Some of those scenes are, to be sure, emotionally affecting and the movie’s belief in taking the Odyssey approach is that since Benjamin ages backwards while everyone around him ages forward, life is most significant to him in individual moments. That may perhaps be true and was also true to an extent in Forrest Gump due to his low IQ but I kept thinking to myself why is this movie not achieving the emotional critical mass it clearly wants to despite its titular character's age reversal? Then, it dawned on me that (this might sound a little strange) there is really nothing truly distinguishing about Benjamin Button as a person. Yes, there is the occasional voiceover narrating his thoughts but the movie just assumes that he will just act like any other person we meet, only in reverse. Hence, with a lack of personal character development, we are never really treated to the wholly different intellectual and emotional perspective that we should have had.
This also then leads to the larger issue the screenplay by Eric Roth and Robin Swicord completely ignores, which is the concept of nature vs. nurture. The story seems to mostly presume that it is only the biological mindset and appearance of Benjamin that determines his real age (such as how a person brings him to a brothel at only the age of 12 because he looks to be in his 70s, which I still found somewhat creepy). But don’t his growing life experiences based on how long he has lived play a role in his maturity? Wouldn’t it have been more fascinating to see a man trying to live forwards even as he ages backwards? Then what would it really be like for a 60-some year old mind to have the free-wheeling spirit of a younger man or how does a child’s mind retain a lifetime of experiences? The second part of the last question in particular on his belated childhood is almost entirely glossed over with a lazy plot point and one montage of too many in the film that is supposed to be heartbreaking but left me feeling rushed and unmoved.
It is unfortunate that all of this serves as an ultimately less than satisfactory dramatic backbone to some astonishing, jaw-dropping images, which is probably why it took so long until now for Hollywood to make the movie and, in the future, will probably be studied by filmmaking students. The first 30 minutes in particular are truly remarkable in using a combination of visual effects, animatronics, and motion capture to seamlessly graft Pitt’s face into a frail baby’s body and later a 4’ sized one when he is trying to walk from his wheelchair in a church. The makeup of both Pitt and Cate Blanchett in their respective roles is also faultless and David Fincher, being the accomplished visual stylist he is, uses even more of his trademark sepia tones with his cinematographer Claudio Miranda to create a chromatically fantastical yet somewhat melancholic universe.
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