Growing Younger Every Day
Pitt and Blanchett shine in The Curious Case of Benjamin Button

It’s easy to forget what a technical marvel Forrest Gump was when it was first released in 1994. Through the newly-developed magic of computer generated imaging (CGI), we were able to see the title character playing college football at Alabama under coach Bear Bryant, visiting with JFK at the White House, and serving in the Vietnam War.

We tend to forget about Gump’s visual tricks because they acted in the service of the storytelling rather than as “eye candy” special effects.

Such is the case with the miraculous new film The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. Loosely based on the F. Scott Fitzgerald short story of the same name, TCCBB tells the story of a man (played by Brad Pitt) who is born as an old man and spends the entirety of his life growing younger.

While the original short story has Benjamin born at the end of the Civil War, the new film has him born at the end of World War I in New Orleans. His mother dies in childbirth and the father (Jason Flemyng) abandons the monstrous-looking infant on the steps of an old folks home run by an African-American woman named Queenie. She takes pity on the baby that doctors say will only live a short while.

But a strange thing happens. As Benjamin gets older, his mental faculties and physical abilities begin to improve, making him a kindred spirit to the residents of the retirement home, even while his mind is childlike. As he grows younger in appearance he also grows restless, and when he seems to be about 65 he leaves New Orleans and takes a job on a tugboat that travels to Gdansk, Poland. Throughout his travels he sends postcards to a young girl named Daisy that used to visit her grandmother at the rest home.

In Gdansk, Benjamin becomes more vital and eventually has an affair with a woman named Elizabeth Abbot (Tilda Swinton) who is, on the surface, a couple of decades his junior. Button’s tugboat crew is enlisted into the U.S. Navy at the beginning of World War II and is forced to battle a German submarine in one of the movie’s more exciting action sequences.

As Daisy (Cate Blanchett) grows older and Benjamin grows younger a relationship develops. They meet in the middle but are doomed by Benjamin’s condition to drift apart. This is where the magic of the visual trickery is employed to dazzling effect. Even when Benjamin wears the face of tiny old man, he looks like Pitt in the eyes and mouth. The same is true for Blanchett, most strikingly when she is displayed as 20-year-old dancer with professional ballet skills. These effects, however, never get in the way of the fantastic acting and tender storytelling that is at the heart of Benjamin and Daisy’s tale. There are also nice moments of humor, such as when Benjamin’s rest home friend tells him about all seven times he has been struck by lightning.

As a period piece, Benjamin Button is a beautifully filmed piece of work, with small, glowing vignettes giving us glimpses of WWI, WWII and post-war America. Set in New Orleans, the film deals with people of all ethnic backgrounds yet resists the urge to say anything politically correct about race relations in America. That evenhanded, historical approach to the story makes it even more believable.

If Benjamin Button has one serious flaw, it is the clumsy frame narrative device used to tell the tale. We see Daisy on her deathbed in a hospital in New Orleans telling the story of her relationship with Benjamin to her daughter Caroline (Julia Ormond). She also has Caroline read passages from Benjamin’s diary to introduce the flashback sequences that make up the bulk of the movie.

Meanwhile, we see through television broadcasts and conversations at the hospital that Hurricane Katrina is about to hit New Orleans. I’m not sure why writer Eric Roth and director David Fincher decided to have their marvelous tale told in the shadow of the Katrina disaster. They certainly didn’t need to impart this tragic love story with any more gravity than it already has.

That minor quibble aside, Benjamin Button is that rare film that will stick in your head long after you’ve left the theater. It forces you to wonder about love, life and those little decisions that change the course of how one spends his or her eighty-odd years on earth. While Benjamin’s condition is indeed curious, it is the way he knows how to live and by the end of the film it seems as natural to us as growing old does.

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button is rated PG-13 or brief war violence, sexual content, language and smoking. It is currently playing at Regal Cinemas in Boone.