Magic. If there is a single key ingredient in movies, it is this. Magic lives in those moments in film where we cast off the bonds of our reality and exchange them for the straight jacket of a good story. Magic is believing in something, no matter how unlikely, because sometimes we forget how to believe in things. Sometimes we worry that we’ve discovered everything on the map and that there’s no new lines to be drawn.
Benjamin Button should have been all about this, couched in the style and class that only a high budget, epic-length Hollywood film punctuated with heartthrobs and starlets can. Instead, it comes off as one of the most self-important, unremarkable and boring films in recent memory. Thankfully, I have no long-term memory for truly weak films and am looking forward to forgetting about this one entirely.
My initial hope was that Button would be a picaresque, a journey film in the vein of “Forrest Gump” and “Into The Wild,” where an individual sets out on the road to find their fortune, a little love and maybe even themselves. The charm of these tales comes from our lead’s chance encounters on their travels. Colorful, memorable characters with a kind of vulnerable honesty and some wisdom to offer about life.
Button was a prime candidate for this, the titular character constantly skirting the fine line of life and death. Instead, all the colorful characters are so excited to be here that they’re practically spewing fortune-cookie life lessons out of every orifice, just itching to frost Button in a sticky film of chicken soup for the soul. And maybe we’d all give a damn if Button weren’t such a breathtaking unentity, but Pitt’s overblown Louisiana accent and incessant stuffy narration drain him of all his folksy, Johnny Appleseed charm.
In the end, he’s just a vehicle for the backward-aging gimmick at the film’s putrid center. The movie feels like it has everything riding on how amazing this is supposed to be to us, but if you strip that away the film simply has no soul. I can’t believe in magic when it’s being spoon-fed to me in every scene. I need subtlety, something the “gee, life sure is grand” dialogue can’t accommodate.
The acting is easily some of the most mundane I’ve seen of Pitt and Blanchett, two actors I hold in very high esteem for doing the exact opposite of what they do for three agonizing hours in this film. Then again, Blanchett was part of the nightmare known as “Indiana Jones 4,” so perhaps there is no saving her at this point.
What may be the worst sin this film commits is doing everything we expect it to. It’s trying so hard to be a classical tale of two starcrossed lovers that it shoots right past all the nuances of the human experience and goes straight for the most tragic bullet points. And it’s not just predictable because the trailer telegraphs every major scene to you though it does and you should avoid watching it. It’s predictable because the boy meets the girl, the boy and the girl part ways, the boy and the girl reunite after some hard-learned lessons, and pain and joy come in equal measures as they make some hard decision of some kind.
I just can’t bring myself to care.
The movie is very well made and very well shot, but at 150 million dollars it damn well better be. And it also earns the dubious honor of biggest WTF moment of 2008, which is its very pointless and even more unnecessarily tragic ending that comes so far out of left field I could swear it was right.
I worry that people will walk out of this movie and think they saw something original, even Oscar worthy, but in the end it’s just a long, sad movie, and there are enough of those already.
Rating: 1/5 stars
