The test of time.

Rating: Null/10 (27 December 2008)

"My name is Benjamin Button, and I was born under unusual circumstances. While, everyone else was agin', I was getting' younger... all alone."
Living and loving: two ingredients that never grow old. Director David Fincher and writer Eric Roth in The Curious Case of Benjamin Button have taken F. Scott Fitzgerald's fabulous short story and those ingredients to cook one of the best films of the year. Benjamin (Brad Pitt) is born at the end of World War I in New Orleans an old man baby and ages in reverse, a course that emphasizes the ephemeral nature of life and the importance of enduring love.
Besides the cautious avoidance of sentimentality and the deft use of a narrative framing device with a daughter, Caroline (Julia Ormond), reading from a diary to her dying mother, Daisy (Cate Blanchett), about the life of Benjamin Button, this film carefully deconstructs Benjamin's lifelong devotion to Daisy as they both face their aging in opposite directions. Pitt's reserve throughout serves as a helpful defense against the arrows of misfortune bound to happen to someone in his unusual circumstance. At the same time the coolness mitigates against emotional payoff scenes with the separations inevitable for someone growing younger while those about him age and die.
Quite the contrary is Blanchett's full-throttle rendition of a woman in an impossible love. Her expressive modern dancing serves as metaphor for the silent, lovely emotion that brings her daily dread of future sorrow. The dancing as motif celebrates the physical balance of their love and the nasty reality of fate waiting to cripple their love.
The aging-in-reverse conceit is effective because it is really not different from the normal one we live in for our short lives. We all separate at the given time, mostly with regret that we did not have more time with the ones we love, who themselves must confront the ultimate separations of their lives. As Benjamin is fond of saying, "Nothing lasts."
"To everything there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven: a time to be born and a time to die . . . ." Ecclesiastes 3:1-8