The Curious Case of Benjamin Button

This handsomely mounted production from David Fincher is ponderous and long-winded, and owes too much to Forrest Gump, also written by Eric Roth, but the scope is large and many of the scenes are impressively staged. It jumps off from a story by F. Scott Fitzgerald, about a baby who is born old and gets progressively younger. With seamless CGI wizardry, the title character played by Brad Pitt ages from wizened small boy to his fortyish self and on to his youthful beauty, along the path to infancy and death. Meanwhile Cate Blanchett is growing from a young girl to a celebrated dancer to a fortyish mother and finally to a very old woman on her deathbed. Over the course of the decades, their relationship reverses, but they meet in the middle for a romantic mating. The historical background is rendered perfunctorily, but New Orleans comes through as a developing character in its own right, though the framing story, set in the run-up to Katrina, is rather otiose, and the narration a bit overbearing. Many elements are moving if not really convincing, but the picaresque whole does not come together and does not sustain the nearly three hour running time. Among the subsidiary characters, Tilda Swinton stands out as the wife of a British diplomat in WWII Russia, who initiates the young-old Brad/Benjamin into the mysteries of love. So it’s all quite overblown, but still impressive, not least in the performances of the two leads. (2008, Images, n.) *6+* (MC-69.)