The Critics Choice currently has Benjamin Button at a 90 rating, along with Wall-E. The Wrestler, Milk and Slumdog at 92, and Frost/Nixon at a whopping 95. Which film gets a 96? The Dark Knight. Here are two more reviews worth reading.
Toronto Star’s Pete Howell:
It’s an uncommon pleasure to behold a movie where computers enhance the creativity rather than overwhelm it. Directed by David Fincher (Zodiac, Fight Club), whose command of the medium continues to amaze, the film has some of the Everyman appeal of Forrest Gump, screenwriter Eric Roth’s earlier work. But the insights into birth, death, romance and sadness are deeper than a box of chocolates, and more Zen-like.
There is no abiding message. Just the wistful observation that life has a way of taking its own path, sometimes a backwards one, and we do have choices in how we travel it.
Cynthia Fuchs, Pop Matters:
Instead, Benjamin is intermittently focused on the love of his life, Daisy, whom he meets when both are children (her grandmother is living at the home) and who grows up to be a dancer, a career that grants her some measure of world-traveling on her own. Their romance gives the film an oddly conventional outline. The lovers grow close and apart, their brief perfect time together made painful by their knowledge that it is, indeed, brief, defined by the point when their ages match exactly. It’s an inelegant but provocative means to measure their ostensibly transcendent connection: as he grows young and she grows old, they share but a single moment when their bodies and visions and hopes can easily coincide. But that suffering is what creates time, makes changes visible. If the romance reduces this concept, it also makes clear Benjamin’s sense of himself as different each day.
