It is no surprise that most people went to see The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, because they were curious. A movie about a man growing younger instead of older in a post World War I New Orleans is a bit of an oddity in itself.
A beautiful piece of filmmaking, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button is very visual, but misses the entire point of its own story. The film starts off as Benjamin Button (Brad Pitt) is left at a rest home and taken in by one of the caretakers. So an elderly infant is left with elderly people, an interesting commentary and concept. Unsurprisingly the movie focuses on time and the passage of it (brought more succinctly in the small prologue about a blind man and a backwards clock expressing his grief about lost sons in World War I).
As he grows he is stuck in the body of an old man, but clearly has the mentality of his actual age, which his main love interest Daisy Fuller (Cate Blanchett) seems to notice immediately when she meets the young/old Benjamin. The movie wants to be a love story between the carefree, effervescent Daisy (who utterly shines in this role) and Benjamin, but it falls flat. Instead of putting together a series of highlights from a couple in love, it instead settles for much more sex (nothing graphic, however) than you'd expect from this type of film.
Pitt and Blanchett have fair chemistry, so I think I'll lay this at the feet of the writing where most of the problems lie. The directing is beautiful and all the acting is a solid good (excluding Blanchett who is superb), but the writing doesn't seem to know what to do with itself. The Curious Case is making a statement, an obvious statement, that time isn't meant to be wasted - yet that is what the film seems to do. A few characters that should be important (Benjamin's surrogate father, his sister, and his and Daisy's daughter) seem to only be in the periphery.
One of the films biggest mistake in regards to this "time wasted" message is that Benjamin does just that, after he's supposedly learned this message. In an act of supposedly self-sacrifice he instead does something immensely selfish and loses (and takes from his loved ones) years of good years because of his fear of growing younger.
Another flaw in this movie is that Benjamin doesn't actually grow younger. In appearance he does regress in age, but in mentality it is a normal development. This is not a different view of the world in terms of living backwards (like Merlin in Arthurian legend), but a physical deformity.
In short, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button is another one of those glorious big budget art films that tries too hard to have a message, and yet has no message at all. Blanchett has a wonderful performance, and some of the side characters light up the screen, but overall the writing brings it down too much and in the end the only thing I was curious about was when the movie was going to stop.
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