The Curious Case of Benjamin Button

A film the size of “Forest Gump,” the granddaddy of all “big-story movies,” and “Big Fish" – both incredible tales of adventure and love – folks looking for who they are, trying to figure it all out. Set in New Orleans - why do so many great tales have their locale in the South?

Benjamin (Brad Pitt) is born a shriveled old man – his mother dying at his birth; his distraught father grabs the infant and flees into the night, ready to toss this ugly creature into the river, but an eagle-eyed police officer forces the father to run and finally leave the child, wrapped in a blanket, on the steps of a nursing home.

Reared with the elderly, Benjamin button begins his life in a wheelchair, afflicted with all the infirmities of age. He likes the nursing home; it’s quiet and peaceful – a place where folks can sit and think about the world.

Then he meet Daisy (Elle Fanning), a red-haired girl full of life – she’s a 7-year old child, and so is he, but he looks like Methuselah. She says, “I think you’re odd,” and he is.

The acting is so very good, and the combination of prosthetics and CG wizardry make for an incredible feast for the eyes. If nothing else, an Academy Award for this.

For me, one of the great images - Benjamin on a 50s motorcycle ... jeans and t-shirt - an homage to two iconic figures: James Dean ("Rebel without a Cause") and Marlon Brando (The Wild One").

“Nothing stays the same,” is a constant refrain in this love story, and that’s what it is finally – love in many different forms: the love of Queenie (Taraji P. Henson) for the ugly little baby left on the steps of the nursing home she manages … the love of Daisy … the love of his father, driven as it is by guilt and loneliness – the love of Elizabeth Abbot (Tilda Swinton) a married woman eager to have an affair, in search of her own destiny, intrigued by the man/boy Benjamin, who's now a tugboat man in Russia. But this kind of love can only be for a moment; she leaves Benjamin a note under his door and with that, she's gone, only to be seen years later in TV news - she finally did it (and you'll have to see the movie to discover her accomplishment).

The theme is time … beginning with a blind New Orleans clockmaker who loses his son in WW1, and when commissioned to build a clock for a railway station, he carefully crafts a masterpiece, but when unveiled and started, everyone is shocked to see the secondhand running backward, trying to undo time and its horrors and sadness. That’s when Benjamin is born, and while he grows younger, the rest of the world can only grow older.

Ultimately, he and Daisy meet somewhere in the middle (she, now a talented dancer in Europe – done so well by Cate Blanchett) – their love for one another, not quite in sync, but as the story unfolds from a hospital bed in New Orleans with Hurricane Katrina bearing down, a love that finally connected, but with the strangest of results.

The story unfolds with a Daisy’s daughter (Julie Ormond) reading Benjamin’s diary – reading aloud to her mother in the hospital … her voice blending with Benjamin’s, and the scene shifting from now to then.

In one of the most remarkable moments in film, a car accident is analyzed backward … if so-and-so had left but a moment later, if the driver had looked this way rather than that way, and if … ah, the vagaries of time.

I suppose we all learn, sooner or later, that love can be had only on its own terms – that love and all of its desires will have its own way with us, but Benjamin is no mere victim, and neither are we. Decisions can and must be made on behalf of things greater than ourselves.

Across the broad horizon of this remarkable story – nobility in love and loss. A simple reminder to each of us that our humanity is quite extraordinary, that we’re capable of great love and sacrifice.

In the end, to have loved and be loved. Isn’t this the sum of it all?

Rarely as we hope, but if we have the eyes to see and the ears to hear, it will be just fine.

A film extraordinary in breadth of story and depth of meaning. I loved it, and will see it again, and likely again and again.

This is a must-see film.