Pitt the Younger

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button is stately, impressive, and, in its final half-hour, very moving. Only later, as the chill winter air rouses one from a contented stupor into a somewhat more bitter condition, does it become oddly apparent that this strange story of a person born old who grows younger as his life progresses until he dies as a baby is actually a humorless remake of the Steve Martin movie The Jerk.

The Jerk, you may recall, begins with the words, “I was born a poor black child.” And thus it is with Benjamin Button, who emerges from the womb of his white mother as a wizened baby, is abandoned by his horrified white father, and is then taken in by a 17-year-old black nurse whom he calls “Mama.”

Like Navin Johnson, the character played by Steve Martin in The Jerk, Benjamin Button leaves the care of his black mother as a teenager and strikes out for the territories. Navin ends up working at a gas station run by Jackie Mason. Benjamin ends up on a tugboat that makes its way to the Russian port of Murmansk.

In The Jerk, Navin becomes wealthy when an odd invention of his becomes a hit. Benjamin Button becomes wealthy when his father comes back into his life and informs him that he is the heir to a successful business called Button’s Buttons. (The humor is not much more sophisticated than the offerings of The Jerk, even though The Curious Case of Benjamin Button cost $150 million.)

Navin finds and loses his love, and then finds her again. The same happens with Benjamin, though there is no analogue between the silly happy ending of The Jerk and the silly but five-hankie final minutes of Benjamin Button, which would cause even the most expressionless Buckingham Palace guard to break down into heaving sobs. I actually heard people gasping for air. I may have been one of them. I’m not saying the movie earns those sobs honestly, but earn them it does.

The Jerk has no purpose other than making the viewer laugh, which it does only intermittently, since it really isn’t all that funny. The Curious Case of Benjamin Button is a much better movie than its predecessor, and it thinks it is making a study of a great many things: Death and war and time and love. It has as much to say about them, however, as The Jerk does.

But it is wonderfully and lovingly made, as opposed to The Jerk, which is sloppy and ugly and incompetent. And where The Jerk had an astonishingly annoying Steve Martin in it, Benjamin Button revolves around Brad Pitt, who is handled brilliantly by his peekaboo-playing director, David Fincher. We don’t get to see Pitt in all his camera-ready glory until the movie is half over. After wearing tons and tons of makeup, Pitt is at last shown taking a ride on a motorcycle through the Louisiana countryside, his hair trailing behind him as the wind whips around him. This is surely the longest and slowest “reveal” in movie history. Pitt is, at last, Pitt, and with his emergence, the movie begins anew with a burst of youthful energy.

Nonetheless, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button is a failure for two reasons: It’s preachy, and it’s stupid. Throughout its 160-minute running time, we are treated to a great many homilies. The scenarist, Eric Roth, also adapted Winston Groom’s Forrest Gump for the screen, a movie in which one character, Forrest’s mother, was known for her statements of pithy depth (“life is like a box of chocolates”). In Benjamin Button, every character offers pearls of wisdom, and does so with the regularity of an airport people-mover coming in and out of Terminal B. There are no conversations in this movie, just one character depositing dubious pearls of wisdom into the ear canal of another; and since they’re neither wise nor especially pearl-like, they grow extraordinarily tiresome.

Worse yet is the astonishingly lame plot device Roth contrives to create romantic melodrama at the movie’s climax. Characters who have made their peace with the fact that Benjamin is getting younger as he ages suddenly decide that it’s just too painful for him to hang around, and an entirely unnecessary and incredible separation is effected to set up the sob-inducing ending.

The preposterous separation takes the movie out of the realm of fable and moves it into the realm of the afternoon soap opera. If you create a world in which a man can live his life backward, and have his “curious” affliction accepted without question by the other characters in that world, you cannot stretch the conceit past the breaking point by having the characters suddenly awaken to the fact that what is happening is unacceptably weird. Either The Curious Case of Benjamin Button is taking place in a world slightly altered from our own, or it isn’t. You can’t have it both ways.

Let me amend that. You can have it both ways. But you’re not going to get an Oscar for it. The makers of The Curious Case of Benjamin Button went to bed every night and awoke every morning with thoughts of that statuette in their hands. But when the credits roll on the Academy Awards at the end of next month, the words “Benjamin Button” will not pass the lips of the Best Picture presenter.

They should take heart, though. The Jerk didn’t win, either.

John Podhoretz, editor of Commentary, is THE WEEKLY STANDARD‘s movie critic.