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Relentlessly engrossing and visually majestic, David Fincher's The Curious Case of Benjamin Button is an astonishingly great motion picture. This is one of the most awe-inspiring meditations on life I've ever witnessed on a big screen. It's so deeply observant about the process of living and aging, and at the same time it's also a wonderfully unconventional romantic story, with a nice helping of comedy for good measure. This is something we rarely get from a wide release - a movie that is irrefutably great in every respect, managing to establish a flawless balance between pure entertainment at the movies while also constantly challenging the viewers' minds and plucking their heartstrings.
It's 2005 in a hospital in New Orleans, and Hurricane Katrina looms. Caroline (Julia Ormond) watches over her dying mother, 80-year-old Daisy (Cate Blanchett). Daisy asks Caroline to start reading from a diary found in Daisy's belongings. Daisy claims she won't necessarily be listening to what Caroline reads, but she does want to hear her daughter's voice. Caroline sees that the diary belongs to a man named Benjamin Button (whom she knows nothing about), and rather than just being a series of written pages, it also contains several photographs and mementos that will be of great explanatory importance as Caroline reads specific entries. She starts reading said diary to her mother, and we are taken back to 1918, to the day in which World War I ended, which also marks the day in which Benjamin (Brad Pitt) was born the size of a baby, yet with all the physical features and health problems of an old man. More plot summary would simply be detrimental to the experience of watching this film, which contains so many revelations that it's almost unfair to compare it to so many other films that have attempted the same sort of thing and have ended up limiting their scope so much. The Curious Case of Benjamin Button fully exploits the potential of its greatly interesting premise, which is probably why it lasts nearly three hours, but don't let that dissuade you from watching this - this is such an involving picture that you won't even notice the time that passed once it's over.
Some may feel turned off by the arguably weird, if outlandish, premise of this story, but the main thing to take away from Fincher's film and what makes it an unbelievably amazing work of cinema is the fact that, even though Benjamin observes what transpires in his life as someone who gets younger with each day instead of following the regular aging process, the observations he makes are the same type of observations that a person who ages normally would make about his/her life. Benjamin meets a wide array of people, sees them die, sees others get born, finds love, laughs, cries, connects with some people more than he does with others, has sex, goes to different places, and the list goes on. Without going too much into spoiler territory, I'll point out that the forgetfulness that Benjamin experiences at the end of the film once he's a child is the exact same type of forgetfulness old people go through. Fincher's thesis is that it doesn't matter whether you age forward or backwards because you still end up in the same state - as one characters wisely puts it at one point, "we all end up in diapers, no matter what." Though a seemingly odd quote, it's a great one in terms of summing up the feeling you get from this film, which is incredibly insightful yet is always good-humored in imparting said insight and never wallows in dryness or melodrama. As Benjamin learns, regardless of whether you age forward or backwards, you simply have to take advantage of everything that life gives you.
I say all of this about the film's premise because of how it has been the subject of negative commentary in so many other reviews. Roger Ebert, known even by those who don't know much about film criticism, is certainly one of today's best critics, but I have to disagree with the basis of his review for this film. Right from the beginning of the review, he basically lets us know that he is dismissing the movie entirely because of the premise, and claims that it is impossible to care about what happens during this film because of the way the story is constructed, and this simply couldn't be further from the truth. I'll admit that, in the wrong hands, that could've EASILY been the case, but in Fincher's hands, it MORE than works. It works perfectly. The film is sublime, yet never moves at a glacial pace. It's funny, yet never ridiculous. And it is a dialogue-driven drama, yet it's never monotonous. We readily accept the premise, and that is what makes it so easy to get engrossed in the film.
After "growing up" and leaving home, Benjamin goes to Russia where he meets Elizabeth Abbott (Tilda Swinton), who is staying with her husband at the same hotel as Benjamin. They start having late-night talks in the hotel lobby, with no one else around, and start getting closer and closer to one another. Benjamin makes an observation that I've often thought about, which is that when a place like a hotel is so quiet late at night, it sort of amazes you that a place that has so many people in it can actually have a moment in which there's so much silence, that even a mouse jumping isn't noticed by anyone. He takes pleasure in being present and awake during such a moment of stillness, and moreso in sharing it with Elizabeth, who tells him a story about how she once swam in the ocean for 34 hours until she simply couldn't move anymore, but claims she'd never be able to do it again. One day, Elizabeth simply leaves the hotel and leaves him what SEEMS to be a disappointingly short and empty message, yet the few words she writes are deeply resonant - as Benjamin notes at one point, sometimes the people you know for the shortest amount of time have the most impact on you. All you need is to "meet" them, as Elizabeth puts it in her message. Later in the film, Elizabeth makes a brief appearance in a hope-inducing moment that is sure to make everyone smile as much as it makes Benjamin smile: you can do anything, no matter how old you are. You just have to make yourself do it.
As you might expect, a lot of the funny moments come from the awkward situations Benjamin sometimes gets in as a result of his, well, curious case, with people often confused by his sexual vigor and other anomalies. There is a scene during a religious service in which a reverend tries to get Benjamin to walk as though his walking stemmed from a miracle of God, and it's one of those things you shouldn't laugh at, but you just have to, and you can just tell that comedy is exactly what Fincher was going for here, which makes the scene's jarringly tragic ending all the more surprising. Many of the laughs also come from a character in the film who makes spontaneous appearances and claims to have been struck by lightning, yet always gives a different version of how it happened. It's the sort of joke that, eventually, you know exactly what's going to be said, but rather than being dull and repetitive, you just start laughing before it's even told because you know what's coming and you can't help finding it endearingly funny.
The last time that Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett starred in a film together was two years ago in Babel, a movie that basically had the butterfly effect (or chaos theory, or whatever term you prefer) as the center of its plot: the idea that one action by someone in a certain place can have a huge impact on someone else who is perhaps miles away and has no relation to that first person. The Curious Case of Benjamin Button features a sequence that pushes the envelope of said theory even further in that it presents several acts by several people all of which could have prevented an event from taking place, had they not happened. Some might think the sequence is unnecessary because it is short and it doesn't seem to have an immense effect on the plot, but well... without spoiling anything, it should be noted that what happens doesn't only affect Daisy's career as a dancer; it greatly impacts the futures of both Daisy and Benjamin, and that is exactly why this seemingly disposable sequence is actually nothing but brilliance on Fincher's part.
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button deserves all possible praise and awards recognition for its achievements in terms of visual/technical and make-up work. The combination of CGI and actual make-up flawlessly depicts the aging process (forward for Daisy and backwards for Benjamin, of course). In addition to that, though, the film is more than beautifully shot, with some incredibly breathtaking locations that serve as stunning backgrounds to the development of this breathtaking story. The film essentially covers the whole of the 20th century (from 1918 till 1985, and then jumping to 2005 for the hospital scenes) and the set designs and period details are impeccable.
The final moments of the film feature a zoom-out in the hospital room, after Caroline has finished reading Benjamin's diary and heads over to find out what is happening with the hurricane, leaving a moribund Daisy in bed. The zoom-out is coupled with background noises that signal the impending doom of the present time, and as soon as the screen fades to black, the movie proceeds to display its final images, with a voiceover by Benjamin, who imparts deep observations about each individual person's role in life, as we get a glimpse at several of the people we met throughout this stunning journey of a motion picture. If, by this point, anyone was not convinced of the greatness of The Curious Case of Benjamin Button this final sequence is all the proof they need.
Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett are perfect star-crossed lovers, playing a very different couple than they did in Babel, and indeed, playing a very unorthodox pair of star-crossed lovers (even though the term "star-crossed" fits perfectly, for obvious reasons). If you look at current pictures of Pitt he's arguably hotter than he's ever been (even though he's into his 40's), so you'd figure it'd be impossible to make him into a plausible crotchety old man at the beginning, and you'd be wrong. Pitt gives a fierce performance, deftly capturing every age stage, and co-star Blanchett is every bit as regal an actress as she always is in films she stars in. Julia Ormond, I believe, redeems herself here for her sub-par work last year in the critically-panned I Know Who Killed Me, never overplaying the part of the suffering daughter who is startled by the revelations she comes across in Benjamin's diary (even when the biggest revelation, which some may predict, is unveiled). Taraji P. Henson is delightful to watch as Queenie, the woman who raises the title character, stealing essentially every scene she takes part in. As Elizabeth, Swinton has a relatively short role, but doesn't fail to impress; it's quite something when a character whom we only meet for a short while shows up later in a film and makes you smile, yet that is precisely what Swinton accomplishes here.
Fincher is obviously aware of Pitt's magnificent potential, which is why he's worked with him in so many of his films. In Se7en and Fight Club, Fincher extracted much toughness out of Pitt's performance, but in this case, the situation is different because this last film is far more sublime, though the actor-director collaboration still yields great results.
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button is a visual tour de force and an amazing feat of storytelling. Everyone, old and young, should be curious enough to see this, and I have no doubt that they all will walk away from it in a deeply enlightened state, having witnessed an excellently-crafted meditation on life and one of the best cinematic achievements produced in 2008.
9/10
