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London,
Derek Malcolm's rating
Reader rating
Dir: David Fincher.
Cast: Brad Pitt, Cate Blanchett, Taraji P Henson, Jared Harris, Julia Ormond, Jason Flemyng
Description: In 1918, an expectant father gives up his newborn son because the mewling infant looks like an old man, with ossified bones and wrinkled skin. African-American retirement home nurse Queenie takes pity on the abandoned babe and raises the child, astonished that as Benjamin grows older, he looks younger. As the years pass, Benjamin becomes ever more vibrant. When he is eventually strong and old enough to leave the retirement home, Benjamin seeks his fortune aboard a tugboat captained by a hard-drinking Irishman and embarks on a tumultuous love affair with a beautiful ballet dancer.
Country: US. 2008. 165mins
Pitt the younger: Button (Brad Pitt) is born with a genetic condition that means he begins life as a wizened old man and dies a baby
Pitt the elder: Brad with Tilda Swinton
Any film which has gathered 13 Oscar nominations demands to be treated with respect, but it is only occasionally that this near-three-hours-long adaptation of a thin novella by F Scott Fitzgerald deserves anything more. An intended tour de force, it is strangely unable to engage the emotions. In the end it amounts to an overweight movie that delivers less than its clever director, David Fincher, seems to think.
Charting Button’s life from birth to death, but the wrong way round — in that he is born a wrinkled veteran and progresses remorselessly towards middle-age, youth and childhood — the film tries to tell us something about time, coincidence, fate and even the history of the 20th century. Yet, despite a certain panache, it’s an oddly one-paced piece from the maker of the swingeing pyrotechnics of Se7en and Fight Club.
You do have to admire the efficacy of the make-up team, however, as Button (Brad Pitt) and Daisy (Cate Blanchett), his lifelong love, progress through life, from old to young, in opposite directions. From the moment Button is born to his dying mother and emerges a wizened old man, rejected by his father and taken in by a kindly nursing-home helper (Taraji P Henson), the real Pitt is successfully and successively plastered with greasepaint and latex until he reaches roughly his own age. Whereupon Blanchett exclaims: “You’re just perfect!” At this point, you can’t help smiling at Eric Roth’s screenplay, which otherwise is as po-faced as anything he penned for the Oscar-winning but dire Forrest Gump.
We enter the film just before Hurricane Katrina strikes, as the dying Daisy, prosthetically altered, provides the gaps between the details of Button’s life read aloud to her at her hospital bedside by her daughter (Julia Ormond) from a diary. We end it before the First World War, and this long history is given detailed production values that at least make the film a visual treat.
There are also some imaginative sequences from Fincher that render it more than that. At one point a slow-motion battlefield scene moves backwards through the carnage as fallen soldiers rise up again and the landscape grows less and less pockmarked by shells. At another, we see, bit by bit, the baleful influence of coincidence on the accident that results in Daisy losing her capacity to dance as a ballerina. If one tiny thing hadn’t happened, the taxi would not have run into her.
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Mostly, Roth’s tepid screenplay, during which the plot progresses with the aid of a voiceover, only allows a prosaic telling of the story, as if its amazing nature is enough of its own accord.
The result is watchable but uninvolving, with Pitt and Blanchett often seeming as much figures within a landscape as real flesh and blood. These are by no means bad performances but you only have to savour Tilda Swinton’s brief turn as another lover Button encounters, in Russia, to see how an actor can transcend the material.
The film’s inordinate length doesn’t help. It just seems to go on and on, usually in one gear, as Button wanders the globe seeking enlightenment after inheriting a fortune and losing the love of his life by whom he has fathered a child. Never at any point do you feel that there’s anything more to it than a very strange story traversed by a film-maker who knows what he is doing but not always why he is doing it. It’s true that Fitzgerald’s short book was no more satisfactory and, in fact, less stylishly done. In the case of the film, you leave the cinema wanting more from less.
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The film was so long i felt i had progressively aged by 10 years from beginning to end. I was left more curious by such a waste of a good storyline and the complete bypass of the relationships between the blacks and whites in 1930s Southern America than enamoured with the burning questions of life and death. A big disappointment.
- H, Bucks, UK
Very boring film. I was very dissapointed - total waste of time and money [on my part]. Couldnt agree more with this review.
- Kataobi, London, UK
I agree with this review. The film was not emotionally engaging at all which was perhaps the most disappointing aspect, and yet I've heard tales of people, friends of mine, crying their eyes out. Very stange. Although you say the short story was no more satisfactory and perhaps less stylish, I found it more touching than the film. The possibilties for a film were so exciting, I felt really let down.
- Kate, Birmingham, England
I agree with David Fincher. It is a poor and over-long film, it bored me enough that I felt obliged to walk out. I didn't even care what happened in my absence.
- Neil MacDonald, Melbourne, Australia
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