The Seoul Times

Nobody in India is talking about the "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button," which has clinched 13 Oscar nominations, including those for Best Picture, Best Director and Best Actor. The attention is all riveted towards "Slumdog Millionaire," which is being touted rather incorrectly as Indian and is comparatively a poor work. David Fincher's "The Curious Case…," on the other hand, may be a fable, but told so fantastically that we forget how unreal it is. F. Scott Fitgerald's 1922 short story has been magnificently transported to the screen by Fincher and writers Eric Roth and Robin Swicord. The adaptation is effortless: it almost seems that the film happened by the wave of a wand.

The story of Benjamin Button born as a wrinkled old man to age backwards is narrated with unbelievable feeling. A fantasy that has the magic realism of Latin America is mounted so superbly and acted out so splendidly that its length of 166 minutes just whizzes past leaving us to grapple with the profundity of life, death and love itself.

Benjamin (played by Brad Pitt) is born on the day of victory in Europe in 1918, a baby that looks so hideous with failing eyesight, brittle bones and creased flesh that his mother dies perhaps in grief and his father abandons him in an old-age home. A black woman, who runs the place, takes him in and raises him as her own son. How could she love this monster, we wonder, but she does with an instinct that glows with maternal warmth.

Benjamin grows into a young man and meets young Daisy (Cate Blanchett), and though they are moving in different directions with one growing older and the other younger, a friendship between them develops and evolves into love and passion. When Daisy gets pregnant with Benjamin's child, they are in a dilemma. How would she raise two children, with Benjamin's clock turning the other way? The predicament dogs them till they learn to cope with it.

The movie takes us from one touching moment to another and covers a huge time span from 1918 to that morning when Hurricane Katrina ravaged New Orleans, a day we see a dying old woman asking her daughter to read the dairy of Benjamin. As waters rush in, roads disappear, trees fall and buildings crumble, the human links emerge out of Benjamin's ramblings: a tale of dream and despair can be seen being played out by a group of excellent actors.

The acting honours undoubtedly belong to Pitt. His incredible good looks, a striking screen presence and an ability to perform to the point of perfection strengthen a widely held belief that an Oscar, that has eluded him till now, may be his this time. He missed the statuette for the 2006 "Babel," but more regrettably for "The Assassination of Jesse James" the following year, where Pitt performs admirably. Pitt's Benjamin is a class by himself and proves his range: we saw him in "Burn After Reading" as a dim-witted, cycle-pedalling health club worker. As Mr Button, he is erudite, sombre, dashing, debonair and, most of all, sweetly romantic in a work that I would love to call pure cinema. And, I do hope for the lovers of this medium and for Mr Pitt himself "The Curious case of Benjamin Button" touches the heart of the Academy.

Gautaman Bhaskaran is a veteran film critic and writer who has covered Cannes and other major international festivals, like Venice, Berlin, Montreal, Melbourne, and Fukuoka over the past two decades. He has been to Cannes alone for 15 years. He has worked in two of India’s leading English newspapers, The Hindu and The Statesman, and is now completing an authorized biography of India’s auteur-director, Adoor Gopalakrishnan. Penguin International will publish the book, whose research was funded by Ford Foundation.