FIMY reviews the curious case of benjamin button

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, based on a short story by F. Scott Fitzgerald, contains a fantastic premise: Benjamin is born as an old man, and instead of growing older throughout life, he gets progressively younger.

The genius of the movie, however, is that the emotional weight of the movie comes from the entirely normal parts of Benjamin's life--meeting people, falling in love, leaving, watching people die. It doesn't take a person growing younger to experience the discomfort of life's changes.

It is in this sense that Benjamin Button is a truthful movie, in that it exposes through a narrative conceit our collective fantasy of permanence. Since we all grow older, we perpetuate a delusion that we are all traveling along the same timeline, something like traveling together on a train. Benjamin Button explodes this myth by creating a character that is traveling the opposite way on the tracks. The other characters in the movie seem to regard him as some sort of abnormality, which thrusts his entirely normal life into relief.

The myth of traveling along the same timeline, like a train on tracks, fools us into thinking that there is a path that all of our lives follow. But the movie, through Benjamin's "unusual" situation, shows us how impermanent our lives are, how subject to change through others and ourselves.

Amidst all this deconstruction, there are a couple of thematic threads in the narrative that I don't entirely agree with. The American ideal of a disassociation from history is present, even romanticized. Benjamin ultimately returns from his wanderings to be with Daisy, but the mooring to his past is seen as willful. By contrast, The Great Gatsby offers a much sterner critique of the American idea of total reinvention.

Furthermore, the movie uses the premise to glorify the adult adolescence of Benjamin, indulging a male fantasy of ditching responsibility in favor of wanderlust. Benjamin's forgiveness seems to come merely by virtue of Daisy's love for him, which continues through her maternal care of him as an infant, another male fantasy.

The cinematography and directing reinforces this critique of timelines, with clearly stylized ocean scenes and frequent references to time. Through Benjamin's story, we realize that the other characters' adherence to these fictions of temporality is a frame of mind rather than a hard and fast external reality.

Conclusion: overall, a really good movie. Really good performances, good pace, good directing. Better than Slumdog.