Slant Mag’s Nick Schager gives Benjamin Button high marks – the reviewer seems torn but decides, ultimately, that Fincher makes the difference:
Still, Benjamin’s very blankness gives the film‚Äîand its central romance‚Äîa beguiling measure of dreamy, fabulistic wonder, one that entrances even as Roth’s script regularly missteps, whether it be by referencing Katrina (a tacky symbol of the unpredictable, unchangeable future) or squandering any of the framing story’s potential (with a mid-plot paternity revelation leading to exactly jack squat). Certainly, Pitt’s sentimentally moderated performance and Blanchett’s suitably chilly turn, when coupled with Fincher’s suspiciousness of bald-faced treacle, makes many of these cheesy history-through-the-eyes-of-a-weirdo errors in judgment go down easier. The film’s more cloying inclinations never overwhelm because the director, and his performers, treat their tale with just enough detachment to give it a beautiful, enchanting refracted-through-gossamer (or ‚Äìtime) quality. It’s a subtle balancing act, and one far less obviously dexterous than the vast data-streamlining of Zodiac. Yet his work here is, in a way, no less impressive, exhibiting both a technical deftness and heartrending urgency that’s ultimately overpowering, Fincher (like his spiritual stand-in, the intro’s clockmaker) so in command of his material and his medium that‚Äîeven in a work as simultaneously rapturous and maddening as Benjamin Button‚Äîhe seems capable, at any given moment, of producing magic.