The extremely boring case of 'Benjamin Button'

Intermittently throughout "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button," an elderly man recounts in a worn and quivering voice, "Did I tell you how I was struck by lightning seven times?" Cut to a silent-film-era shot: A younger version of the man walks down a street and is suddenly hit by a spotlight. A poof of smoke spurts from his sleeves, and he topples over.

When my favorite part of a film has nothing to do with the plot, that's a bad sign. Director David Fincher, of "Seven" and "Fight Club" fame, clearly has a thing for Brad Pitt. Their third film together, however, is a far cry from the perverse worlds of the previous two. ‘Button' is a swollen epic, one that aims for grandeur but winds up only a potent sedative. Not lean or mean, this one: Fincher's gone all fuzzy and cutesy on us.

It's not like the movie didn't have potential. The short story on which ‘Button' is based, written by Princeton's very own F. Scott Fitzgerald '17, is a disquieting meditation on life and death, on social prejudice and flawed preconceptions.

It's only 20 pages long, yes, but it's chock-full of ideas - ideas that have been mercilessly drained away in the screenwriters Eric Roth and Robin Swicord's adaptation. The sinister foreboding is stripped away, and the plot is left running around aimlessly like a headless chicken. It seems like Roth, the man responsible for "Forrest Gump," just couldn't leave that syrupy sentimentality behind.

So ‘Button' is less "Fight Club" and more "lite club." Still, the overt attempts to ape ‘Gump' for Oscar attention and big bucks smack of desperation. It was like the producers sat down in the boardroom and dictated to Roth what he should do with ‘Button,' forgetting that ‘Gump' even existed. I can picture the scene.

"What shall we do about this new ‘Button' project? Well, the academy loves accents. Let's set the film in New Orleans. How about a boy who at the beginning of his life has some sort of impediment, but, due to some miracle, overcomes it? He falls in love with a girl and has a longstanding obsession with her. They get together at some point in their lives, have a baby - girl or boy, it doesn't matter - only to find that they can never truly be together. And just to add a little spice to the plot, let's have the protagonist, this Benjamin Button, age backwards!"

Instead of exploiting such a premise and building a rich and rewarding character study, Team ‘Button' put together a depiction of the title character that's as flat as a 90-year-old Coke can. Even one that's aging bloody backwards. Benjamin Button's life, extended across a whopping three hours, is surprisingly ... boring.

Benjamin sits around and listens to people, walks around and waits for people, and basically does absolutely nothing. He spends most of his time in Paris staring at the hospital window of his beloved injured ballerina Daisy (Cate Blanchett). That really is sweet of him, but for a member of the audience, a bit of excitement in his daily grind shouldn't be that much to ask for. Though Benjamin does explore the world a little, even in wartime, his adventures are glossed over seemingly because they have too little to do with the core romance.

Granted, the script is hardly brimming with opportunity, but Pitt's acting, apart from his wheezy old voice in the beginning of the film, is hardly invigorating either. An uninteresting character portrayed in a reserved manner is a recipe for disaster. I'm still waiting for the Academy to revoke his Best Actor nomination for this particular movie, as he basically wears a mask of blandness the entire time. I do think he is a great actor, but just not in ‘Button.' Besides, can the performance really be termed an independent Pitt effort if Benjamin Button's wizened identity was created by rotoscoping technology and a combination of body doubles?

The film's claim to fame, apart from its exquisite cinematography, is the makeup and visual effects artists' ability to scrunch skin and tighten wrinkles at will. With this Oscar-deserving sorcery, Pitt and Blanchett speed from young'uns to old farts in the blink of an eye. Though Blanchett's face looks unconvincingly taut - every time she smiles it looks like she is grimacing in pain from a facelift - Pitt looks freakishly fresh-faced during his youthful scenes. You might even start to suspect that they cheated by stealing footage from his "Meet Joe Black" days.

So, why was this film nominated for so many awards? I mean, it's not every day that a movie picks up 13 Oscar nominations! Beyond me, really. The alleged moral of the story is spelled out in the film's closing narration: "Along the way you bump into people who make a dent on your life. Some people get struck by lightning. Some are born to sit by a river. Some have an ear for music. Some are artists. Some swim the English Channel. Some know buttons. Some know Shakespeare. Some are mothers. And some people can dance." Well, some movies serve no function apart from winning awards, and some should never have been made in the first place.

1 out of 5 paws.