Adapted from a short story by F. Scott Fitzgerald, David Fincher's latest is about a man, Benjamin Button (Brad Pitt), who ages backwards. His mother dies in childhood and his father, repulsed by his haggard baby boy, leaves him on the steps of an old people's home where Benjamin is brought up by Queenie (Taraji P. Hensen). There he meets a young girl, Daisy, who later grows up to be Cate Blanchett, a ballet dancer who is later crippled in an accident and who becomes the love of Benjamin's life. Twee, sentimental, maybe even a little condescending at times, Fincher's film works in fits and starts. The stunning cinematography, set design and special effects are captivating, although the latter become distracting by the time Benjamin hits his early 20s and the audience is left staring at Brad Pitt's eerily unlined face. There are definitely some longeurs, in particular an unneeded story involving Benjamin witnessing Pearl Harbour. The acting is erratic also. Benjamin is little more than a cypher, leaving Pitt little to work with and Blanchett is surprisingly uninvolving but Tilda Swinton and Julia Ormond, as Benjamin's lover and daughter respectively, bring a bit of emotional heft to the material. The movie ends by offering up a message that we must try new things, that it's never too late to become someone new. It's trite (and hardly unexpected from the writer of Forrest Gump), but delivered with enough sincerity to ensure that when we witness the elderly Daisy caring for Benjamin through his infancy and up to his death as a baby in her arms, that I was left with a few sniffles. As a follow-up to Fincher's marvellous Zodiac, this is a disappointment, but it's not entirely without its charms.
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