The Beautifully Curious Case of Benjamin Button

Shakespeare once said that the purpose of playing was to hold a mirror up to nature, and in this The Curious Case of Benjamin Button is a beautiful success. It holds a mirror up to nature just as it should and displays life’s mirror image: a life lived in reverse.

F. Scott Fitzgerald’s original short story of the same name was actually inspired by a remark from Mark Twain, in which he commented that it was unfair that the best part of life is in the beginning and the worst at the end. While Fitzgerald’s story largely follows this assumption about the best and worst parts of life, David Fincher’s artful film demonstrates the great cyclical similarities of our mortality, whether lived backward or forward. It’s about the artificiality of the differences, and what beautiful artifice it is.

The fairytale-like film about a man who was born 80 and grew younger, Benjamin Button glows ethereally on the screen. Like moving paintings, each lush shot is carefully crafted and laid out across its living, breathing New Orleans canvas. And nothing is quite so gorgeous to watch as the curious trick of watching Brad Pitt get younger and prettier in each frame.

Pitt gives a tour de force performance as the boy with the backward life. His naïveté and boyishness charm delight with an easy sweetness. It’s impossible not to love Benjamin Button, the man who’s so curiously interested in the world and those people who live their days in the right succession. Equally enchanting is Benjamin’s great love, Daisy (the stunning, age-defying beauty Cate Blanchett), a dancer who’s loved Benjamin since he was an old man, and one day finds herself lucky enough to meet him in the middle.

Supporting players Taraji Henson, Tilda Swinton, and Jared Harris lend their significant talents to the tale. Henson is endearing and lovely as Queenie the faithful, young woman who takes Benjamin in and raises him as her own. Swinton steals kisses and screen time from Benjamin’s other red-haired leading lady during his travels in Russia. And Jared Harris and his bumbling, quirky crew of steam boaters provide lighthearted and serious moments as they travel abroad before eventually joining the war effort against the Germans.

Benjamin Button dances between an epic love story and an epic life story. Benjamin’s story is told through a diary he wrote for Daisy toward the end of his young life, before he could no longer remember her or the curiously remarkable life he had lived. Daisy’s daughter (Julia Ormond) reads the story to her mother on her death bed.

It sets up a mirror for their two lives – one in which they both grow up as misplaced youths in an old folks home, go off on their own paths to self discovery, seeking new loves, wars, and other disasters, before finally finding each other again. It’s full of light humor, tearful departures, and deep humanity. It’s a film about two extraordinary people and their extraordinary journey together – which in the end wasn’t all that extraordinary at all.

Shakespeare knew that the beginnings and endings of life weren’t all that different. F. Scott with his obsession with youth seemed to have forgotten, as many of us have, but Benjamin Button affirms Shakespeare’s notion. Daisy is just as stunning in her old age as she was as a lithe, youthful ballerina. Benjamin Button asserts again and again that there’s nothing to fear from old age.

While it’s much too slow to start and lacks the plot urgency to make its 3 hour length feel short, Fincher’s film remains a cinematic triumph in story telling. Let’s face it, we can’t turn back time and we can’t reverse it. But what difference would it make if we could? A life lived backward isn’t all that different from a life lived forward. The Curious Case of Benjamin Button is timeless not because of its gimmick but because it’s not afraid to show life’s beauty in all its stages.