The Curious Case of Benjamin Button shocked me with disappointment. I couldn’t deny the high expectations I had for David Fincher’s new film. Zodiac is a masterpiece, despite being shamefully neglected during the awards season last year, and there was no reason to expect anything less with this effort. Failed.

Benjamin Button follows the trials and tribulations of an abandoned child who ages backwards and finds his true love in childhood playmate Daisy. It’s not an awful film (i.e. Seven Pounds), but there is a resounding dullness that baffles me, especially since the film is beautiful to look at. The subject matter is treated with such deadly seriousness, I have to wonder if Fincher or Eric Roth (screenwriter) actually read F. Scott Fitzgerald’s short story, which is more of a hilarious fable than an epic scientific documentation.

Roth discarded nearly every detail, down to the setting and century, but most of all he discarded the humor. The first half of Fitzgerald’s story, in which Mr. Roger Button is insisting that his aged son play with children’s toys when all he wants to do is smoke cigars and read encyclopedias is a goldmine. There’s no magical backwards clock built in the throes of sorrow, Benjamin starts off big, his mother doesn’t die, his father doesn’t abandon him (because he’s a goddamn gentlemen), and there is no Daisy, there’s a Hildegarde. What was the point of adapting Fitzgerald if the material moves you to abandon it?

Last month I heard most of an interview with Fincher on NPR about Button, and how the subject of a love story was wholly uninteresting to him, but the idea of death and mortality made him change his mind about doing the film. First off, it never feels like the material ever truly inspired him. And of course, if he refers to it as a love story that seems to suggest Fincher doesn’t even have Fitzgerald’s tale in mind. The scenario of a man aging backwards can facilitate such a strange and humorous exploration of life and death, but Fincher’s film is so utterly conventional. I would kill to see Terry Gilliam’s take on it.

Every time I began to settle into a feeling of enjoyment in it’s lowest form, the narrative was brought to a screeching halt by it’s disjointed flashback story telling, courtesy of a dying Daisy’s annoyingly withered and shaky voice and her daughter (Julia Ormond) reading Benjamin’s diary. In the meantime, Hurricane Katrina is barreling into Lousiana. This is important…because they’re in Lousiana…and because…because.

The acting from Blanchett and Pitt is serviceable but a bit cold. This coldness is magnified by some of the more light-hearted characters they encounter. Benjamin is portrayed a bit slow, and Daisy becomes selfish and a little self-destructive. There’s just something so familiar about their relationship, all the missteps and unrequited love, all the letter writing…

And then the true culprit is revealed! Eric Roth wrote a little gem called Forrest Gump in 1994. He completely recycles his own ideas for this “screen story” but fails to recapture the magic a second time. It’s all there: The special slow boy can’t be with his childhood crush, he leaves home, sees the world, joins the army, they meet up again at some point, it’s awkward and she’s a bit of a whore, they part, do stuff, meet again, have there time together, they have sex, something comes up, they must part, eventually one of them dies and the other tells the story. How dare he! And worse, everyone is totally buying it!

Both Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett are great actors. They’re never going to be awful in anything, so when they’re ok in a poor film it seems Oscar worthy to people too busy doing meth to actually go out and watch a majority of the films released in one year. Some critics have earnestly called this Brad Pitt’s career best performance. Those individuals have failed to see the following films:

The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford
Babel
Fight Club
Seven
12 Monkeys
I’m going to go ahead and throw in Inglourious Basterds, and then pretty much ANYTHING else he’s been in.

Tim Roth aged backwards much more expertly in Francis Ford Coppola’s unfortunately flawed, but infinitely more intriguing Youth Without Youth. The overwhelming critical and awards season success of The Curious Case of Benjamin Button has to be chalked up to luck and a significant amount of black magic. F. Scott Fitzgerald might roll over in his grave, but there’s nothing in this film to truly be moved by.