The Curious Case of Benjamin Button DVD Review
May 9, 2009 by Christina
Filed under 2009 DVD Reviews
Some of us lead lives of quiet desperation – others, just that of normal frustration – and others are just….different! We meet a very “different” character in The Curious Case Of Benjamin Button, released on May 5th by Paramount Pictures/Warner Bros. starring Brad Pitt as Benjamin (who is literally born in his 80’s and ages backwards) and Cate Blanchette as Daisy, the woman who changes his life forever.
We first see Daisy in a hospital bed with her daughter Caroline (Julia Ormond) at her side. Daisy states that she isn’t afraid to die, she’s just curious about what comes next. She recalls a train station built in 1918 with a fabulous clock where one of the hands runs backwards in hopes that the soldiers at war might come home again! Caroline then discovers, among her mother’s personal items, a journal written by Benjamin Button, and she begins to read aloud from it.
Benjamin is born on a special day, the day that ends the First World War. Benjamin’s mother dies after childbirth and his father Thomas (Jason Fleming) leaves baby Benjamin on the back steps of Miss Queenie’s (Taraji P. Hensen’s) home for the elderly. Benjamin grows up around older people who are dying. On Saturday nights Queenie takes him to a Gospel tent to have the devil cast out of him. One night while there, cheered on by the crowd’s hysteria, he leaves his wheelchair and totters across the stage, finally walking alone.
Later Benjamin meets the grand-daughter of one of the home’s residents, and blue-eyed and red-haired Daisy is a bit younger than he is but she looks like a little girl, while he looks like a wizened old man. She tells him that he is different than anyone she’s ever met, and her grandmother teaches him to play the piano. Many years later Benjamin meets the owner of a factory called Button’s Buttons (not knowing that his is his father). By then Benjamin is a sailor on Captain Mike’s tugboat and we have followed him through a series of adventures abroad. He recalls his piano teacher telling him that “We’re meant to lose the people we love, else how would we know how much they meant to us?” This is the major theme of this film, as much a death story as a love story.
While Benjamin has been away at sea, Daisy has become a very talented but rather decadent ballet dancer. Benjamin’s father dies and he attempts to tell Daisy, but she rejects him. Yet when tragedy strikes Daisy he runs to help her. Daisy and Benjamin have a child, and their lives proceed much like that of normal folks, except that Benjamin’s genetically pre-determined odd time-span changes everything between them. As Daisy grows older he becomes younger, the clock is taken out of the train station the night before Benjamin’s very unusual death, and Caroline, reading the journal right before her mother Daisy dies, discovers something about herself that she never knew.
The Curious Case Of Benjamin Button lasts over three hours and is visually stunning. Based on a short story by F. Scott Fitzgerald, it is a painstakingly realistic period piece utilizing astonishing 21st century technology. Rated PG-13, for teens and adults, we all identify with Benjamin as we recall what happened to us too in all of the special moments of our lives (a first kiss, a first job, a first love and the difficulty of withstanding life’s hard knocks as we attempt to fit into society). An epic must-see for everyone!
DVD Review by Christina of Movie Room Reviews
This looks so good, I wanted to see, but did have the chance, maybe I’ll pick it up!
Dottie