Current mood:	moved
Entry tags:	films, ideas

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
Yesterday I did indeed go see The Curious Case of Benjamin Button and I enjoyed all 166 minutes of it. It was a beautiful story about unconditional love and devotion, and about things happening in their own season. It's one of those movies that sort of defies genre categorization, and I like movies like that because they present an intellectual challenge and invite interpretation.

It won 3 Oscars on Sunday, for Art Direction, Visual Effects, and Make-up, the latter two unquestionably well-deserved, although I am bemused by the extent by which they have become almost the same thing in recent years. Not that that's a bad thing; if that's what it takes to keep the stories coming, then I'm all for it, and this is definitely a story that probably could have been presented without extensive CGI, but it probably wouldn't have been as effective. I felt that all the aging (or un-aging, as the case may be) effects in the movie were very skillfully and gracefully done.

I respect Brad Pitt as an actor because he seems to be one who tries to maintain artistic integrity and doesn't allow himself to be typecast or pigeonholed, but as a result he's played a lot of roles in which his character is, for lack of a better word, creepy. Creepy at best. So it was nice to see him play a not-creepy character for once. Well, he was still kind of creepy what with the whole digi-man-boy aspect of it, but the creepiness came more from the situation and not from the content of the character's soul.

I just realized what a frightening thing it would be to age backwards, because you'd have a much more definite idea of when exactly your life was going to end. Also, I found it interesting how the movie presented childhood as being analogous to old age, and how as he grew younger he seemed to suffer from dementia, which begs the question, is it because he's nearing the end of his life and his brain is worn out, or because his brain is becoming less developed? The movie doesn't answer the question, nor should it, but it's interesting to think about.

I found this movie very poignant because, as I said before, it's about things happening in their own seasons. Now don't get me wrong; I'm not remotely fatalistic in my worldview, because the last nine or ten years have taught me that things don't always happen the way that they're supposed to, or if they do then life is nothing more than a sick and pointless joke, which I refuse to believe. But on the other hand, some seasons or time periods are more auspicious for certain things to happen than others. For example, you could try to plant corn in the middle of winter, but it'd be a lot of unnecessary work and you probably wouldn't get very good results for your efforts. In my own life I've been feeling kind of impatient of late at the rate at which things are changing; I feel as though I should be doing more and accomplishing more and seeing more and faster results than I am. John Milton wrote several poems about that topic, that he felt that he wasn't using his time and his talents as fully and efficiently as he should have been. There's a famous sonnet, often identified by the first line: "When I consider how my light is spent", that he wrote about going blind, and in it he talks about how now that he's lost (or is losing) his vision he fears that he didn't make the most of the time that he had it. The last line is also rather famous: "They also serve who only stand and wait", or in other words, sometimes the best you can do is nothing, sometimes it's best to just be patient, to reassess the situation and to wait until conditions become more favorable. Which is not to say that you don't sometimes have to put in effort to get the results you want, nor is it to say that you will necessarily get the results you want even when you put in the effort. It's just to say that there are certain times when conditions are more favorable than others; it's not necessarily a waste of time to wait for more favorable conditions, and you might waste a lot of effort and resources trying to force things to happen out of season.