"The brief and vivid union of a tempestuous heart united to the tempest"

Rating: 9/10 (28 December 2008)

This is a remarkable film, and to me, Fincher's attempt to create a complete picture is as admirable as it was nearly achievable - successfully drawing together the two parts of my existence perhaps most common to us all, if ever a thing can group us together. That is, love (the search or loss of it) and our terminal stay in this world. The first is realized through two fine performances by Pitt and Blanchett, and the latter, by their circumstances, which prove non-too-unusual after all. Our life is fleeting, yes, as are our actions and the few relationships we will have during our stay. The condition has summoned some to revolution, and others to their premature, or perhaps, fitting exit. The characters in this film will come and go like us as well. Though many of us will pass this life unnoticed, few of us will attempt to draw from this strange security, the subsequent freedom it thus affords us. Often too passive or too impatient at what we later discover are the wrong moments, we lose great love or the chance at it, and discover at long end, that the actions which finally drew their present course, lead us to a life we are non-too-pleased with.
Strangely, this grim bell is why the film remains hopeful, despite its subject, and ultimately succeeds. Indeed, though epic love, like Benjamin's strange condition, war, or the beginning of yet a new life all find within them the same terminal fate, and although the winding paths we each cut across the progression of this common fatality may multiply the swings of its axe, our short stay CAN STILL prove rewarding. Brad Pitt's representation of Benjamin, and Fincher's story, are therefore at once hopeful, appropriate and terrific because the one plays, and the other shows love fashioned through a terminal life is not only possible, but also possibly remarkable. To have done so from the viewpoint of Pitt's passive observance is commendable for both the actor and director, who in so doing, place him like us, as an observer becoming gradually aware of a marvelous and yet frightening condition he cannot escape.