Chattanooga Pulse

Written by Phillip Johnston
Tuesday, 30 December 2008 21:20

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button borders on many genres. In essence, it’s a fairy tale-a story about a logical and physical impossibility-but it is also a bewitching piece of Americana, based on story by F. Scott Fitzgerald, one of America’s best-loved authors. It is a romance, a war picture, a story about the love of family and friends. It is supremely hopeful-and nearly a masterpiece. The film is directed by David Fincher (Fight Club, Se7en, Zodiac) and is about a life; two lives, perhaps, but mainly one as it intersects with another.

The story begins and ends in a New Orleans hospital room in the hours when Hurricane Katrina is beginning to rage. It is here we meet an old woman confined to a hospital bed and the daughter who has come to care for her in what will be the last hours of her long life. The old woman breaks the cold silence of the hospital room, asking her daughter to retrieve a notebook from a suitcase across the room and read from it aloud.

This is the handwritten story of Benjamin Button (a brilliant Brad Pitt throughout), a New Orleans boy born on Armistice Day in 1918, who grew up in a nursing home, toiled night and day on a tugboat, survived WWII, traveled around the world, lived happily for years with the love of his life, fathered a child, and eventually died. It could be a typical American biopic but for one special fact: Benjamin aged backwards.

He was born with the wrinkled body and manifold ailments of an 80-year-old, an alarming condition that led his shocked and surprised father to contemplate drowning him on the night of his birth after his wife died in childbirth. Luckily, the conflicted father laid little Benjamin on the doorstep of a nursing home where he would be found by a black New Orleans belle named Queenie, the only mother he would ever have.

The story moves right along, but keep in mind that Benjamin Button’s story is not a science-fiction tale about some freak sideshow. Rather, the backwards-aging idea is the simple and brilliant doorway the story uses to welcome a larger evaluation of life. All is taken into account: The small and simple things we do, the people we meet and the ones we grow to love, the nature of time, and how so few things are permanent. “Nothing lasts,” Benjamin says throughout the film. It’s not a statement of happiness or of lamentation. It’s a simple recognition of fact.

The present-day woman dying in the New Orleans hospital is Daisy, played throughout the film by Cate Blanchett, who has never been more beautiful. Daisy was the love of Benjamin Button’s life from the moment they first met as children. Their paths cross many a time, back and forth like the rolling tide. Her performance is just as rigorous and careful as Pitt’s and her character’s love for Benjamin is hard to shake, particularly in the last hour of the film.