A Backwards Fairytale

Rating: 10/10 (21 August 2009)

It is January 3, 2008. I saw today The Curious Case of Benjamin Button for the second time with my father. It was a hassle getting him up.. When he was younger, in his twenties, he was playing tennis with a friend and when he went for a backhand, his spine cracked. He had to get surgery on his lower back and has hard a scar ever since. His back got better, but a few years ago, it began to feel sore again. He had to get an enhanced type of surgery to help stabilize his spine. After this surgery, he progressively got better, but his back continued to fluctuate between feeling all right and feeling worse. There are many reasons why I feel the need to tell you all this before talking about Benjamin Button. The first and most obvious reason of all is because the film is about 3 hours long, and my father had the guts to sit through it, and still enjoy it. But past that, there are more complex reasons why Benjamin Button connects to my fathers life. You see, this film is different than anything anyone has seen before. If you are sick of seeing the same story over and over again, this is the sort of movie you've been waiting for, for it is a story that has never even been touched or thought of before. It begins without a touch on the life of Benjamin, and instead, opens with an old woman and her daughter in the hospital, the older on the death bed, and the daughter telling her mother how much she loves her. The woman tells the story of a blind man whose son goes to war, and in the meantime, builds a clock. The man and his wife get the message that the son is dead, and when the clock is finally revealed to the public, the clock moves backwards; he figures time should go back to honor the memory of his son, in the imagination that maybe he'd be able to see him again. After that story, the woman decides to spend the last moments of her life being told the words from a diary, and it turns out to be the life of Benjamin Button. And from this point on, you are swept away on a miraculous and wonderful, self righteous journey of a man is physically born an old man, growing younger. As his life goes on, you see deaths around him, how his life influences the people around him, and how others influence his own.. You honestly feel as though you are seeing through the eyes of someone different; someone who lives their own life and gets carried away by the pleasures of life in general.
I will try not to sugarcoat it, but Benjamin Button is truly a film that helps you believe in life. With the help of fantasy, it is a film that can open your mind and help you get past all the pettiness of your own life (atleast it has helped with mine). But don't take the miraculousness of this film from someone as biased as me, take it from my father. You see, Cate Blanchett, who plays the love interest of Benjamin when he is old and she is young (they meet each other in the middle, don't worry), says it herself: we all end up in diapers. Benjamin Button is a film that can inspire any age, give life to the old and wisdom to the young. It can even get a pained old man with screws in his back out of bed. So go see it for yourself. It's a film that becomes a part of you forever.