The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (The Criterion Collection)

At the close of WWI, a baby is born with a decrepit, aged body. His horrified father abandons him and little Benjamin grows up - and grows younger - in the boarding house of his loving foster mother. Over the next 85 years, he experiences life and love and grief, all while continuing to grow younger.

I liked this movie and thought it was very well made. It's long and meanders slowly through Benjamin's life, which is really pretty much like anyone else's life except that he was born old and then gets younger - a stretch of the imagination, but the aging is so well done that I could accept it. The episodic nature of the film made it seem like one of those movie trailers that shows a peek at an exciting scene then fades to black, shows another bit of excitement and fades to black, and it went on like that for 160 minutes. Since Brad Pitt's make-up is so convincing at many stages of life, I really only felt like it was him in one or two short vignettes when he appeared as his actual age (and then he was so handsome!). He gives a very touching and understated performance.

Cate Blanchett plays the young girl who meets him when he's old; their paths cross often over the years and they both meet in the middle at one point. She's very good and also ages convincingly to her eighties. The movie is a bit like "Forrest Gump" in that it shows America changing during one naive and vulnerable man's life. The theme is love enduring over the years and the inevitable losses we all face; I sobbed several times. It's a very thoughtful and gentle movie. Highly recommended.

excellent service, I got it as a replacement. Reverse aging idea is unique and well done. Watch it and enjoy.

While this movie, for the purists in our midst, probably doesn't do justice to the original story - they rarely do - it does succeed in making the point that drove Fitzgerald to write the story in the first place. As a fantasy, "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button" speaks to the terrible insecurity he felt in his life being trapped in a loveless, sottish marriage to the mentally-deranged Zelda. This movie captures that elusive essence of believing that somewhere out there in fantasyland there is a chance that circumstances will conspire to give you another chance of getting it right. Like "Forest Gump" before it, "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button" is one such fairy tale that lends itself well to a Hollywood script where certain liberties can be taken in modernizing the story. With a little cinematic magic, a lot that is seemingly cruel and wrong in this old world gets put right in a way that is both entertaining and thought-provoking. The storyline is creative, the characters interact well, and there are some good one-liners. I was also taken with the notion that this production subtly promotes the notion that callow, immature men often seek the embrace of older women who remind them of their mothers. Overall, a pleasure to watch.