The Curious Case of Benjamin Button

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button may suffer from the opposite problem faced by Tom Cruise's Valkyrie -- too much advance positive buzz, particularly for Brad Pitt (who co-starred with Cruise 15 years ago in Interview With the Vampire.) The premise of the film -- a man is born old and dies an infant -- is fatal to the movie, Roger Ebert suggests in the Chicago Sun-Times. It "devalues any relationship, makes futile any friendship or romance, and spits, not into the face of destiny, but backward into the maw of time," he remarks. Likewise Mick LaSalle in the San Francisco Chronicle comments: "In every way, the movie looks like somebody's idea of a great movie, just as its length -- 167 minutes -- proclaims its importance. But the proclamation is untrue, and all the trappings are in the service of a story that's emotionally false and fundamentally unimportant." Joe Neumaier writes in the New York Daily News, "The problem is that there's no point. Benjamin could have aged normally and been the same nonreactive hero." Strip away the film's gimmick, says Ann Hornaday in the Washington Post, "and it's utterly conventional and predictable, its moral payoff nothing more than a maudlin, anodyne mumble." To be sure, the film has enough supporters to help thrust it onto the lists of award nominees -- if not for best picture and director (David Fincher), then certainly for best actor (Pitt) and makeup (33 makeup artists are credited). "It takes a world-class storyteller and a great yarn to rivet your attention for nearly three hours," Lou Lumenick says in the New York Post. "This very classy, old-school movie -- employing cutting-edge technology that will make your eyes pop -- did it for me." It did it for Christy Lemire of the Associated Press, too, who wrote: "It's the damnedest thing. You look into the elderly man's blue eyes behind a pair of old-fashioned spectacles, look at the sweet smile ringed by wrinkles, and you know that's Brad Pitt under there. But the special effects are so dazzling, and Pitt's performance is so gracefully convincing, that you can't help but be repeatedly wowed." And Wesley Morris comments in the Boston Globe: "At its most profound, Benjamin Button isn't about anything more important than Pitt's very handsomeness, which, for a surprising stretch of time, is a wonderful subject for study. There is a sad scene that requires him to leave a room, and the sheer fact of how young he seems really is breathtaking. [Pitt is actually 44.] I almost gasped at one point."