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I didn't really want to write about The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. I didn't like the movie, and I feel like my time is better served by writing about things I do like, but the Oscars seem to have fallen in love with the film, and that makes it newly important. In a sentence, I found the film to be a rickety and overlong affair that misapplies its essential concept and some superlative effects work to tell a story that is fundamentally shallow. The film purports to be the story of a life lived backward, but squanders that theme. The original story, by F. Scott Fitzgerald, used it to create some rather daffy comic sequence -- when Benjamin is born, he is an old man with a long gray hair who would rather smoke cigars and read encyclopedias than play with toys. Fitzgerald's Button lives every aspect of his life backward, including maturing in reverse. As he grows young, he rejects his wife the moment she starts looking old and invests himself in the follies of youth. There is some ironic hay being made here, as it's not uncommon for older men to likewise reject their wives in favor of younger models, although Fitzgerald wasn't really trying for irony. It's a short story, only big enough to hold a dozen sharply crafted comic sequences.

The film version of The Curious Case of Benjamin Button isn't short. It's almost three hours long. And it isn't a comedy. It isn't even Fitzgerald, as the film version only shares with the original short story a title and a character who ages backward. No, rather than comedy, the film tries for profundity, and fails miserably. The fault begins with screenwriter Eric Roth, who cribbed outrageously from his own adaptation of Forrest Gump, but director David Fincher also can claim much of the blame, as he seems to have become so caught up in the mammoth special effects the film required that he forgot that films should also tell a good story.

Benjamin Button wants to be great. It really does. It's filled with terrific performances, including, for most of the movie, Brad Pitt as the title character. I've often felt that Brad Pitt's real talent lies in creating offbeat characterizations, which he is rarely given the opportunity to do. As an older man, Pitt is unworldly, gentlemanly, and fascinating. Some of this performance, by the way, comes with the assistance of computers, which managed to behead Pitt and reattach his noggin to other people's bodies, to show him as an old man in a child's body. The effects wizards also created some of Pitt's performance, albeit inspired by the actor. Nonetheless, we reach a point where Pitt takes over the role, and he maintains his appealing courteousness with an understated sense of humor. That is, right up until he ages backward to the point where he becomes Brad Pitt's actual age, at which moment the caricaturization ceases and Pitt becomes another version of the laconic Brad Pitt-character he plays in most films, and instantly becomes much less interesting.

But the film also features some wonderful character performances, including a heartfelt turn by Jason Flemyng as the father who abandoned Button and Jared Harris as a tattooed and sodden tugboat captain. The film lets itself get a little goofy in its supporting characters, including one older fellow who has been repeatedly struck by lightning, and whose reminiscences are accompanied by very short silent films reenacting the event. These moments, and the characters in them, are quite fun, and only manage to last half the movie, right up until Button begins his romance with his childhood sweetheart, played by Cate Blachett. Alas, Blanchett, although a very good actress, isn't a character here but a type, very similar to the romantic interest of Forrest Gump, played by Robin Wright Penn. Both are free-spirited women who go off in search of adventure and are badly hurt by them; in Blanchett's case, she's a ballerina. Blanchett brings some nice bits of business to her role, including a tendency to stand in formal balletic postures, but in a film that has enjoyed a superabundance of outrageous characters, she comes across as a lightweight. Nonetheless, the film makes Benjamin Button fall in love with her, and so we must spend the rest of the movie watching the two engage in what is supposed to be an epic love affair with a tragic ending. Instead, it feels like the movie has dropped being interesting in favor of laboring at being meaningful, and simply stops being fun. Worse still, screenwriter Roth trades in shallow self-help aphorisms, which he uses in place of crafting a story with real depth. At one point, Pitt has grown young enough to become something of a rebel (never mind that the film has conveniently made him a millionaire, which gives him endless resources for rebellion but no clear target for it), and so we see him on the back of a motorcycle, tootling around the countryside. And that's it. Later, Button goes off in search of enlightenment, and so we see a few scenes of him washing his clothes in the Ganges. And, again, that's it. It's as though the film's creators feel that as long as they show a few images that represent what the character is going through in a sort of cliched shorthand, they don't actually have to explore what the character is going through. And so, when it comes time for Button to impart the hard-won wisdom of his rebellion, and his travels to India, the best that he can offer up is "Don't be afraid to start over." Thanks, that was worth three hours.

Worse still, Button doesn't actually age backwards. Sure, his body does, but, unlike the literary character who inspired him, he begins life with the maturity of a child and then grows to be an old man. His reverse aging loses the comic potential Fitzgerald saw in it and instead simply becomes a disability. And, like Forrest Gump, it is a disability that is really no disability at all, unless easily having adventures and becoming rich can be considered crippling. At the very end, he grows so young that he must be tended to, but, at the very end, if we live, we will grow so old that we must be tended to. There is not much difference between Button's life and ours, except that the filmmakers have conspired to have him on hand for some of the big events in history, just as they did with Forrest Gump.

One of these events is especially egregious. The film is mostly set in New Orleans, and, to an extent, makes good use of the location: A rather sweet scene between Pitt and Blanchett is set at the Peristyle in City Park; a character drinks sazeracs; characters ride the St. Charles street car; a cop chases a man along the riverfront. I lived in New Orleans, and the film feels like it has gotten some of the distinct character of the town into the film (perhaps influenced by Pitt, who lives there now). But the film uses Hurricane Katrina as a framing device, and it is here that I feel the films errs badly. I may be especially sensitive to this, as I left the city because of Katrina and lost most of my possessions as a result, as well as having to watch a city I very much love suffer repeated disasters, starting with the levee breaking and continuing with years of neglect and unconcern. As a result, while I do not feel Katrina cannot be addressed in film, I feel like there should be a good reason for doing so. The Curious Case of Benjamin Button instead uses it as a device, falsely inflating the framing of the film with tension as the storm approaches, but otherwise having nothing at all to say about a Gulf Coast-sized storm that ravaged the city. And I shouldn't have been surprised, as the rest of the film likewise uses the most dramatic and heartbreaking experiences in life -- illness, aging, poverty, war, and death -- to say nothing at all that's worth saying.