The Bloated Case of Benjamin Button

There are flashes of Fitzgerald in the film. An encounter between Button and the wife of a British diplomatic official (read: spy) stationed in Russia, typifies the fleeting relationships Fitzgerald’s Button, an oddity alienated from the world, is prone to, given his unusual condition. Tilda Swinton, that graceful marvel, brings poignancy and intelligence to the role of a vulnerable, yet stoic and worldly woman whose remedy for loneliness is forged through keen, yet understated, political instincts. If there is any honesty in the film, it lies in that transitory, finite meeting of people moving in separate directions without the pretense that there will be some kind of life ever after.

But the film is intent on embedding Button in a grand romance that sees him bound to a soulmate, surrounded by people who unconditionally accept his condition. He grows from old age to babyhood, with no mention of the logistical obstacles Fitzgerald touches on, naturally enough, in his story. Proving his identity, for example, when his appearance grows more youthful. (What would the DMV say to that?) His mirror, Daisy, the ever-luminescent Cate Blanchette, starts as a baby and reaches her deathbed as an old woman. The intersections are, naturally, brimming with passion and longing and the unbearable heaviness of time ticking ever forward. And in all this lies the inescapable fact that death brings all things to an end, presented with the heartbreak that comes with believing that anything worthwhile must somehow transcend death and time. If this is tragedy, it is lazy tragedy.

Some of the padding is necessary, given how Fitzgerald’s story is a kind of idea-driven biographical sketch rather than a plot- or character-fueled narrative. Eric Roth justifiably adds characters, fleshes out existing ones – that is, he reinvents them – to create an epic. Yet from Button’s relationship to his father to the almost detached way he goes through life, Fitzgerald’s story had more than enough with which to create a good film. As it were, none of that is enough for Roth, who begins by burdening the film with the clumsy allegorical prologue of a clockmaker who, broken-hearted over the death of his son in World War I, creates a clock that runs backward in the hopes it can, at least metaphorically, reverse time. This marks the launch of the film’s framing narrative of a dying Daisy sharing Button’s diary with her daughter, Caroline (Ormond) a device used to similar effect in “The Bridges of Madison County.” But unlike Eastwood’s literary adaptation of the popular novel by Robert James Waller, Roth’s flashback machine doesn’t enhance the story. It only adds running time. Waller’s kids, who read their mother’s diary, take away a lesson, a moral, however modest and down-to-earth. Caroline, a character adrift in the haze of a poorly defined, apparently unhappy life, is left adrift apart from one predictable revelation nestled in overwrought pseudo-inspirational; a character that doesn’t go anywhere.

And going nowhere is what happens with a film that tries to go everywhere. Part rueful meditation on love and death, part exhortation to live life to the fullest, part this, part that. Even a master of well-calibrated mood and careful composition like director David Fincher, whose use of special effects justifies the buzz, becomes complicit in overloading the film with symbols and portents until the whole thing collapses from its own sense of self-importance.