The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (2008)

Very loosely based on the story of the same name by F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button provides a wide and very cinematic landscape for director David Fincher, as well as a significant change of pace from projects like Fight Club, Se7en, and Zodiac. However the story is very simple, it’s a love story played out over the better part of a century, and one that would be rather unremarkable were it not for the odd condition that renders Benjamin Buttons (Brad Pitt) case curious, he ages in reverse. This provides plenty of complication as he and his true love Daisy (Cate Blanchett) dance around each other for most of their lives, enjoying only a few years of loving domesticity in the 1960’s and early 70’s. Attached to all this are a series of enjoyable secondary characters, friends and family whose stories intertwine with Benjamin’s over the decades, including a man whose been struck been struck by lighting seven times, an audience favorite judging from crowed reaction during my showing. While it comes across feeling oddly contained for an epic of this scope, it is a theater worthy cinematic experience, an odd event film that’s a more existential Forest Gump. So well executed, so oddly compelling, and rightly paced (though everyone seems to describe it as long, but I didn‘t feel it was particularly so), that I deem it a 5 out of 5.