In adapting the Fitzgerald story, screenwriter Eric Roth has essentially recycled his three-hanky, Oscar-winning approach to Forrest Gump (1994). All the important components are in place: We have a huge swath of American history viewed through the eyes of a unique protagonist who comes from the Deep South, a love story that contrasts the protagonist’s relative innocence with his true love’s defiant hedonism, and a rogue’s gallery of interesting supporting characters that in some way touch or change the protagonist’s life. It is certainly an effective approach to epic storytelling, and it allows the central conceit of Benjamin’s backward aging to take on a particularly poignant hue because it inherently isolates him amid the turmoil of history (although racial issues, which should have been central, are all but ignored). With the exception of a brief period when Benjamin and his true love are the same age physically and chronologically, at all other times he is progressing in his own alternate universe, a place in which mind and body are headed in opposite directions.

It is particularly intriguing that the film was directed by David Fincher, who is best known for dark, twisting, and deeply cynical films like Seven (1995), Fight Club (1999), and Zodiac (2007). It would seem that Fincher’s moody visual proclivities and fascination with the more disturbing impulses in human nature (particularly anger and obsession) would be in direct conflict with Roth’s rather mushy temperament, but in fact they intertwine quite harmoniously, turning Benjamin Button into a fascinating paradox when it could have been mere treacle. Fincher brings his darker sensibility to bear on the story’s inherent whimsy, which gives it a weight and heft it might have otherwise lacked.

The story opens in a hospital room where an aged woman named Daisy (Cate Blanchett) lies dying in her bed and asks her granddaughter (Julia Ormond) to read to her from a diary written by the titular Benjamin Button (Brad Pitt). Benjamin thus narrates most of his life, beginning in New Orleans on the night in 1918 that marked the end of World War I. Born as an infant with the physical appearance and the frailties of a man 80 years of age, Benjamin is deserted by his father (Jason Flemyng) after his mother dies in childbirth. He is left on the doorstep of a black woman named Queenie (Taraji P. Henson) who runs a boarding house for the elderly. Since her heart is as large as her accent is thick, Queenie takes in the wrinkly baby, thinking that he will soon die. However, he does not die, but rather grows up like a normal child, albeit with the physical effects of aging running in reverse.

It is when he is a 12-year-old (who looks like a shrunken old man) that Benjamin first meets Daisy, and they strike up a friendship that will eventually develop into a romance in the years ahead. In the meantime, though, Benjamin goes through the travails of life, losing his virginity in a bawdy house of ill repute, learning the in’s and out’s of rugged manhood from a rascally Irish tugboat captain named Mike (Jared Harris), and seeing the world as part of the tugboat crew. During an extended stay in a Russian port he meets and falls in love with a married British woman (Tilda Swinton), who treats him to his first lesson in heartbreak. It won’t be the last, though, as he returns to woo Daisy, who is now an outgoing twentysomething ballet dancer more interested in casual sex and having fun than settling down into a significant romance, although it is clear that her youthful impulses will at some point fade against the pull of true love.

If the script is sometimes uneven and the dialogue a bit too self-consciously pithy, the underlying emotions in Benjamin Button keep it afloat. The film’s conceit of backward aging is deployed with both physical verisimilitude (the combination of digital and practical effects are simply amazing in their seamlessness) and thematic poignancy, which is most memorably captured when Benjamin and Daisy stand in front of a mirror together, a fleeting moment of togetherness that summarizes the film’s underlying preoccupation with the inherent transience of happiness. Pitt’s performance as Benjamin captures his character’s aloneness in the world, and if at times he seems like a bit of a blank slate, it is only because he is so fundamentally different, so radically out of synch with the natural processes that connect the rest of humanity. His trajectory is both fascinating in that it allows him to enjoy the benefits of life experience in a youthful body, but also sad in that he cannot share it with anyone (as he writes in his diary, “I will go out of this world the same way I came in--alone”). His happiness with Daisy can never last simply because they cannot age together, which is arguably the tie that binds lifelong love. He is destined to regress to infancy--his literal second childhood--and the scene in which the elderly Daisy cares for him in his final years have an especially bittersweet touch.

Whenever the film threatens to become too weighty for its own good, Fincher gives us a small surprise, such as an amusing recurring gag involving an elderly gent randomly mentioning one of the seven times he was struck by lightning (which are depicted via jerky silent-movie-era aesthetics). However, he fundamentally miscalculates the framing story, whose use of Hurricane Katrina as yet another milestone history marker (joining World Wars I and II, the launching of Apollo 11, and the Beatles performing on television) is both heavy-handed and ultimately meaningless. Yet, even with its missteps, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button maintains its intrigue as it elucidates, if only briefly, Robert Frost’s poetic proclamation that nothing gold can stay.

Copyright ©2009 James Kendrick

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