I remember when this one had premiere and thought, that is a weird story/plot. And maybe because it was sort of inverted proportinality by the idea of reversing the aging of mind cand not body body.
In the right hands it could prove an interesting experience and since it is David Fincher of "Fight Club" fame and being a solid director this one ought to me to be one to watch.
Benjamin Button is born on the day the first world war ended and at the same time as a "blind watchmaker" makes a clock that goes in the wrong direction. His face looks old as in "dying" of age while his body is as a newborn. His motehr dies and his father dumps him at a home for old and dying people.
AS we get strated it seems that the movie is going for a theme of time and creation and possibly very philosophical. But to my disappointment, the plot apart from the reversed aging concept pretty banale and uninteresting. The people he meets during his strange life are either baffled by his aging youth or his youthful old age. But the deeper philosophical things that might be handled is not really handled. As the obviously Kierkegaardian "Life must be lived forward but is best understood backwards"
The cinematography is very good, if not a tad predictably "pretty" and the acting by the supporting actors, particularly Cate Blanchet, are very fine. Brad Pitt is well camouflaged and CGI´ed in his non natural scenes, but even if his part is of an introvert kind, he does not come across with very deep emotions of any kind.
I am not sure why but Pitt usually gets much better praise in his movies than he deserves. He is not much more than a very pretty face. He is amateurish in his expression and cannot express deeper emotions or bodily expressions of more than a few kinds. In the scenes where he is a crippled youth I am sure it is CG generated
It has a Forrest Gump feel to it, but it doesn´t have the same kind of humour and distancing of this fairytale story. It could also be seen as a science fictiony, moral tale but all it eventually coalesces into is "you can be anything you want" stupid kind of moralization.
And all the while his female relationships are so gynocentric. While he is engulfed in his white knighting towards his love (Blanchet) she wants to "shop around" while she is young and fertile and only when she is crippled she returns to Ben ... to have children.
She ends up holding him in her hands as an infant old dying. So what is the story really here? That we should be happy that we age at the same rate and diretion, and the Benjamin Button Jesus figure created by the blind watchmaker is here to tell us to spend time wisely and do things at their right time which he cannot. Except for a time of equality midway through their lives as a pivot?
I could be sympathetic to that but it does come across as secondary aspects that are thrown in here and there to make it a moral tale, while the plot otherwise just trods along .. and is pretty boring overall. TRhe central character does not have an emotional arc, only this aging one. And it becomes a combination of a standard melodramtic structure and this weird reversal.
So after all I have a hard time recommending this. I have seen raving reviews and more reserved ones and I an certainly on the reserved side. I thought i strated out good and expected a different kind of movie after the first act. Then it just kind of fizzled out and left me confused about what it really wanted to tell me.
But I guess a small recommendation would be in place, if the overall expression I have presented here, falls into your thumbs up area. But the feel is disappointment, mostly in an opportunity lost to take this to another more philosophically driven level
5/10