One of the major puzzles of the 2008-09 season remains the success of "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button," which generated remarkable raves from the usual ravers and garnered the most Academy Award nominations of any picture. One answer to that puzzle lies in the movie's blatant, even brilliant manipulation of its material and its audience, which of course includes all the eligible voters for those awards. The movie pushes every button, plucks every heartstring, stimulates every tear duct, and caps it all off with the sort of utterances that many filmmakers and filmgoers mistake for philosophy.

Based on a flimsy fable by F. Scott Fitzgerald about a baby born an old man who then grows down instead of up, the picture traces the long life of its protagonist, as he passes the stages of his age and youth in reverse, becoming ever younger until he ends his life in infancy. The script offers a vague, meaningless bit of action to justify the process, which unfortunately makes no sense at all, thus neatly fitting the emotional and intellectual level of the picture.

Aside from the central fiction of Benjamin Button's "ungrowth," the film depends upon a series of voiceover narratives, sometimes consisting of stories within stories, from a couple of different characters. It builds its structure on the frame of the conversation between an old woman (Cate Blanchett) slowly dying in a New Orleans hospital and her daughter (Julia Ormond). She instructs her daughter to read her diary, which includes, among other memorabilia, Benjamin Button's autobiography. As Ormond reads the prose, Brad Pitt's voice takes over, and he becomes the major storyteller of the film.

Aside from its bizarre foundation, the plot unfolds in a relatively orthodox manner, showing a series of episodes in the life of the old baby as he grows up (or down), appropriately, among elderly people in an old folks' home. As he matures in his backward way, he encounters a variety of people and events that shape his life and thought - the devotion of the cook (Taraji P. Henson) who becomes his surrogate mother, the young girl Daisy, with whom he will eventually fall in love, his first job, his first drink, his first sexual experience, and so on. Born at the end of World War I, he serves on a tugboat in World War II, which allows the director to include a long and entirely extraneous sequence set for some reason in Murmansk.

When Benjamin, the sole survivor of a submarine attack, returns from the war, he once again meets the grown-up Daisy, who had known him as an aged kid but now has reached the point where they can meet in the middle of their divergent paths. Her career as a dancer creates a number of obstacles to their relationship, which ultimately evolves into a period of total emotional fulfillment. He knows, of course, that he will continue to grow younger, which prevents anything like a normal, permanent relationship and finally forces him to abandon her and their child.

The purported romantic story of the two doomed lovers provides some, but not all of the tears that flow throughout "Benjamin Button." With its several funerals, the scenes of coffins taken from the home, the constant presence of the old, the sick, and the dying, its frequent cutting to the painfully declining Daisy, and the gratuitous pathos of Benjamin's own deterioration, the movie positively wallows in death. Its long, lugubrious meditation on the subject inspires a number of pithy utterances from the various narrators about love, decay, and mortality, none of them particularly original or uplifting.

Employing the magic of a variety of special effects, presumably state-of-the-art digital technology with some expert makeup thrown in, the movie shows Brad Pitt in various stages of "ungrowth," which may itself account for some of the lavish tributes poured all over "Benjamin Button." Its real appeal, however, lies in the lachrymose sentimentality of its plot and characters and the phony profundity of its inspirational lines, which possess all the depth of a fortune cookie in the better sort of Chinese restaurant; "Benjamin Button" is the "Forrest Gump" of our time, and will therefore probably sweep the Academy Awards.

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button

(PG-13), directed by David Fincher

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