The Curious Movie about Benjamin Button

I don’t know what’s gotten into me lately but it seems like every entertainment I encounter these days seems overly long; too digressive and seemingly filled with look-what-I-can-do bravado, sometimes without rhyme or reason. This includes the 75-minute “show-biz insider” off-Broadway musical What’s That Smell, which seems to be meant solely for the Regina Dramatica among us and on which I have chosen not to waste and further words.

Proceeding onward: Buried in the epic and bloated The Curious Case of Benjamin Button is a great work of cinematic art. The first 20-30 minutes are baffling and beautiful and interestingly quirky and otherworldly, which is as it should be in a story that follows the life of a man from death to birth. Beginning in 1917 and ending in what I think is about 1995 it covers a lot of historical ground while accompanying Benjamin from his birth as a baby in his 90’s to his death as an old man in infancy. If that’s confusing, so be it…you’ll just have to see the movie or Google it for a better explanation.

The movie holds your attention within its two-and-a-half-hour length but at times it seems to be striving so hard to be, I don’t know what, artistic? that sometimes I did feel a tiny bit of oh-c’mon-get-on-with-it ennui. One thing I can say for sure, the special effects are spectacular and the digital wizards in charge of the reverse-aging process of Benjamin Button have performed some kind of believable miracle. This is not entirely true of other characters (including Cate Blanchett) who seems to have had the disadvantage of good but “ordinary” aging make-up, but Brad Pitt, who plays the title character from the age of about 65 down to, say, about 18 has the supreme advantage of this digital genius. There is one extremely jangling moment however, when Mr. Button is chronologically about 28 and Mr. Pitt is given the full HOLLYWOOD STAR treatment and an audible gasp echoes throughout the theater as the audience gives tribute to a recognizable movie star as his beauty is revealed in all its sensitive, but manly, glory.

Benjamin Button ranks right up there in my favorites movies of 2008 but really, enough is enough with the snow-choked streets of Russia. The story stems from the reading (and movie narration) of the diary of Benjamin Button to a dying patient in a hospital room, which is certainly an acceptable presentation device, but I’m not really sure why it has to take place in New Orleans as Hurricane Katrina is bearing down. Also, we are treated (more than once) to a symbolic humming bird beating its wings against the elements that might be too obvious for me to understand fully. I guess I just have to remember this story is a fantasy and proceed accordingly.

Despite my caveats and misunderstandings the creators deserve the highest praise for creativity, imagination, execution and the sheer audacity of it. It is a very, very good movie. Oh, by the way, Brad Pitt shouldn’t win any acting prizes for this role and I just hope voters don’t mix up great acting with great make-up, digital and not. But more curious things have happened.