Cast: Brad Pitt, Cate Blanchett, Tom Everette, Robert Towers, Peter Donald Badalamenti II, Charles Henry Wyson; Director: David Fincher; Producers: Cean Chaffin, Kathleen Kennedy, Frank Marshall; Screenwriters: Eric Roth, Robin Swicord; Music: Alexandre Desplat; Editor: Kirk Baxter, Angus Wall; Genre: Drama/ Fantasy/ Mystery/ Romance; Cinematography: Claudio Miranda; Distributor: Paramount Pictures; Location: Cambodia; Running Time: 166 min.;Technical Assessment: 3.5
Moral Assessment: 3
CINEMA Rating: For viewers age 14 and above
During the time of hurricane Katrina in 2005, an 80-year-old woman (Cate Blanchett), on her death bed in New Orleans, asks her daughter Caroline (Julia Ormond), to read from the diary of one Benjamin Button (Brad Pitt). From reading it, Caroline learns that her dying mother is the Daisy in the diary. In 1918, Benjamin Button’s mother dies giving birth to him, the infant who looks like a shriveled old man. Benjamin’s father Thomas Button (Jason Flemyng)—taking the child for a monster due to his hideous appearance and blaming him for the death of his mother—leaves the infant at the steps of a nursing home for the aged. Its kindhearted manager, Queenie (Taraji Henson), keeps and raises the foundling despite his monstrous looks. By the time Benjamin is seven years old, he looks like younger but still decrepit 80-year old who moves around in a wheelchair. Nobody takes him seriously when he says he is aged seven, because they do not know that Benjamin is physically aging backward. At age 13, Benjamin meets Daisy who regularly visits a relative in the home, and the girl is to be unforgettable for him.
Director David Fincher reportedly waited to do the film until the technology could enable one actor to play the role in the film’s entirety. This is it—technological magic at its amazing best. All throughout the movie you could be asking, “Is that Brad Pitt?” Blanchett’s makeup as Daisy on her death bed is so natural that you wonder if it’s a different actress; indeed, Blanchett seeing her aging image could well prepare for her golden years. But Blanchett’s makeup is nothing compared to what cinematic technology did on Pitt’s character. They superimposed Pitt’s face and eyes into the Benjamin Button character—except, of course, when Button reached Pitt’s age, as Button is pure Brad Pitt circa 2008. The acting is Oscar material, and the cast couldn’t have been better chosen, with Taraji Henson, Tilda Swinton, Jared Harris and Jason Flemyng delivering supporting roles. Helping the viewer accept the improbable plot is the movie’s attention to period details. Sets for the 1920 vignettes are perfectly reconstructed and special effects are used to enhance the flow of the story.
Inspired by a short story written in 1922 by F. Scott Fitzgerald with the same title, the movie The Curious Case of Benjamin Button should be viewed as science fiction but pondered as drama on life, time and aging. Viewers shouldn’t bicker about the story’s logic or the lack of it, the incongruousness of the idea of aging backwards, but rather take it as a fairy-tale that can lead us to empathize with the characters and then go deeper into ourselves. Could we believe we could sire a child who looks like a reincarnation of Rosemary’s Baby? Would we care to nurture as our own a repulsive-looking newborn abandoned at our doorsteps? Would we bother to play with a teenager who looks more like our great grandfather? Would we employ in our tugboat a senior citizen who’d be better off resting in a home for the aged? Even if we were a prostitute, could we stand having for a customer a 75-year old virgin? Would our love be strong enough to want to marry a lover knowing he’d look 16 when we are 64? And wouldn’t we feel ancient bottle-feeding an infant who used to be our lover? A story of reverse aging may be a difficult premise to accept but the movie must be viewed on its own terms and for the richness it offers to thinking viewers; otherwise, it would be seen as just a whole lot of nonsense.
