Curious Indeed

At last I finally go to watch The Curious Case Of Benjamin Button. It is true what they said—Cate Blanchett is not human. She’s an android. She’s the movie’s most astonishing special effect. No wait. Come to think of it, when Brad Pitt enters the dance studio and he’s restored to the Thelma And Louise vision of himself, that was a jaw-dropping moment in cinematic history, up there with such iconic visuals like the shot of the bone turning into the spaceship in 2001: A Space Odyssey, Marlon Brando sitting behind the desk in The Godfather, the silhouette of Clark Gable and Vivien Leigh against the burning depot in Gone With The Wind, and the giant ice cream on the beach in Temptation Island.

Curious case of Brad Pitt, though: at first I wondered why he got nominated instead of his co-star when he was basically in Meet Joe Black mode of acting. Then I sadly realized that, as great as Cate is, her acting did not transcend to greatness. She was great as she got older, but when she was young what saved her was the CGI work done on her face to make her look younger. And her performance as the dying mother in the hospital is her version of “Top Marlon Brando’s Mumbling”.

I’ve heard people griping that the movie didn’t seem to have a climax or build-up worthy of its 2+ hour running time. I disagree; sure, one can see the conclusion a mile away, but the whole movie is one long “and then what happens next?” as Benjamin gets younger and younger. Watching the movie made me melancholic, because it is after all a meditation on life, death, the impermanence of things as well as the inevitability of time, whether forwards or back. And with its nearly three-hour running time, you’re sure to have aged by the time you step out of the movie house.

To think that the material was from a short story by F. Scott Fitzgerald; imagine how long the movie might have been if it had been adapted from a novel!