The Curious Case of Benjamin Button

A film that begins in New Orleans. A baby is born old. His skin is wrinkled, his joints do not hold, and the doctors say he will not live. His father leaves him on the steps of a care home. A woman working there takes him in and raises him. Benjamin grows up among the old and gets a little younger every year. From there the film is a life. A tugboat, a hotel in Russia, a war, a motorcycle, and a relationship spread over years. Daisy is the other end of the narrative. They meet as children; one ages, the other grows younger, and only somewhere in the middle are they the same age. What the narrative is interested in is not the oddity but timing: the film sets up how hard it is for two people to be ready at once as though it were a law of physics. One section describes step by step how an accident happened, and every step is a coincidence; it is the best written part. The frame is a hospital room. The old Daisy has her daughter read from a notebook as a hurricane approaches. The source is a short story by F. Scott Fitzgerald, though the film departs from it almost entirely. The images of the old Benjamin were made digitally. The actor's head was carried onto other bodies, done at this scale for the first time; the film won Academy Awards for visual effects, make-up and production design. The screenplay is by Eric Roth and its structure closely resembles an earlier film by the same writer, which was often noted after release. Brad Pitt, Cate Blanchett, Taraji P. Henson, Tilda Swinton and Julia Ormond are in the cast. David Fincher directed. Who it is for: anyone who likes long, slow, melancholy life stories. Who it is not for: anyone looking for pace; it runs close to three hours and repeats its idea after a point.