The Curious Case of Benjamin Button David Fincher, director 2008

How would you live your life if you knew the general course it would follow? What you act differently, live 'deliberately' as Thoreau advocated? This is the existential conundrum of Benjamin Button, the central protagonist in The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, starring Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett.

Benjamin was born an old man. Out of sheer disgust, Benjamin's father, the owner of a button factory, abandons him on the back stoop of a retirement home in New Orleans. The home is run by an African American woman named Queenie (Taraji P. Henson), who takes Benjamin into her own home and raises him. Despite his condition, Queenie says, Benjamin is 'a child of God' who deserves love and a family.

Benjamin fits in well at the retirement community, as he seems to be an extremely old man. As he grows, he gets younger and younger. But the residents of the home pass away, and, other than Queenie and her long-time love Tizzy Weathers, few there seem to notice that there is something odd about Benjamin.

As a young teenager, Benjamin meets Daisy (Elle Fanning and Madisen Beaty play Daisy as children) who is a few years younger than he. The interaction is odd and uncomfortable in that he is a child who looks like an old man, and he is scolded by the girl's grandmother who thinks he is an old man playing with a child.

This first meeting launches the two on a path on which is destined to intersect several times in the future, with he growing younger and she getting older.

Meanwhile, he joins a tug boat crew to earn a living and see the world. In this journey through life, Benjamin adopts an ability to listen and to empathize with the people he encounters. It is probably a result of his special condition and his appearance that others treat him as if his life is rich with the experiences of a senior. He is attributed a quiet wisdom beyond his years. In living with a strong sense of his own fate, Benjamin lives it to the fullest. He learns about love and the value of human relationships.

It is in portraying this stoicism and thoughtful depths that Brad Pitt shines. Vulnerability and honesty in Benjamin are worthwhile departures from the physicality or irony of previous Pitt characters, e.g. Tyler Durden in Fight Club or Rusty Ryan in the Ocean's Eleven series.

Cate Blanchett is stunning and will probably win gobs of awards – and deservedly so.

Two things are striking about the film. Along side the emotional plot, I found myself repeatedly in an internal conversation about the make-up and special effects needed to make a child look like an old man and to make Cate Blanchett look far younger or far older than her years. It was disruptive and sometimes reminded me of the nearly three-hour length of the movie.

On another point altogether, the movie handled complicated social issues like race and sexuality as incidental plot points. More conscious commentary on these issues may not have improved the film, however. Indeed, the failure to explore how a Black woman in New Orleans at the close of World War I came to run a retirement community peopled almost entirely by whites, or how she and Tizzy Weathers never seemed to have been criticized for their partnership outside of the bounds of marriage seemed to prompt introspection of these social issues even without their deliberate or heavy-handed imposition. These things almost seemed unquestioningly normal, a notion which in itself required some self-scrutiny.

In addition, the story is told through a diary read in a hospital room in New Orleans in August of 2005 as Hurricane Katrina is set to make landfall.

The social commentary is extremely subtle. We see a fictional world in which human beings care for each other as if it were a duty, while escaping or ignoring the oppressive nature of certain types of human relationship such as sexism or racism. The looming presence of the hurricane that nearly destroyed that city and exposed the raw wounds of racism and poverty reminds us that the trajectory of our own lives are not unlike Benjamin Button's. While the oddity of the difference under which he lived heightened his sense of his fate, it should not cause us to think of our own as any different. The finite quality of life and its contingencies should require of us a similar passion for living life fully as well as an empathy for the people around us.