Though Hollywood suits have been trying to make it for decades, "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button" is not a project that cries out to be filmed. Now that it's finally been turned into a major motion picture, complete with megawatt stars Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett, you have to wonder why everyone bothered.
As enervating as it is long -- and at 2 hours and 47 minutes it is quite long -- this version of the F. Scott Fitzgerald fantasy short story is a baffling project, an endurance test of a movie that feels like it was made on a dare.
FOR THE RECORD
'Benjamin Button': A photograph of a scene in "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button" on the cover of Thursday's Calendar section was incorrectly attributed to Digital Domain /Paramount Pictures. It should have been credited to Dan Holland / Paramount Pictures.
"Benjamin Button's" central conceit, the story of a man who ages backward, who is born old and dies an infant, is about the only thing that has been retained from Fitzgerald's original piece of 1922 whimsy.
Both screenwriter Eric Roth ("Forrest Gump," "The Insider") and director David Fincher have used that notion as no more than a departure point, a framework on which to hang what feels like a random string of dramatic incidents. That makes "Benjamin Button" play like making the best of an assignment rather than something created out of genuine passion.
Yet passion is part of what this film is supposed to be about, as it tells the decidedly peculiar love story of Benjamin (Pitt) and Daisy (Blanchett), a couple whose romance is constantly thwarted by the fact that Benjamin's body almost never matches up with his chronological age. Adults who sniffed at the obstacles Bella and Edward faced in "Twilight" get their comeuppance as they're expected to swallow this equally implausible scenario and proclaim it art.
Even given all those inherent obstacles, "Benjamin Button" would've had a better chance of success if it had landed in the hands of a director with more of a facility for telling emotional stories than Fincher, whose films include "Se7en," "Fight Club" and "Zodiac." No wonder everything feels icy and removed. Giving Fincher this project is like asking the great French humanist director Jean Renoir to do a slasher movie. As my mother used to say, no good will come of this.
As written by Roth (screen story credit goes to him and Robin Swicord), "Benjamin Button" departs almost immediately from Fitzgerald's story, which had BB born a full-grown old man. That would have been too bizarre, but what the film comes up with has problems of its own.
