The Time of His Life

Benjamin Button never was supposed to live, but live he did.

“I was born under unusual circumstances,” B2 (an outstanding Brad Pitt) says at the beginning of director David Fincher’s The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, an adaptation of the 1920s short story by F. Scott Fitzgerald about a man who ages backward.

Benjamin was born a wrinkly baby in his physical eighties, and died an old man in the body of a newborn.

The film takes us through his life, as told by his soul mate Daisy (Cate Blanchett) to her daughter (Julia Ormond), on her deathbed in 2005, several decades after Daisy, then a child, met Benjamin in their native New Orleans.

We follow this unusual story, from the end of WWI in 1918 into the 21st century, and learn that Benjamin was abandoned by his industrialist father at the door of Queenie (the awards-worthy Taraji P. Henson, who has called her character “the embodiment of unconditional love”), who is kindness incarnate.

We see him meet and fall in love with Daisy, and eventually leave her to find meaning in his life, and then perhaps for good.

We see him on a journey that is unlike no other man’s in spite of its peculiarity. Time, it seems, doesn’t stop for him, either. Like the rest of us, all he can do is enjoy it and make the most of it.

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button is an epically dazzling film, a grand film with really amazing production values and performances.

I wasn’t too keen on the caricature-like nature of some of the characters that came in and out of B2’s life – they just didn’t feel fully realized – but I was truly head over heels over the grand nature of the question the film: What is in a life?

A lot, it seems, because as Queenie says, “You never know what’s comin’ for you.”

And like Benjamin Button, one can only hope to surprise everyone and really live.

Let The Curious Case of Benjamin Button be wake-up call. They don’t get any more artful than this.

My Rating ***1/2

Photo: Paramount Pictures.