Youth Without Youth | Brad Pitt doesn’t look a day over 65 in The Curious Case of Benjamin Button.
Anne Thompson, Variety | “David Fincher and screenwriter Eric Roth have delivered an historic achievement, a masterful piece of cinema, and a moving treatise on death, loss, loneliness and love. As the movie proceeds, and Brad Pitt ages backwards, we know where he is headed: it’s where we are all going. But he feels he has to go there by himself, without his loved ones. And nobody wants to die alone. So when the movie reaches its climax, it is extraordinarily moving (although some find the movie cold and dispassionate). It may pack a more powerful punch the older you are and the more people you have lost. In that case it will score with the Academy, who will also recognize the skilful filmmaking on display.”
Nick Schager, Slant | “The film’s more cloying inclinations never overwhelm because Fincher and his performers treat their tale with just enough detachment to give it a beautiful, enchanting refracted-through-gossamer (or -time) quality. It’s a subtle balancing act, and one far less obviously dexterous than the vast data-streamlining of Zodiac. Yet his work here is, in a way, no less impressive, exhibiting both a technical deftness and heartrending urgency that’s ultimately overpowering, Fincher (like his spiritual stand-in, the intro’s clockmaker) so in command of his material and his medium that, even in a work as simultaneously rapturous and maddening as Benjamin Button, he seems capable, at any given moment, of producing magic.”
Karina Longworth, Spout | “There’s no doubt that Fincher is in love with his imagery (this is the only explanation I can come up with for that chaos theory sequence, which plays as nothing but a flaunting of Fincher’s contractual right to final cut), but he doesn’t seem to trust it. Eric Roth’s script tells us over and over again, in very literal language and often via narration, that this is a film about loneliness and difference. Every feeling and every story detail is telegraphed in advance, underlined throughout and commented on after the fact. Button is the opposite of Pitt’s last Oscar hopeful in that respect: The Assassination of Jesse James was a film in which every frame seemed to invite contemplation. Benjamin Button is a film in which every cut seems designed to block thought. Maybe the earlier film’s failure says it all about the philosophy behind Button’s construction: for audiences and Oscar voters, thinking is bad. Spoon-fed artifice is good.”
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