The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (2008)

“I just don't like getting old!

This is an odd film, only loosely based on the F. Scott Fitzgerald short story on which it's based, which takes its central conceit- a man who is born old and lives life backwards- almost as an incidental detail at times and feels just as much, if not more so, a chronicle of the short twentieth century from 1918 to 2004.

The non-linear narrative is clever, as a dying Daisy has her daughter read Benjamin's diary to her as Hurricane Katrina approaches. Thus we have two perhaps unreliable narrators, gaps, different pints of view, a narrative which is never coded as neutral or omniscient. The fairytale quality is constant, from the haunting tale of the blind clockmaker who makes a clock to bring back his dead son to the reading aloud in the present day. Brad Pitt is an ok star, f an inevitable one for a David Fincher film, with Cate Blanchett outshining him a little.

Inevitably there's a picaresque quality, and the sense that the framing of the film, as a tragic love story between Benjamin and Daisy, is just one complex way of looking at that big, complex thing that is life. There's a rather interesting sequence in which Ben, narrating, details a huge number of ordinary human actions from various different Parisians that cause Daisy to be hit by a car and her ballet career to end. And yet, later, it turns out that Caroline was never aware of her mother's illustrious career. We lead multiple lives, all of us.

A thoughtful and philosophical film, then, if an odd one. But one that has, I think, a lot to say beneath its surface.