First Hit: I got bored waiting for this film to find legs and when it did it lasted too long.
I loved the premise of this film, someone whose body goes from old to young. It reminded of a conceptual story I’m familiar with whereas one is born old, as he lives he gets younger each day and dies as a twinkle his parents eyes.
However, I digress here because this film wasn’t as interesting as my memories of listening to this story.
The premise is that Benjamin Button (played by Brad Pitt) is born in a body that looks 80+ years old. His mother dies giving birth to him and his father, for inexcusable reason, can’t stand this old looking baby and drops him off at home for aging people.
Benjamin is raised by the house attendant named Queenie (played by Taraji P. Henson), a young black woman who can’t give birth on her own. Benjamin looks old but has the curiosity of a child and slowly (very slowly) he gets younger looking as he gets older.
As a child he is befriended by a young girl named Daisy (who is played at various older ages by Cate Blanchett). We follow Benjamin through his life and slowly watch him get younger. We also follow Daisy’s life and watch her as she gets older.
They meet at middle age and have a wonderful fulfilling life, until Daisy gets pregnant and Benjamin leaves because he doesn’t think he can be a dad as he digresses into being a kid and baby himself (although his mind will be old).
David Fincher the director appeared to get caught into seeing just how subtle he could make the changes in Pitt’s getting younger and Blanchett’s getting older, therefore the film ended up being really long. The computers digitized both Pitt and Blanchett into looking younger than they really are for certain scenes and these shots make them glow (angelic like) when, looking angelic wasn't the intended effect. There is a lot of makeup used on both Pitt and Blanchett and, in fact, the 80 something dying Blanchett telling her daughter who her father is, is the base point of the film. Given that both Pitt and Blanchett are great actors; they did their best with an overly long, drawn out storyline that needed a good pair of hedge shears.
Overall: I was very disappointed by this film from the outset. The opening scenes were tepid and didn’t do much to set the stage. The film was, at least, an hour too long and there were multiple scenes in their entirety that could have been cut with no dramatic affect on the film whatsoever.