The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
Many comparisons are being made between The Curious Case of Benjamin Button and Forrest Gump, which would be suspect even if Forrest Gump wasn't a ripoff of Being There, which was written 50 years after The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. But they do have one thing in common: Eric Roth has now adapted both novels for the screen.
In this case, Roth's fine adaptation moves the beginning of F. Scott Fitzgerald's short story from antebellum Maryland to the end of WWI. Born on Armistace Day in 1918 New Orleans (where all quirky happenstances like this seem to occur in the movies), Benjamin Button is no simpleton, either by birth or by circumstance. He's a man in the unfortunate predicament of being born old. In Fitzgerald's story, he is born a full-grown man of 80; in the film, Benjamin's body is growing younger while his mind grows older. Some people might call that fortuitous, but like most things, that depends on your point of view.
Benjamin's life proceeds through the decades with great alacrity, stopping on occasion to focus on the most influential moments, most of which involve women, and in particular one woman—Daisy—whom he met when they were both children, in a manner of speaking. Their lives cross paths over the years until finally the relative proximity of their physical and mental ages makes a lasting relationship viable. Of course, the same problems that prevented their romantic relationship in the early parts of their lives will do so again in the later stages, only in reverse.
It's a story of entropy: Life is random, you can't stop change and everything breaks down. We spend an awful lot of our time living life in the past, wondering what could have been, contemplating as we get older that old axiom about life being wasted on the young. In that regard, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button is hardly groundbreaking. There's no shortage of movies proclaiming the message that we can't escape our mortality and life cannot be lived backward. It's just perhaps the first one to show it literally.
That job falls to one of the more exceptional filmmakers of the last 15 years, David Fincher, who reunites with his lead actor from Se7en and Fight Club, Brad Pitt. Fincher's approach is tender without being overly sentimental, keeping a firm grip on the somber but paradoxically uplifting message about making the most of our brief existence. Together, he and Pitt render a beautiful portrait of this living, breathing philosophy lesson, who walks the Earth with a unique perspective on life, yet one which ultimately must reach the same conclusion as the rest of us.