Meh. Better than Forrest Gump, but still didn't quite have the emotional or philosophical impact I feel the filmmakers (dir. David Fincher) intended.
Like Forrest Gump, we have a special southern protagonist, and the same screenwriter, Eric Roth. Strike number one. He wanders through the decades of the 20th century, and his special nature tells the audience about themes of life and how to live a happy life. Unlike Gump, the soundtrack doesn't feel hokey, the historical moments aren't forced down our throats, and the main characters aren't shallow moralistic templates.
So yes, it's pretty good. But no, it's not great. Cate Blanchett, the love interest and bookending dead character, uses her breathy voice to approximate a Louisiana accent, but comes off in the end as a bit too vacant. She is wonderful at portraying the naive, confidence of youth. Her character's life as a dancer is a good parallel in a story about aging. Only certain athletes like gymnasts and ice skaters can share such a tragic life pursuit.
But Brad Pitt, who is well cast as an image, who wouldn't want to grow hotter as time goes by, walks through the movie with little affect. He is too vacant in his performance. His physical condition, as a person aging backwards, constitutes the entirety of his character. Otherwise, Benjamin wanders around, captivated by powerful personalities and bemusedly smiling along with their lives.
Then there is the tragically overplayed metaphorical object. Will someone contact Scorcese? because most of this is his fault. there is a hummingbird that magically appears when a character dies at sea. It's preposterous that a hummingbird would be seen deep at sea, let alone that it would appear after a man with such a bird tattooed on his chest dies. It's cheesy. And I call out Scorcese because he similarly keeps using animals and objects in cutaways to slap the audience in the face with a metaphor. The rat in the end of the Departed? The Bible tossed into a river in Gangs of New York. It's hokey and it needs to stop. I got the hummingbird metaphor when the character explained his tattoo, but seeing one at his death and at the death of Daisy, Cate Blanchett, is just banging the audience in the head with a foam cheese hat from a Packers game.
I'm also not sure why Tilda Swinton's character of a British emissary/Russian spy's wife was even included except to kill time while Benjamin was away with his heart growing fonder and to show Benjamin that after he has a daughter that life is to be lived and it's best to be independent and fulfill your own personal goals. It didn't work and, while making me appreciate the odd morality of the film, made me sad that pursuing one's own life must come at the sacrifice of supporting and intensely loving one's family according to the film. What a man's perspective on fulfillment. I kept thinking that even though it was going to be hard for everyone that he was growing younger, that Benjamin was cruel and foolish to abandon his family that he clearly loved so deeply. Just because something is extremely hard, doesn't me that it's not worth doing.
The Gump analogies continue with his youth spent in a boarding house - this time a senior home, a quirky parallel black friend - this time a pygmy from Africa whose stature makes him a carnival attraction, a gospel loving mama who teaches him some choice phrases, a lost father, and a childhood love who can't see what she's got until it's almost too late.
I do like some aspects of the book ending of the story, although since Saving Private Ryan I generally loathe book ending. Telling the story on Daisy's deathbed creates a palpable contrast with Benjamin's death and life. Yet, the reveal of Daisy's daughter's true father is tossed aside as Hurricane Katrina comes crashing in. I also like the use of Katrina as a manifestation of the unpredictability of life and of time's painful erasure of all of our lives.
the themes of the film are good to emphasize, that the future is unknown, yet it often feels like things and people come together at just the right moment from time to time. Yet there was an emotional crevasse, probably stemming from Pitt's vacant performance.
My final gripe is that I pity the cinematographer who works with Fincher. Someone needed to tell him to cut it out with the After Effects. There is a sequence set in the past that appears as if it was filmed in the 1910s, but colorized, and it's too much. There's no subtlety in the technique of aging the film. It's annoying.
While the makeup was good, it wasn't great. The youthification was impressive, but as usual, much of the aging felt plastic and the CGI is trusted too heavily to achieve many of the effects.
The ending possesses a certain magnificence, watching a man turn into a child and go senile. But all in all, it's too long and not potent enough for me to have felt struck by a masterwork. Good, but not great.
PS I love Tilda Swinton and found it very sad that she was described as plain looking in the film because she's stunning looking. She's got those incredible eyes like pools of ink like Mathieu Almaric. But this dress makes her look like she has five boobs, right?
