The Curious Case of Benjamin Buttons
There’s a lot of fancy CG effects in The Curious Case of Benjamin Buttons. There’s the site of a Brad Pitt growing younger as he ages. There’s a riveting attack on a German U-boat. There’s a wonderful, old-timey gag on lightning strikes. And there is Cate Blanchett — young and old.
There was the CG effects, and it dominated every scene of the movie to a point that I had to think about what wasn’t real and was. Then I thought about how they pulled that off. Did they put Brad Pitt’s head on a kid? A midget? Or was he completely built up as a CG model like Neo in the later Matrix films. The most intriguing CG was the your Cate Blanchett. How did they graft her face on that body so seamlessly? Or did they digitally stretch and shape her to look young and svelte?
The effects really got in the way of the story. It was a short story from F. Scott Fitzgerald, but was mainly written and adapted by the guy who did Forest Gump. It shows. Benjamin Button seemed to go from one thing to the next just as Forest did. So the story was rather meager. It was filled with love, but was so boring.
And it was long. The problem was that Brad Pitt is in his 40s and when he reached the look of his natural age, the movie was already two hours old. We followed that dude to the grave and it felt like it.
It also had an unfortunate framing device of the old Cate in the hospital dying and her daughter (Julia Ormand!!!!) reading Benjamin’s diary in New Orleans as hurricane Katrina bears down on them. You get too worried about the present to enjoy the past. I’m hoping Julia Ormand made it out of New Orleans to safety.
Just not that good and intriguing. A disappointment from Fincher (!) whose last film was very, very good.
2 of 5 stars.
