THE CURIOUS CASE OF BENJAMIN BUTTON

Hollywood elite take on age and boning

By DAVID WILDMAN

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To paraphrase another big film scripted by Eric Roth (Button's co-screenwriter), the movie industry is like a box of chocolates: You reach in there and sometimes you get something tasty. Other times, you recoil because you've just grabbed a hulking piece of rat shit. Lately your chances of grabbing a turd seem greater than ever, and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button is such a large, polished piece of poop, it's impossible to miss.

If you've seen the trailer, you already know what happens: A woman gives birth to a hideous, grizzled baby/old man who grows in reverse, getting increasingly younger and more handsome until the lucky fuck turns into Brad Pitt two-thirds of the way through the film and proceeds to slide the sausage to Cate Blanchett (Daisy) relentlessly. Eventually he has to quit because he's entered that tender age where the authorities would be locking her up for statutory rape. That's pretty much it, folks. Thanks for coming. Drive carefully.

OK, so maybe there are a few halfway unusual tidbits sprinkled along the way, but none of them add up to much of anything. The whole thing is done as an implausible diary narration on Daisy's deathbed. It seems there's some magical clock that runs backwards, but for some ill-explained reason it mainly affects our protagonist, the titular Benji B, played by Mr. Pitt with the help of some extremely impressive computer graphics-created facial restructuring. Benjamin's mother dies in childbirth and his creepy father dumps him at an old-age boarding house in New Orleans, where he is raised by poor black folks (unintentional echoes of Steve Martin's The Jerk here). When he gets a little, uh, younger, he joins the crew of a fishing boat and hangs out at sea for a while. Then he bones Tilda Swinton (Elizabeth Abbott), whom the narration tells us is the wife of a Nazi spy, but the potential intrigue of this situation is left completely unexplored. Basically, stuff happens and then our protagonist moves on, barely affected. There is no conflict leading to resolution because, besides the whole reverse-time thing, very little challenging or even out-of-the-ordinary events happen to Benjamin.

When you encounter a film as conceptually undercooked and overblown in every other way as this one, it is difficult to not try to psychoanalyze the intentions of those behind it. Interestingly, Pitt as an old fart looks shockingly similar to the way Robert Redford looks now. My theory is that Hollywood's elite are feeling their mortality, as the boomers head off toward the sunset, and it isn't pretty. When the WWII generation was getting to this point back around the '60s, they stoically denied it, pretending they could swing just like the kids. John Wayne played the same character until he keeled over, and codgers like Dean Martin posed as sexy secret agents. Pitt is still relatively young and handsome, but he can't help gazing at his navel like a pussy and neurotically obsessing about that inevitable light at the end of the tunnel.

Here's hoping that for his next film, he gets a life.

THE CURIOUS CASE OF BENJAMIN BUTTON

RATED | PG-13

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