The Curious Case of Benjamin Button - Movie Review

There's not much playing out there worth seeing so time to catch up on the Academy Award nominees, if we can find them. The only one we could find that we haven't seen that's still playing was The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. So off we went.

Surprisingly, there were quite a few people there which means we weren't alone in looking for something worth seeing. Unfortunately, this wasn't quite worth it. I liked parts of it - more of the scenes towards the middle worked for me better than the ones at the beginning and end and, please, spare me the wrap around technique of having the main character look back on the action of the movie, either through their own memory or by reading a diary. Cut out those scenes and the movie doesn't suffer so they're not needed anyway.

No, the conceit of the movie didn't work for me at all. Of course, it's fantasy and not realistic at all but the premise of a character aging backwards just doesn't work. It's an occurrence that no one can really relate to. No, you can't relate to space or time travel or battling Orcs or vampires, either, but in those kinds of fantasy/sci-fi plots, there's still something to ground you to human experience. We experience time in a certain manner - from the beginning to end - and trying to tell a story of a character that experiences time backwards, well, it doesn't work. Especially when the emotions expressed are simply the same emotions you'd find in the same story told about a conventional character: life is sad but sometimes happy. (And, yes, Brad Pitt is beautiful, but for only short stretches. Most of the time he doesn't look like Brad Pitt.)

Well, it was the only thing out there so it was good enough to spend while away an afternoon.