Film review: The Curious Case of Benjamin Button

Brad Pitt's latest offering, The Curious Case Of Benjamin Button, is being promoted with a trailer that seems expressly designed to discourage you from seeing the film.

It summarises the whole plot, simplifying it to such a point that the film's grotesqueries are magnified and its subtleties obliterated.

All you really take away from it is the fact that you've been shown how Pitt will look at 80 if he's especially unlucky and contracts emphysema and crippling arthritis.

The film itself is a lot better than that. It's a speculative and enthralling fantasy about what it would be like to age in reverse.

It was F Scott Fitzgerald who came up with the character of Benjamin after being inspired by a remark of Mark Twain's. Twain thought it a pity that the best of life came at the beginning and the worst at the end.

From this thought, which occurs to most of us at one time or another, Fitzgerald fashioned a cynically comic short story about Benjamin, a baby who is born looking and sounding like a crotchety old man.

To his own amazement and delight, he grows progressively younger until he reaches the prime of his life, enjoying great happiness with marriage, children and a successful business.

Then all too soon, age steps in again, gradually turning him into a boy whom no one will take seriously. In effect, Fitzgerald has trumped Twain by pursuing his observation to its inevitable conclusion. However the life cycle is arranged, Fitzgerald makes the statement that you can't win - time always has the last word.

Hollywood has been interested in this glib little fable for years and in the early 1990s writer-director Robin Swicord ( The Jane Austen Book Club) embarked on a draft screenplay. Twelve more followed, a series of potential directors came and went and the script acquired a reputation as one of Hollywood's best unproduced screenplays. Finally, David Fincher came on board with Eric Roth, author of the Oscar-winning script for Forrest Gump. Benjamin's story has much in common with Forrest Gump, by the way, with a similarly picaresque shape and the same underlying philosophy - that you must deal with life as best you can using the tools you've been given.

The difference lies in this film's complete lack of sentimentality. Fincher's films are known for the bleakness of their settings, their preoccupation with violence and their tobacco-stained palettes. He's hardly type-casting for a fairytale like this one where the only acts of violence are those by time itself. His only other brush with the fantastic was Alien 3, the grimmest instalment in the series. Yet he proves to be the perfect choice.

He's taken the sourness out of Fitzgerald's story to produce a reflectiveness brightened by moments of sardonic humour and he's softened the murky look he usually favours with warm flashes of colour and light.

Benjamin's mother dies on the night of his birth in New Orleans in 1918 and his grief-stricken father takes one look at the wrinkled baby and dashes out into the night with him, abandoning him on the steps of the first house he comes to.

Fittingly enough, it turns out to be an old people's home and the residents, who've seen most things in the course of their lives, are intrigued rather than appalled. Benjamin is adopted by Queenie (Taraji P. Henson), the home's black housekeeper, and during his childhood and adolescence he's treated to a comprehensive series of lessons about the transience of life as all his elderly housemates die, only to have others take their place. Along the way, Benjamin himself gradually sheds the infirmities of senescence and meets Daisy (Elle Fanning), a girl of his own age, who will eventually grow into Cate Blanchett and become the love of his life.

The story is told in flashback as Blanchett's Daisy lies on her deathbed, voice annoyingly muffled under an excess of prosthetic make-up. It's a rare mistake. In every other instance, the film uses prosthetics and digital effects with startling skilfulness. I have no idea how you can still see Pitt in the bent, gnarled figure of the early scenes but you can. The film's pacing also has something to do with the convincing way in which he changes. At 159 minutes, its running time seems leisurely rather than slow. And it's certainly not measured, which is too dull a word to describe its serpentine twists and affecting switches in mood.

Again like Gump, Benjamin has a perpetually youthful spirit. He's a listener rather than a talker, remaining open to every opportunity that's thrown at him, but while he greets the results with amiable wonder at life's richness, he doesn't go on about it.

Daisy is more temperamental. Full of high expectations, she goes off to New York to try to fulfil them as a ballet student, while Benjamin goes to sea.

Many adventures follow, including an odd, witty and ultimately poignant romance with Tilda Swinton as an unhappy embassy wife with an urge to swim the English Channel.

But the film's centrepiece is Benjamin's reunion with Daisy, whose self-absorption has now been tempered by disappointment to a graceful acceptance of all that she has been able to glean from her experiences.

It's a great performance of Blanchett's and there's something moving about the brief, golden period when she and Benjamin become the perfect couple.

Underpinning it all is a meditation on the double-edged nature of time and the spiralling twists a life takes en route to its end. Time is brutal, the film is saying. Fitzgerald was right about that. Yet there can be moments that defeat time by enduring as long as they remain in someone's memory.

I urge you - avoid the trailer, see the film.

The curious Case of Benjamin Button
Director: David Fincher
Starring: Brad Pitt, Cate Blanchett
Run Time 159 minutes
Rated: M
Trailer: Flicks.co.nz

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