The Nick of Time.(The Curious Case of Benjamin Button)(Video recording review)

David Fincher's "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button" (now available in a two-disk set from Criterion and in a single-disk release from Paramount) is based on a short story by F. Scott Fitzgerald, a gentle fantasy about a man who is born old and ages in reverse. The film, with a script by Eric Roth, reworks Fitzgerald's light-comedy conceit into a sumptuous and stirring work of art. It also turns it into a romantic vehicle for Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett, yet, even as the movie fulfills the sentimental expectations of a grand and tragic love story, it reaches speculative heights that are rare in Hollywood.

Using the framework of a long-hidden diary and a mysterious tale of concealed paternity, Fincher and Roth dramatize the process of filmmaking itself by turning the text of Benjamin's recollections into a series of long flashbacks that tell his life story, beginning with his birth, on November 11, 1918. That night, at the end of the First World War, a monstrously decrepit and seemingly moribund newborn is abandoned by his prosperous family and left to be adopted by a poor black woman who, appropriately, runs an old-age home. The young/old man's birth date thus launches the story with a suggestion of auspicious historical focus; Fincher's subject is nothing less than time itself, and the role of the cinema as its repository. If time is familiarly imagined as a river (and rivers play a major part in the story), Benjamin makes its ...