The Curious Case of Benjamin Button is Too Long: Why Brad Pitt's Latest Film is Over Length at Two and a Half Hours

A backwards-aging man may be an interesting premise, but even Brad Pitt's impressive acting can't keep some viewers interested. For casual movie-goers, anything over two-and-a-half hours is automatically off-limits.

The film tells the tale of a man born with the appearance and health problems of a man in his 80s. As he grows, he slowly begins to get better, becoming more youthful and healthy while watching his friends and loves grow older. After "meeting in the middle" with the love of his life (their apparent ages being similar), Benjamin has a child with the woman, but realizing he cannot raise a child while he is becoming one himself, leaves his family and is later found as a confused child who eventually becomes a baby again before dying. The tale presents the moral "Life isn't measured in minutes, but in moments."

Why Would Director David Fincher Drag Out The Curious Case of Benjamin Button?

The foremost reason, one would think, is that the film is an adaptation of an F. Scott Fitzgerald short story. Fitzgerald, author of such works as The Great Gatsby, is considered by some to be long-winded and a writer prone to drone on, especially when considered by today's easily-distracted youth. In order to be true to the story, director David Fincher may have wanted the film to run long enough to feel like a Fitzgerald story.

After 166 minutes, however, the film only feels like it should have ended much sooner.

MSNBC and Altweeklies both condemn Button for being a shoddy attempt at re-creating the emotional impact of fictional bio-pic Forrest Gump. The problem with such an endeavour is being able to maintain a pace that will keep viewers interested while telling a long story. Gump was able to get its story told in 142 minutes, about 20 minutes less than Button. Director Robert Zemeckis was able to do this by keeping the different segments of his protagonist's life relatively short, and not diverting attention away from the goal of his film.

Fincher, however, tends to dwell on segments, visuals and ideas that, while intriguing and sometimes visually stunning, ran much longer than was necessary to get their point across. For example, a particular segment tells of causality and how if one thing during the day were different, a terrible accident may have been averted. This segment, while interesting, ran much, much too long, making the viewer want to throttle the director and stamp him in the forehead with a rubber stamp emblazoned with the words "we get it already!"

Some biographic films are understandably long. A story about an amazing life is not something that should be cut too short, but the audience has to be taken into account as well. Though interesting, audiences today need to be entertained enough to keep them watching without feeling like they have to force their way through the end of the film.

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, while an interesting story, is not about an amazing life. It's about a fictional life, and as such its point is to get its moral across, not teach history. Had the director figured this out, the film would have been shorter, pulled in fewer odd directions, and better received by all.

Feb 26, 2009 1:48 PM

Guest :

went to see this film this afternoon and spent the first hour wondering when the plot was going to kick in, and the last 20 minutes straining to see my watch in the cinema as my full bladder, sore arse and rumbling tummy was telling me I had obviously been sat there the best part of 3 hours..have no objections doing this with an epic, Ben Hur or Nicholas Nickleby for example, and would expect it from an adaptation of War and Peace..but an adaptation of a short story??? How long would it have been if it had been an adaptation of a full length novel? I don't know about Brad Pitt having grown old too quickly but I sure as hell aged during this drawn out saga..in all, the acting was good, the storyline quirky, but simply not interesting enough to keep you gripped for that length of time..when I watch a Mike Leigh film I feel like I daren't pull my eyes from the screen for a single second lest I should miss a nuance of detail, a facial expression etc..but so little happens in the first hour of Benjamin Button that one could leave the auditorium, go to the foyer, buy popcorn, hotdogs and coke, drink and eat, go the the toilet, adjust your hair and make up, come back in and not notice that the plot had moved on..because it won't have..i'm all for staying true to an authors original book, it honours and respects their work, but the visual medium demands a faster pace than the written word..reading D H Lawrence can be laborious in places, but you can always skip a page or two, same with Fitzgerald, but in the cinema you cannot bypass the longevity of the film..this would be more suited to tv, where you can flick channels or go and make a cup of tea until the action hots up...a brave attempt by the director and beautiful performances by the actors, but generally, not a film you come out of thinking..i'm glad i saw that..which was a shame, as it so easily could have been! If only the director had heard of the saying..sometimes less is more!!!