The clock runs backwards-that is the opening symbol of the movie, a clockmaker whose son is killed in WWI creates a clock that runs backwards so all the boys killed in the war can live full lives. When I was a kid I thought life was something you had already experienced and you were telling the story to somebody, and that is the structure of The Curious Case of Benjamin Button.
The story is told in flashback form, mirroring the life lived in reverse theme. An old woman dying in a hospital as hurricane Katrina rages outside the hospital, as the woman's daughter reads a diary by Benjamin. Benjamin is born as WWI ends, his mother dies in childbirth and his father discovers the child is born as an old person. He abandons the child at an old people's home and Benjamin grows up, but he's also growing younger at the same rate he would grow up. Benjamin fits in at the old people's home, when someone asks him how old he is and replies 7, they think he's just an old person with a great attitude. As Benjamin grows chronologically older he experiences some of the same experiences as a child would, a growing sense of wanting to know more about the outside world. He meets Daisy a beautiful red haired, blue eyed girl who is about 8 to his 12 and introduces him to a curiosity about girls, even though Daisy's grandmother assumes he's a dirty old man. In his late teens, Benjamin notices he's growing younger and he inadvertently gets a job on tug boat that takes him on a series of adventures around the world. He's promised Daisy to send a postcard from every place he visits and he lives up to his promise. His adventures as a sailor carry him through World War II, and when he returns home he's starting to look noticeably younger and when he runs into the Daisy he discovers she's now a young woman in her early 20's and a dancer, and she's as in love with Benjamin as he is with her. Unfortunately, life doesn't allow us to be with the person we're in love with, at least not at first. Their love becomes the love of a lifetime and all the time Benjamin becoming younger as Daisy ages and they're able to meet in the middle. As Benjamin becomes younger the movie demonstrates that childhood and old age aren't that far apart in experience. At the end of the movie we see the magic of love and how chronology isn`t everything in age or love.
Brad Pitt as Benjamin is absolutely solid in the performance, it's nuanced, there are no pyrotechnics in his performance but he's believable at every age of Benjamin from a man in his 80's to a teenage self. Cate Blanchett as Daisy continues to be a chameleon on the screen, ably playing a young woman, middle aged, or as Bob Dylan, or even Katherine Hepburn. Taraji Henson is worth mentioning as Benjamin's mother, she's a talented actress whom I first noticed in Hustle & Flow gives another fine performance here.
The screenplay is by Eric Roth who also wrote Forrest Gump and while there are some similarities, but it's not the same type of movie where Benjamin's adventures have him bump into every famous person or event during his lifetime. Benjamin's adventure through life are less ostentatious but no less important in quality of a life lived. The story is based on an F. Scott Fitzgerald short story and in certain moments you can still see the genius Fitzgerald's talent assert itself.