14 DAY TRIAL // When Benjamin Button says he was “born under special circumstances,” there is no place left for us to doubt his words. This 2008 cinematographic masterpiece, in more ways than one, is the stuff that fables are made of. At the same time, it is also intrinsically connected to our everyday reality for making us wonder, once the final credits run, about the purpose of life and the many opportunities, even those that we miss, that make it what it is.
As many critics have already observed, from the very start, David Fincher’s take on the F. Scott Fitzgerald short story “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” poses the ever-asked question of whether life can still be seen as a box of chocolates if lived in reverse. The answer is as straightforward as it is beautifully presented: yes, it is, if only we learn to make the most of it before it is too late.
Powerfully marked throughout by beautiful parallelisms and making ample use of colors to render a story that would have otherwise come off as a plain oddity, “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” is one of those films that strike the viewer as extremely hard to classify. Saying that it is just about life, or just about a strange case of a boy born in the body of an eightysomething man who “youthens” with the passing of time, or simply about love would mean doing it a great injustice.
Boasting a stellar cast that on its own could have propelled it to the top of the box-office charts (Brad Pitt, Cate Blanchett, Taraji P. Henson, Tilda Swinton, Jason Flemyng and Julia Ormond), “Benjamin Button” somehow manages to make a story that spans decades and covers settings from Russia to the Atlantic and Paris seem extremely believable. Yet, with all these going strong for it, this is one movie that still feels extremely “intimate,” as if it’s a story that only one viewer at a time is being whispered in the ear by narrator Brad Pitt as Benjamin.
“Some say I was born under special circumstances” begins the story that will, in the end, teach us a lesson about the passing of time. Benjamin is born in the body of an old man: abandoned by his father on the doorsteps of an elderly house, he is raised by a kind woman together with people who look like him, yet are not. “I’m seven, but I look much older,” says Benjamin with typically childish humor. His view on life is, however, not that of an old man, the only thing that differentiates him from the other children with whom he cannot and is not allowed to play being that he is, as Queenie repeatedly tells him, “special.”
In the end, this is also a film about learning to make the most of life when everything seems to go against you. About seeing that being different does not necessarily mean we can’t leave our mark on the people we come into contact with. As his adoptive mother says more than once, we’re all heading in the same direction, we just take separate routes to go there. This is also at the core of Benjamin’s relationship with Daisy, a stunning dancer portrayed by Blanchett, the woman who comes to terms with being in love with a man who would never grow old next to her, like all girls dream when they’re still into “playing bride” with pillow cases on their head.
The movie is constructed as such that, even if Benjamin and Daisy know and like each other ever since childhood, and they eventually discover death together, there is not one single moment of awkwardness or sense of impropriety. Their love story comes to show that, even if Benjamin is destined to go through life “all alone,” convinced that nothing ever lasts, “some things do.” And love is one of them, as also is whatever memories, be they good or bad, we leave our loved ones with.
Running an impressive 159 minutes, “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” may be a slow starter but it does eventually manage to take the viewer into that beautiful place where, as the tagline says, “life is not measured in minutes, but in moments.” A place where senile old men who look like 4-year-olds believe they can fly (and just as well might), and where death comes knocking but whoever answers it has no regrets and greets it with a smile on their face, holding onto the one person that made it all worth it.
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