On Friday, I finally saw "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button." I thought it was a good film, even though I've read many critics who did not like it. It was a bit long, but it didn't feel long to me. It's the story of a man born in 1918 with some kind of defect that made him look old, even as a baby. As he got older, his mind aged but his body got younger. So as a baby, he was a wrinkly prune-looking thing with arthritus in all of his joints. And as a pre-teen, he was bald and limited to a wheel-chair, looking like a man in his 80s. But as he got older, his hair became less white, his skin smoothed, and he became younger and younger while everyone else around him got older and older. Eventually, Benjamin lives out the last few years of his life as a senial toddler.
There were alot of interesting themes in this movie that I'm still chewing on. There's the theme of rejection and isolation, as Benjamin must learn to cope with his deformation as a child, but ironically there's a point in the movie when we begin to feel envious of him as he becomes the strapping Brad Pitt at age 60. There's the theme of time . . . how quickly life seems to whiz by and the despair of missed opportunities. And the dominant theme is about death and aging. It's about finding life's meaning in the love we share with others despite the sometimes undignified manner in which we age and die. I read a review by Roger Ebert, who really didn't like the movie because he couldn't relate to Benjamin; the idea that a person would age backwards was too weird. For me, this was the very thing I liked about the movie. Despite the fact Benjamin spends his whole life aging backwards and getting younger and younger, the lesson he learns about the purpose of life was the same as his friends and family who were passng him going the other direction. And in that way, Benjamin, despite all appearances, was just like us.
