too often, sluggish and remote. For every well-shot, suspenseful torpedo tugboat scene, we have dialogue overwhelmed by Alexandre Desplat’s score and Brad Pitt looking as if he’s auditioning for a remake of The Way We Were. We also have a movie where pancake and powder are the order of the day, characters in their own distracting way. “Pretty” usually wins out over “substance” in Button.

The screenwriter of Forrest Gump, Eric Roth, is adapting again, this time his own 1994 movie ... I mean, an F. Scott Fitzgerald story about a man (Pitt) aging backward. (The adaptation is very, very loose.) A babe is born, looking eightysomething, in 1918 New Orleans and abandoned by his father on the steps of an old folks’ home run by a Gone with the Wind-esque mammy (Taraji P. Henson). As time advances, our boy, played by Pitt in various layers of makeup and computer manipulation, becomes physically younger, and he connects with one resident’s granddaughter (Blanchett; Elle Fanning as a child). At points, we break from the flashbacks for wheezy dying sequences in August 2005 in a Southern hospital.

In Gump, history pivoted around Tom Hanks’ character. In Button, the characters aren’t connected to the outside world, minus the badly shoehorned Hurricane Katrina framing. We didn’t need Benjamin to, say, overhear Truman planning the use of the atomic bomb, but Button uses history the way lazy filmmakers employ the Empire State Building as an establishing New York shot. It’s throwaway at best, Symbolism 101 at worst.

Surprisingly, the love story between Benjamin and Daisy captivated this grouchy cynic. “Sleep with me,” she moans when they’re finally in an age-appropriate relationship. “Absolutely,” he replies, eagerly. It’s the sexiest thing People’s two-time Sexiest Man Alive has ever said, and it catapults Button in a way none of the special effects do.

In a long black jersey dress and flowing red hair, ballet dancer Blanchett isn’t the siren one expects but instead a lovely evoker of wistful melancholy. Swinton plays an earlier Benjamin lover, an older, dissatisfied woman whose arc comes to a delightful, quirky conclusion. As for Pitt, it’s hard to say how what he’s doing for much of Button is acting. He’s mostly posing and reacting, often deficient in emotion. Brad, give your nomination to Leo.