Brad Pitt runs Shakespeare's "seven ages of man" in reverse in The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, which ranks with the best films about youth (say, Hope and Glory) and mortality (say, The Dead). It starts in 1918, when Benjamin Button is born with an old face and dilapidated plumbing and wrinkled skin over an infant body, and ends in 2005, when his true love, Daisy (Cate Blanchett), completes the telling of his story.
Every chapter in between brings with it a fresh air of discovery. And the movie's emotional completeness leaves you poised between sobbing and applauding - it comes from a full comprehension not just of one man's life, but of the intersection of many lives over the course of the 20th century.
The director, David Fincher (Fight Club, Zodiac), working from a robust yet tender script by Eric Roth, weds his painter's eye to a composer's rhythm. His filmmaking has the musical beat, and the heartbeat, of a prime E.L. Doctorow novel (such as Ragtime) rather than the wan F. Scott Fitzgerald story it's actually based on. The result is a masterpiece: funny, harrowing and magical.
In the title role, Pitt doesn't become recognizable as Pitt until midway through. But he gives a subtly humorous and wise and insidiously moving performance even when movie magic plants his eyes in digital faces atop other actors' bodies. After his mother dies in childbirth, his father, crazed by loss and horrified by his son's wizened visage, leaves him on the steps of a New Orleans old-age home. From that night in 1918 (at the close of World War I) to another night 25 years later, when he survives a Nazi submarine attack in World War II, his story has the open-ended adventure of a young man confronting the physical world.
A lot rides on Pitt's calm alertness and unshowy sensitivity: After all, Benjamin is the rare character we see from birth, and he narrates his stories, too, from the journals that Daisy, on her deathbed, has asked her daughter to read to her. Until Button makes a crucial act of self-sacrifice, the part offers no opportunities for the internal grappling that American actors have grown to love. Happily, Pitt is one contemporary star who knows (as golden age stars like Gable and Cooper did too) how much energy and depth is required to understand the outer world. He makes palpable the movie's central theme: the connection of one life to many through a series of what Fitzgerald might have called "golden moments."
