Ebert Breaks Pattern of Four Stars All the Time

Ebert has at last stopped dolling out the four stars and gave Benjamin Button a mere two and a half stars. The last time he was this wrong, I think, was when he and Siskel gave Unforgiven a bad review but then changed their minds years later. Ebert hates the whole premise of Button in the first place and can’t ever get beyond it. I guess it’s more interesting than the usual lament of it being too long (that’s the most popular complaint), cold (second most popular) and too much like Forrest Gump. Ebert writes:

Yes, you say, but Benjamin Button’s story is a fantasy. I realize that. It can invent as much as it pleases. But the film’s admirers speak of how deeply they were touched, what meditations it invoked. I felt instead: Life doesn’t work this way. We are an observer of our passage, and so are others. It has been proposed that one reason people marry is because they desire a witness to their lives. How could we perform that act of love if we were aging in opposite directions?

How indeed? The movie asks these questions and no more answers them than life, or religion, does. No, these aren’t questions that CAN be answered. Time is cruel. Aging backwards seems like a perfect way to go through life so that youth isn’t wasted on the young but in fact, it’s a horrible curse.