There’s a tug of war going on throughout Benjamin Button‘s lengthy running time. On one side of the moat, there’s director David Fincher, as always with an eye towards burrowing into the darker side of the human experience. Anchoring him is the ghost of F. Scott Fitzgerald, whose strange and somewhat clinical short story provides the inspiration for the film. Opposing those two is screenwriter Eric Roth, the writer of a couple of quite good films, but mostly of unwieldy junk with highbrow aspirations, the worst offender (and most appropriate to discussions of Button) being Forrest Gump. Giving him support is Alexandre Desplat, who provides an overbearing heartstring-tugger of a score, and, more importantly, a cadre of studio executives hell-bent on getting a weepy crowd-pleaser in the spirit of Titanic and Gump for their $150 million dollar investment. Who’s going to win?

Well, the only element left of Fitzgerald’s story is the title and the basic premise of a man born looking 70 years old and gradually aging backwards. Beyond that, Roth has little use for the source material, resetting the time and location of the start of the tale from Civil War-era Baltimore to WWI-era New Orleans, and scrapping the rest of the plot along with it. Roth’s vision is of a tragic love story. Brad Pitt, as the title character, is born as a very wrinkly and decrepit looking baby and, as accident and good fortune would have it, is left on the doorstep of a rest home. A few years later, the child-like but elderly Benjamin (played by Brad Pitt) meets the actual child Daisy (Cate Blanchett), and an odd friendship blooms that turns into star-crossed relationship, into full-blown romance as the two come closer and closer in the appearance of their ages. Nothing lasts forever, though, and we can see where this path inevitably leads.

It’s not an inherently flawed premise, but it is in Roth’s saccharine-stained hands. Those unfortunate enough to still be unable to wipe Forrest Gump from their memory will recognize the beats of that movie immediately here. The episodic construction with an Event of Great Significance to mark each one; the use of nostalgia as a rickety crutch; one insipid leitmotif that springs up multiple times as a metaphor so bludgeoningly obvious you’ll have a headache from the hammer used to deliver it. In the case of Gump, it was that recurring feather; here it’s a hummingbird used in identical fashion. But it’s more frustrating in this case, because as with so much of the film, it’s easy to see how it could have been so much better.