12A • 165 mins • 6 February

Director: David Fincher

Cast: Brad Pitt, Cate Blanchett, Tilda Swinton

Rating:

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button arrives laden with Oscar expectation: an epic, star-driven exercise in feelgood that will play your heartstrings like Edward Scissorhands on a stratocaster.

Loosely based on an F Scott Fitzgerald short story, it’s a tale armed with a weapons grade high concept. Our hero is born as a tiny, shrivelled ancient and ages backwards. Folksy adventures follow: a spell on a tugboat, wartime peril, foreign dalliances. His decades-long romance with a ballerina (the eternally good Cate Blanchett) tells us that, in the end, the trajectory of true love is all about timing.

The early scenes have the most magic. Fincher has an eye for the golden past and paints the initial parts of the movie in tones of honeyed Americana, all Rockwellian railroads and Main Streets USA. A prologue establishes a world where a town clock runs backwards, but this Burtonesque whimsy is an awkward fit for the movie’s contemporary framing sequences, set in the prelude to Hurricane Katrina. Ironically, Burton himself did this sort of thing so much more gracefully in Big Fish.

The young/old Benjamin is a winning creation, a mesmerising collision between Gollum and Truman Capote. And Pitt is brilliant here, adding quiet humanity to an FX triumph. But once Benjamin morphs into Pitt in all his A-list hunkster glory you feel the movie’s strange charm begin to dissipate. Soon we’re left with something that resembles an all too trad romantic drama, The Bridges of Madison County with a steadily diminishing echo of magic realism.

This is Fincher in restrained mode. There’s none of the kinetic visual showboating that defined such early work as Fight Club. But while Fincher filled 2006’s serial killer flick Zodiac with slowburn unease, here he’s content to unfold his tale with a wry, detached smile. The film’s premise and its plot never quite connect with that killer punch.

Crucially, there’s little sense of the era in which Benjamin grows young. His advancing years coincide with rock ‘n’ roll, the birth of the cult of youth, but while there’s a howlingly predictable glimpse of the Beatles on television his life plays on in a vacuum. Pity. The movie could have done something truly resonant with the notion of an old man infiltrating the age of the counter-culture.

Ultimately this is a kindly, sweet-hearted film, filled with some truly touching stuff about impermanence, love and loss. But at a languorous 165 minutes it’s old before its time.

Nick Setchfield