★★★ out of four stars
Rating: PG-13 for brief war violence, sexual content, language and smoking.
It's the stuff of fables and folk tales. An infant is born prematurely old, then ages in reverse. Cataracts and arthritic joints heal, wizened skin becomes supple, and the child moves from decrepitude to vigorous maturity, then youth. Meanwhile, the people in his life grow wrinkled and brittle.
"The Curious Case of Benjamin Button" follows a character whose life is out of joint, detailing his extraordinary journey with breathtaking beauty and technical finesse.
In New Orleans, in 1918, Benjamin (Brad Pitt) is born prematurely old. His mother expires and his father abandons the freakish infant at a nursing home. Queenie (Taraji P. Henson), an attendant, raises the boy as her own.
Reuniting with his childhood sweetheart Daisy (played as a girl by Elle Fanning and later by Cate Blanchett), Benjamin knows that a long future together is impossible. Still, he opts for whatever time they can share. The film captures his yearning and fatalism with deftly composed images. Staging a key scene between ever-younger Benjamin and fading Daisy in her mirror-lined dance studio deftly reflects the story's themes of loss and transience.
There is much to praise in the film, including a blood-and-thunder naval battle, breathtaking effects and sumptuous production design, but there are serious problems, too. Two clumsy framing devices bookend the story, one with elderly Daisy in a hurricane-swept New Orleans hospital, one about a blind clockmaker who builds a reverse-time clock as a tribute to soldiers sacrificed in World War I.
The script is stuffed with such secondary characters, who add Forest Gump-ish incidents but little dramatic oomph. Worse, the biggest special effects are piled into the beginning, a succession of miraculous images that peel away as the story progresses. That's a lot like life, childhood wonderment eroding as we move into humdrum maturity, but it gives the yarn an anticlimactic structure.
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