But the movie’s emotional center of gravity — the character who struggles and changes and feels — is Daisy, played by Ms. Blanchett from impetuous ingénue to near ghost with an almost otherworldly mixture of hauteur and heat. The story of Benjamin’s life is read to Daisy by her daughter (Julia Ormond) in a New Orleans hospital room in 2005, just as Hurricane Katrina is approaching the city. The imminence of the storm is a superfluous and unduly portentous device, since Katrina brings to mind precisely the hard, real-life miseries the movie has done everything in its power to avoid.