'The Curious Case of Benjamin Button' veered between the grotesque and the sentimental and in the end couldn't settle on a genre.Some engaging sequences didn't make up for the backside-numbing length, and there was none of the suspense that carried an epic like 'Australia'.

One thing puzzles me: Americans have all these surgical and cosmetic interventions, so people in their sixties and seventies appear quite 'worth it' as Jane Fonda puts it in the ad, but as soon as someone (Cate Blanchett) is dying, aged 80, they're made up to look as if they've been dead for 100 years already!

It's as if people suddenly become their own portraits of Dorian Grey when they are about to croak. That, or the make-up artists are recruited from workers on zombie films. Cate looked like one of the undead and Benjamin as a senile baby resembled a waxy gargoyle.

As for the 'coloured folks' you would think we hadn't moved on from 'Gone with the Wind'. Just as I thought there'd be an outbreak of negro spirituals, there was!

There were some good parts, such as the sea-voyages in a frosty tugboat, although even that looked like a bath toy at times. Tilda Swinton brought a 'Lady of the Camelias' atmosphere to her midight trysts with Benjamin. The early panoramas of street scenes complete with rickety cars was a bit Norman Rockwell but pleasant enough.The music was good, too.

All that false olde-worldy philosophising struck a false note, though - about 'letting go' and being grateful, but it didn't seem to relate to much that was actually happening in the film - it seemed tacked on rather than arising from circumstances. An old gent claiming to have been struck by lightning seven times, with a comic silent film flashback added little except light relief.

It's hard to believe it was adapted from a Scott Fitzgerald short story, because the characters and their old-timer philosophies seem like mangled Steinbeck.

I've liked Brad Pitt since he played opposite Frances McDormand as a fitness centre assistant permanently attached to his iPod in 'Burn after Reading'. He doesn't have much chance against all the resin in this film. It creates a kind of Disneyfied old-ness, an artifically 'distressed' look that wouldn't fool the experts on the Antiques Road Show.

I felt sorry that 'Brad and Ange' didn't get anything at the Baftas, but now at least I understand why they were disappointed. 'The Changeling' was a better film but was marred by a similar detachment from the past which makes it surreal.

I can see it might go down well with a tolerant American audience, as a kind of sepia-tinted Forrest Gump-style fable-biopic, but it seemed to me far too long and rambling - until the very end when it dwindled to a halt as if the director had lost interest. I'm afraid that happened to me after the first hour or so.