I just read the short story. It’s interesting. It reminds me of Alan Moore’s The Reversible Man, a short comic strip originally published in 2000AD.
I liked the idea of this movie and I agree with Diogenes that life, death, loss, and all these unpleasantries of life need to be examined. However, in my opinion, these themes are best examined in books; not movies. As a film, a better actor than Brad Pitt would have had the ability to quietly convey some of these ideas. However, his performance was flat and he didn’t play off Cate Blanchett very well, in my opinion.
I will give the book a try because, as I said, there are important concepts to explore here, but as a movie, it left me cold.
They did – they completely removed the laugh lines from around his eyes and mouth. He had no wrinkles at all. I was marveling at that too. It was downright eerie – I couldn’t see any “tells” that it was an effect, and yet I knew he shouldn’t look that young. Not exactly “uncanny valley” but I sort of felt like I was responding in the same way that Daisy was right then – he shouldn’t be that young, but he is.
I liked the juxtaposition of maturity vs. age, and I took that away as a central theme. For example, his first girlfriend was around 60 years old, and chronologically, emotionally, he was about 18. His outlook on life was fairly un-complex, simply because he had so little life experience; but because it was packaged in a 65-year-old body, she experienced his naivete as a simple kind of wisdom and maturity. Had she been speaking to someone she knew was 18, she probably wouldn’t have lent much weight to anything he said, and written him off as young and naive and she had the hard experience to know better (aka had been hardened into cynicism). Instead, he ultimately inspired her to return to and achieve her previously-abandoned dream. Because she saw him as wise instead of young, she really opened herself up to his perspective, and what was really his youthfulness, allowing herself to “be young” (and optimistic, idealistic, and what-have-you) again without resistance to the “indignity” or “immaturity” of it.
I also got the impression that the reason he left when his daughter was so young, was because he thought it would be selfish to stay long enough for her to get attached to him. (And then just as she hits her teen years, he’s apparently a teenager too – and he is a playmate, and not a father. Would a teenager take him seriously if he looks no older than she?) He told Daisy to find her a father; he left to make room for one. I don’t necessarily agree he was right – the difficulties that would come up when both father and daughter are in their “teens” were probably not insurmountable – but I can follow his logic why he did so.
I didn’t much like it. Sure it’s an intriquing idea, and it was well crafted, but halfway through I’m thinking this is too much Forrest Gump for me, and when he walked out on his family I was like, no thanks mr you never know what’s coming for you, if you don’t like it change, but I’m afraid so I’ll abandon my wife and child. I couldn’t hang with that.
Yay! We’re saved!
Saw this tonight - at times a visually stunning, beautiful movie, at times, a bore. Could’ve easily cut 1/2 hour, more.
I agree with Carnick: Button was too ordinary, lead too pedestrian of a life for me to be interested in him. At least Forrest Gump did things and met interesting people.
I enjoyed the cinematography of the WW1 sequences involving the clock-maker, and felt the film stayed too long in the amber hues of the 1940’s sequences. And, yes, somebody should’ve freaked out at least once in his life, which makes you wonder in what sort of no-press, no-internet world this guy lived? 
And, what: the girl couldn’t grow up knowing that “Daddy’s sick”? Isn’t that a sad reality for too many little girls already? Just because he’s growing younger didn’t mean he couldn’t be her father. His explanation was self-serving, and I really stopped caring for the movie once he abandoned his wife (common-law, at least) and daughter.
I saw the film last week. I liked the first half, but thought it bogged down after the tugboat. Overall, I liked it well enough.
One cool thing is that every time I go to New Orleans I eat at Clover Grill. One scene was filmed there, and when it came up we were like, ‘Hey! That’s Clover Grill!’ Ex-fiancée asked me to bring her a T-shirt from New Orleans, so I got one from Clover Grill. I emailed her to watch the movie, as she would appreciate having a shirt from there because of it.
I saw this on DVD the other day. After a promising start it fell flat. It’s rather dull. I’m not sure it would have garnered as much attention as it has without Mr. Pitt in the lead role.
I’ve seen it a couple of times on DVD. It just seems like a remake of Forrest Gump to me, but with a different gimmick.
I thought Pitt was badly miscast. He is one of my favorite actors, and I can usually rest assured that a movie he appears in will be watchable. But he’s high energy kind of guy, and this low-keyed character didn’t suit him very well. I’m sure he enjoyed the stretch, but it didn’t work.
The hospital scenes were torture. I see no benefit to them at all, except to exacerbate the poor continuity of the movie as a whole.
I didn’t dislike the movie, but I didn’t feel it had a whole lot to say. It was just 2 1/2 hours of bittersweetness.
Zombie thread, but…
Just saw this a week or so ago. I liked it well enough. It could have been a bit shorter. I thought the whole “There’s nothing wrong with being old,” theme was nice. And the neatness of the Katrina bookending was great.
Lola. You also might have seen its effects in one of the X-Men movies, making Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellan younger.
So is this thread getting younger as it ages?
FIrst of all, it was never established as being the sea captain’s symbol. You assumed that, It was established as the symbol for infinity, the afterlife, the angel of death.
But even if it was the captain: does it not make sense that the character’s main father figure would come back when his son died?
It seemed to me more like they weren’t too confident of how well the deaging effect would work, and only wanted to use it conservatively. I’m not even sure they used CGI on the more oft-seen Blanchet; it all just looked like makeup and lighting to me.
The thing that bugged me most about the aging was that there were times when both started looking younger in one scene, but older in another. And usually, the part that made them look older only lasted for a second or less. That would have been the perfect time to use the CGI brush-up effect. It could have been done on a frame-by-frame level, even.
Oh, and Blanchett should have been redubbed when she appeared in scenes as the dying Daisy, or at least laid off the old person accent. Both my sister and I had to keep turning on the subtitles to understand what she was saying. I assume it was the makeup/prosthetics because she’s perfectly understandable when she narrates offscreen.
Finally, it is a long movie, and is better watched in two chunks. The tugboat scene is a natural dividing line. I took a break there because my sister was getting too sleepy to watch, and I wanted to finish watching it with her. And, unlike the rest of you, I never really got the feeling that it was too long.