After reading the short story by F. Scott Fitzgerald, it is simple to figure out the reasons why they changed it so much to make an Oscar worthy, mainstream film. The story is wonderful, very satirical and beautifully written, but it would not translate well into a film, even if they had kept the general plot devices; yes, the only resemblance the film holds to the story is the arch, a man born a septuagenarian (what a useless word) aging backwards into eventual nothingness. The short story has a whimsical, detached feel, a meandering narrative structure despite its compact length. The movie maintains the structure and the arch, but nothing else.
That said, I loved the film.
David Fincher will undoubtedly be criticised for going soft, for appealing to the pathos of a mainstream audience. I unjustly made this assumption at first glance; there's a doomed romance, and a misplaced focus on realism in some of the scenes despite the mystical possibilities of the premise. However, after re-reading the short story, I came to realize that there was no way to successfully adapt the tone of the piece into a film; it focuses almost expressly on generational conflict, and the aging of a person making them even more naive than when they arrived on earth. The film needed to elaborate; and it did, into a well-deserved 159 minutes.
The opening sequence, beginning in a New Orleans hospital at the onset of Hurricane Katrina, is quite possibly the most beautiful of the entire film. A dying Daisy describes the efforts of a blind clock-maker to build a clock fit for a new train station. He makes it work in reverse, for reasons that I will not disclose in this review; it will suffice to say that what ensues, set to a poetic voiceover, is the most beautiful reverse-motion sequence I have yet seen (out of lots of reverse-motion sequences, believe me...). It serves to draw the viewer into the mysticism, to lose their sense of logical time--and to affect them emotionally from the onset.
The film is, however, a slave of consequence. This is where the inevitable comparisons to Forrest Gump will most likely be drawn. Some of the historical throw-ins are magical, such as Daisy and Benjamin witnessing a space-shuttle launch whilst sailing in the Gulf of Mexico. Others feel very forced, such as Benjamin's encounter with the woman who swam the English channel (although even that occurrence works in the context that it is used). An outright strange reference is the recurring joke of a man in a retirement home claiming to have been struck by lightning 7 times, a likely allusion to Roy Sullivan, the Virginia park ranger. (I looked him up on Wikipedia. This is slightly anachronistic, though strangely relevant to the short story; Roy Sullivan lived in Virginia, and the film takes place mostly in New Orleans, but the short story is in Baltimore.) The general premise of the film is reliant upon eventuality--evidenced by the fact that the revelation of the story is related with the climactic backdrop of Hurricane Katrina.
No matter how forced the film feels at times, it is genuinely moving. It is conveying a message that needs to be taken into account by all; life is fleeting, but don't take it for granted.