A (not-so) curious case of Oscar bait
- Title: The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
- IMDB: link
So David Fincher (Se7en, Fight Club, Zodiac, Panic Room) and Brad Pitt have tossed their hats into the ‘well, we’ve decided we want an Oscar’ ring with the Christmas Day release of “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button”, a sprawling, nearly 3 hour exercise in how to tempt Academy voters that manages to avoid any semblance of plot or meaning. Ostensibly based on the F. Scott Fitzgerald short story of the same name (which you can read in its entirety here), in truth the two share naught but a title and the central hook of the story: A man who is living his physical life in reverse, de-aging with each passing year.
Normally I’d use this paragraph to sum up the story (and throw in a few pithy comments), but quite frankly there’s precious little of interest to share. The film is not much else but the timing challenged love story between Benjamin and Daisy (played as an adult by the always wonderful Cate Blanchett), but mostly it’s a collection of vignettes filling in the spaces of when Button is too physically elderly to be with the youthful dance ingenue. Button works on a tugboat with the salty and drunk Captain Dan, uh I mean Captain Mike (Jared Harris)! Button has an affair with the bored wife of a spy! (Tilda Swinton) Button uh… hangs around a lot and starts a successful shrimp business. Wait, no. That’s the other one. In this one he kinda inherits a button factory but doesn’t do anything with it. But you get the point.
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