Today was a day of high points. First, I filled with pride to see that President-Elect Barack Obama is Time Magazine’s Person of the Year. Who says that black folks are never on Time? This afternoon, I saw Brad Pitt look old and wrinkly. Just like a black President-Elect, it was another sight I never expected to see in my lifetime.
Brad Pitt’s new movie is called “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button.” It could’ve also been called “Doesn’t He Look Great For His Age?” If you really loved “Forrest Gump,” you’ll love Pitt’s new film. It’s practically a knock-off version of the Tom Hanks blockbuster with a little Big thrown in for added pleasure. There’s a reason why it’s so Gump-like. That film and Pitt’s were written by the same man — Eric Roth. This fantasy film tries for epic romance and tragedy but misses because it is so undeniably similar to “Forrest Gump.” To me, that’s an obstacle for the talented cast.
I’m a Tom Hanks fan. However, I had reservations about seeing him as Forrest Gump. I’d read the novel in one weekend. Winston Groom’s book about the Southern character had me howling with laughter with its cynicism and satire. Forrest is a massive blond bohunk, built something like former pro-wrestler “Stone Cold” Steve Austin. He’s also an idiot savant. In the novel, Forrest says “Being an idiot is no box of chocolates.” Besides his savant qualities, he’s also been blessed with an appendage to rival porn star Dirk Diggler’s in “Boogie Nights.” Due to his idiot side, Forrest doesn’t understand why women who see it want to be on him like he’s an amusement park ride. The novel is a series of episodes with Forrest leaving his greedy old mama, becoming a soldier, an astronaut, a pro wrestler, a shady politician and even landing in Hollywood to make a cheesey movie with a temperamental new sex symbol named Raquel Welch. THAT was one funny episode. Two minutes into the film adaptation, I knew that it would be something altogether different. The novel is unsentimental. The same cannot be written about the Tom Hanks film version. If hardcore fans of the film purchased the paperback copy of the book, I’m sure they were greatly disappointed. I loved the novel. I appreciated the writer adding a splash of vinegar to the collard greens. The movie (and, again, I dig Hanks bigtime) was a lot of molasses on the cornbread. One sample is the sweetened line for the movie, “Life is like a box of chocolates. You never know what you’re going to get.”
“The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” is adapted from a 1920s story by F. Scott Fitzgerald. However, the movie opens in New Orleans with the imminent approach of Hurricane Katrina and then takes us back to World War I. The heart of the story is about the true nature of love and how it goes beyond limitations of age and race. To get the point across, we meet Benjamin, a male who is born old with all the infirmities of age and becomes younger as he gets older. I’ve never read the Fitzgerald story but, with the Hurricane Katrina element, one can tell that Eric Roth took great liberties with the Fitzgerald source material as he did with the Winston Groom novel. I got the feeling that he took his screenplay elements that helped trigger a box office bonanza back in 1994 and flat-out repeated them.
We have the elderly Southern woman on her deathbed revealing golden moments of her life. We have a non-Southern Oscar winner playing a Southern woman. In “Forrest Gump,” it was Sally Field. In “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button,” Cate Blanchett sounds a tad like Olympia Dukakis in “Steel Magnolias.” We have the sympathetic Southern man-child outcast lead character with a leg disability. We see him befriended by a black man who introduces him to something new and adventurous. The lovable outcast winds up on a boat. We have the major passage of time with love, war, birth, death and different styles of music through the years. Instead of a white feather, like we got at the open and end of Bob Zemeckis’ “Forrest Gump,” we get a hummingbird. One more thing — like Bob Zemeckis’ film, David Fincher has directed a long movie. It takes Brad Pitt 2 hours and 40 minutes to age as Benjamin Button. He may get younger but you don’t sitting through this thing. The production is quite handsome, if heavy on the sepia tones. Pitt is good and, as far as his movie star appeal, he is gourmet eye-candy in the last half of the film. One romantic montage recalls a similar montage in “The Way We Were” with Robert Redford and Barbra Streisand. When the camera cuts to one of the scrumptious close-ups of Pitt on a sailboat, you expect to hear a commercial announcer say “Eternity…by Calvin Klein.”
This performance seems to be an attempt by Pitt to play something that matches a new spiritual center he’s found in his own off-screen life. There’s a fine warmth to his work here. Nonetheless, the part must have appealed to his actor’s vanity. He’s the star and he ages in reverse while everyone else ages normally. When he’s a drop dead gorgeous young man, the leading lady starts looking like Norma Desmond. Blanchett plays Daisy, a ballet dancer who becomes an original castmember in the revolutionary Rodgers & Hammerstein 1940s Broadway musical “Carousel.” A native Southerner, she goes to New York and has a bohemian phase. Daisy is to Benjamin what Robin Wright Penn’s Jenny was to Tom Hanks’ Forrest. It’s the ultimate May-December romance — only Daisy wonders if, one day, she’ll have to burp and diaper the man she loves. I’ve heard that Catherine Zeta-Jones often wonders the same thing. Taraji P. Henson, who was expertly vulgar and endearing as the ghetto fabulous girlfriend opposite Don Cheadle in “Talk To Me,” is quite touching as Queenie, Benjamin’s mother figure. The actress is younger than Pitt. Tilda Swinton has a lovely turn as an unhappily married but socially comfortable British wife whose plain looks cover up a passionate spirit waiting to be lit up again. Swinton never looked more glamorous in the kind of supporting role that Deborah Kerr would’ve portrayed in the late 1940s.
To me, the movie doesn’t hit the emotional bullseye because the script seems to fall back on old tricks that worked before. You keep waiting for the next “Forrest Gump”-like element. It’s a calculated screenplay. Not so much original art as it is “paint-by-the-numbers” output for popular mass consumption. Also, Eric Roth’s script telegraphs key scenes. When you see lightning and hear thunder, you know that heartbreak’s a comin’. That happens more than once. Overall, “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” is enjoyable with its “You never know what’s in store for you” message. For a holiday release, this movie is rather like a sweet little gift that came in an over-sized designer box with deluxe wrapping. After you’ve opened it and pushed aside all the tissue paper, you kind of expected something more.