A whimsy and eloquent dance on life, beautiful and tragic whilst human and fantastic.

Rating: Null/10 (9 February 2009)

Fairy tales and fables come in all sorts of different forms, the least of which certainly not being the film, and while the novel may have came first, there still remains a certain extra-dimensional beauty to seeing a good piece of fantastical fiction being pulled off up on that giant silver screen. At risk of over-romanticising what is nevertheless a fairytale grounded deeply in the human spirit and heart, I submit that The Curious Case of Benjamin Button is exactly that; it's a rare example of an eloquent dance synchronised along to the melancholic keys of a piano played within a rustic bar on the edge of New Orleans. It's tangible, real, and yet ethereal and poignantly larger than life at the same time. Yet there remains one key aspect to Benjamin's story here that most fables fail to resolve - that is that a key theme, in fact, the absolute idea behind his story is the idea of the entirety of life, death and everything between; not just the happy parts, or the struggles, but the whole of that journey in all its details. Of course, Benjamin's case isn't exactly what you'd call "normal", and yet despite its somewhat fantastical façade and makeup, there is still plenty of humanity on show here that always plays first and foremost to the backing of Mr. Button's curious, but harrowing tale.
For director David Fincher, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button represents a dive further into long, grand pieces of character-driven work largely dominated by larger than life statements. Indeed, as was a somewhat unfortunate flaw within Fincher's previous work Zodiac, the only problem prevalent here is that his feature tends to get overwhelmed by the size, scale and scope of the story to which he is trying to tell. Granted, telling eighty years of mans life, and doing so backwards -in a sense-, is no easy thing to do, but it remains a testament to the ambitious director and indeed the movie itself that much of the scrawling runtime is paced evenly enough to avoid any major disjointedness. Despite this sporadically distracting flaw, Benjamin Button showcases Fincher's ability to draw human characters out of surreal situations to the point where emotional response is consistently drawn from the audience without resorting to cheap ploys and devices. Instead the feature builds characters, and relations which transpire within a somewhat meagre plot, telling their stories in an eloquent, refined and subtle manner; this, in contrast to Benjamin's unique disposition in that he ages backwards, provides a fairytale that caters to the viewer's romantic and realist sides in ways that only the best of art can claim to do.
Like the best of fairy tales however, there remains a poignant mix of styles to Benjamin's story that reaches beyond just plain character drama and romance. There's action, comedy, even a little bittersweet lust for life in there too, and while much of this would be easy to misplace and in turn spoil the coherency of the story, Fincher does well to keep things consistently engaging regardless. Most of this of course lies for the most part- outside of Fincher's direct control however, in the form of Brad Pit who portrays Mr. Button here in what is undoubtedly a career defining performance. He, his co-stars and his romantic interest played by Cate Blanchett reflect the majestic nature of Benjamin's story without loosing touch of their distinct human qualities. Sure enough there remains some degree of ill-fated dissonance to Benjamin and Daisy's romance as a direct result of their tragic dispositions, but despite a somewhat anti-climactic uniting of the couple of during the movie's middle act, the movie retains its whimsy, airy charm throughout. It's not a perfectly constructed romance by any means, and this again is a detrimental result of the movie's extremely large scope at trying to tell a fleeting romance within such a large time scale, but the emotive power of the story is not without its impact during the first and last hours.
While it would be presumptuous to walk from a showing of The Curious Case of Benjamin Button with the rose-tinted view that it represents cinema and storytelling in perfection, such an occasion is only rarely and briefly awarded to cinema goers. Yet, despite the fact that Fincher here delivers a film that has quite a few failings that more discerning viewers will be disgruntled with, there is nevertheless no denying the simple power of Benjamin's Forest Gump ¬tinged biographical story. What it represents is a whimsy and eloquent dance on life, beautiful and tragic whilst human and fantastic. Indeed, by the time the curtain closes on Mr. Button's curious case, the impact of his story remains with you long after the credits stop rolling; it's the kind of film that is imperfect but not at the expense of making a statement so poignant and hard hitting that the movie as a whole succeeds in being irrefutably futile to resist in its warm embrace. Most importantly and somewhat ironically however is that Benjamin's story provides an almost ageless and unforgettable tale that simply uplifts and emotionally resonates without overly romanticising the small nuances of life. Reflected during one of the movie's strongest sequences, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button takes to heart that life is a strange series of events, ostensibly random and yet poetically beautiful; indeed, somewhere between the chaos theory and that of predestination lies Benjamin Button- and sure, it can be a bumpy ride, unpredictable and seemingly cruel in design, but Benjamin ascertains that that's just life, and that's exactly what Fincher and Roth deliver here.

A review by Jamie Robert Ward (http://www.invocus.net)