Impossible and yet a perfect fable for love, memory, aging, and life itself.

Rating: 8/10 (7 October 2013)

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (2008)
Magical, bizarre, emotional, sentimental, gorgeous, profound, impossible.
Thankfully the director of this amazing short story by F. Scott Fitzgerald was David Fincher. You can imagine how overblown and needlessly saccharine it might have been in the hands of a more centrist director (say James Cameron) or how needlessly fanciful and detached by a more visionary one (say Baz Luhrmann, who just released that other Fitzgerald adaptation, "The Great Gatsby"). Fincher shows a sense of psychology in the characters, and of probing how we all think through edgy, improbable situations (from "Fight Club" to "Se7en" to even the one-dimensional "Panic Room").
I say "amazing" story because in fact the original story is even better than this really moving, excellent movie. (It left me weeping at the end.) So maybe start there. Google "Benjamin Button xroads" for the full (short) text.
Or start here. The beginning makes clear the problem. A child is born an old man. Infant-sized (unlike the story) but with cataracts and arthritis and so on. And as he grows (and does not die as expected) he gets younger. Eventually he becomes a tottering Brad Pitt, and then an extremely handsome Brad Pitt. And then...well, what can happen as you get so incredibly young after six or eight decades?
I know, I know, how ridiculous. But somehow Fitzgerald makes it all work, and Fincher pulls out that core for the story here. The biggest issues are love and death (as Woody Allen keeps reminding us). In love, you can see how it might be frustrating to fall in love with someone and then realize that as they get older you get younger and you end up literally growing apart. In death, the problem is even more profound, because even though the title character, Benjamin, seems to be lucky because he doesn't grow old, by his final years he ends up facing all the same problems--losing friends, losing his ability to function as he once did, and eventually, shutting down. Dying. (The final line of the book: "...and the warm sweet aroma of the milk, faded out altogether from his mind.")
This gives nothing away, not really. It's how this happens that matters. And simply seeing it happen. This is where Fincher does such a solid, delicate job. There has been a lot of worthy talk about the effects used--aging people (in both directions), and working with the different eras so fluidly. The movie does span most of the 20th Century, ending with a Hurricane Katrina echo in the 21st. It's a visual masterpiece, for sure (much like "Hugo" is a computer-enhanced masterpiece in turn of the century France). But not once does an effect get in the way or announce itself.
Pitt, it has to be said, is brilliant--and brilliantly restrained. Unlike his "restrained" role (one might say deadened) in "Tree of Life" we see here a subtle inner mind at work, an "old soul" with some wry wisdom and delight at being alive showing. He's sometimes played up for his looks alone (on purpose, and it made us laugh out loud at the poster-boy look he can pull off), but mostly he's just really convincing. Equally so, but with a smaller part, is the other main character, Cate Blanchett, who also ages (in the normal direction) and works through her years against the main character's.
There are some additions to the movie that are moving and not Fitzgerald's, and some of them are unnecessary for the story, and maybe distractions or attractions depending on what you need from a movie. The biggest example is the way the story is told through reading a diary at the bedside of a dying woman in a hospital as a hurricane approaches and the lights flicker. It brings to mind "The Notebook" (which will make you cry even harder than this movie will), and it's not badly done, but is not actually helpful, either, except to give the plot and the characters more depth. Likewise, there are lots of little historic scenes thrown in for drama--World War II, for example--that are purely extra material. Good enough. But also more than enough, perhaps.
Most of all the movie changes the love-affair of the story from a realistic and heartbreaking tale of aging and changing attraction to a very Hollywood "love is forever" kind of romance. It's fine, and you'll probably like the optimism, but Fitzgerald tapped into something more trenchant that Fincher was apparently afraid of.
The movie is too long for sure, dragging at times. And it's too dreamy and sentimental for its own good, too, at least sometimes. It lacks some kind of puncturing force, wrapped up so nicely as it is. But see it, regardless. It's got too much to recommend it overall.