Starring Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett. Directed by David Fincher. Released by Criterion. $34.95 (Blu-ray $39.95) *** 1/2 (3 1/2 stars)
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Cutting-edge film technology has rarely been put to better use than in The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, starring Brad Pitt as a man born old and growing ever-younger. Through methods that are exhaustingly broken-down in the DVD extras, makeup artists worked closely with computer wizards to, first, age Pitt several decades, and then to put his wizened face on a tiny body.
The results are astonishingly seamless, to the point where you quickly stop noticing the magic and start paying attention to the story.
And that's a good thing, because director David Fincher (Fight Club, Se7en) and screenwriter Eric Roth, working off a short story by F. Scott Fitzgerald, have created an affecting, incisive portrait of love and pain, devotion and distraction, fantasy and reality.
From the moment the foundling Benjamin is embraced by his adoptive mother, Queenie (a forthright and loving Taraji P. Henson), to the fleeting final moments he spends with his lifelong love, Daisy (Cate Blanchett), this is a film of scope, compassion and wonder.
Even when it veers perilously close to Forrest Gump territory (no surprise, since Roth wrote that script, too), threatening to become a simplified one-man course in American history, Benjamin Button never loses its bearings - or forgets that it is, in the final measure, testimony to the human capacity for selfless, at times overwhelming, love.
Also in stores today: A hit at last year's Maryland Film Festival, John Gianvito's Profit Motive and the Whispering Wind (Watchmaker Films, $17.95) offers a quietly subversive course on American history by visiting historical markers, grave sites and other reminders of men and women who have questioned, and often fought against, the established order, from the Massachusetts colony's Anne Hutchinson to Baltimore's own Philip Berrigan
Other releases: Michelle Williams is a victim of the economic downturn, looking for work and, more pressingly, looking for her dog in the sublime Wendy and Lucy (Oscilloscope, $29.95); the American west, John Wayne-style, is front-and-center in TCM Greatest Classic Films Collection: John Wayne Westerns (Warner Home Video, $27.95), featuring Fort Apache (1948), The Searchers (1956), Rio Bravo (1959) and The Cowboys (1972); Gillian Anderson and Anna Maxwell Martin star in a BBC mini-series adaptation of Charles Dickens' Bleak House (BBC Warner, $39.95)
