The Kissable Writer reviews David Fincher's "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button" (part2)

Rating: 9/10 (18 April 2009)

For you wonderful people hopefully still enjoying my musings of questionable value but guaranteed real emotion and passion, you'll find a lot of elements discussed in this review, but I refuse to bash the movie on account of it's crazy enthusiastic optimism, so disaster tourists and pessimism-is-realism snobs can take the next exit out. In case you're wondering, I didn't write this review in a fever dream of ecstasy right after watching the film, I let it sink in for a week, and believe it or not I took a 300 word chunk out.
You see, "Benjamin Button" is not a dialog-heavy movie, it is not a 4 hour soporific trial, but there are scenes so beautiful in it I almost can't stand it, I can write a thousand words about such a scene alone, this probably is what it must've felt like for American Beauty's eccentric voyeur to see the plastic bag dancing and twirling in the wind.
Blanchett's Daisy and Pitt's Benjamin eventually do get together, even long before they "caught up with each other" age-wise. This junction leaves me with the fewest words to spill out, yet it's the best part of the movie, it's a challenging task to do any degree of justice to a love story worked out in detail on the screen. Daisy is the first girl to notice that Benjamin's a special boy. They share a moment under a blanket(no, not in that way) but soon enough life happens and Benjaming takes off on a tugboat and unwillingly ends up in WW two. He writes her whenever he docks a new town and doesn't relent in doing so for a great many years. When he returns home, she - at the age where her hormones are racing - wants their relationship to crystallize in something physical, but he as old as he looks hasn't reached that maturity yet. Hurt, she loses some wild hairs when she moves to the city to pursue her artistic ambition as a ballet dancer. He very sweetly tries to woo her on a surprise visit and is hurt on his turn when she displays no enthusiasm towards him whatsoever. Again they tragically part ways. Fincher turned the genders around as Benjamin symbolizes the girl who isn't ready to sleep with her far more eager boyfriend yet. "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button" is filled with these subtle innuendo's and double bottoms. For instance, he demonstrates how the stars can align just as plausibly to drive two people apart as fate can bring them closer together. A series of the most unfortunate of small events costs Daisy her dancing ability, after which she is too humiliated to let Benjamin take care of her.
The two soul-mates ultimately do lock lips and experience many happy years together, as she matures physically and he matures mentally, their love grows and they couldn't be more in love than the moment right before they part. Which brings us to the most surprising plot twist in the confident, not plot-driven film namely: Benjamin leaves Daisy way before he's forced to in an effort to give her the opportunity to find a second husband and mostly a father to their newly-born daughter, who is perfectly baby-faced by the way. Another surprising scene tells about a later re-encounter between the two broken hearts, making for one of the movie's very best scenes.
They picked up the pace for a lot of the scenes in Benjamin's later, pre-pubescent life, as they contour the bleeding heart of the movie, the fleetingness of everything, even love can not stop time. Mortality is an endlessly interesting theme, yet most movies steer clear of it consciously. "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button" is a musing on it, and even though the odds are stacked against it, it un-selfconciously embodies hope, optimism, beauty and it succeeds in reaching an emotional plateau that will give future filmmakers nightmares in awe of the achievement.
"The Curious Case of Benjamin Button" is a grand movie sans the pretension, it is an intelligent movie sans the esotericism, but most of it all it's a movie with a tremendous heart and emotional intelligence that, helped by it's dreamy style, elevates the viewer into cinematic heavens.
9.5/10