kismet posted by imani , Friday, January 9, 2009 at 11:08 PM, in Labels: something else

‘I was born under unusual circumstances’ – and so The Curious Case of Benjamin Button unfolds…

But I could not bring myself to write anything right after seeing it. It felt like it would all be a big – I don’t know – some sort of blasphemy or sacrilege or something. I knew that I must first feel everything, contemplate upon what I have seen and heard and understood, atom by atom, fiber by fiber.

It was just all too good to look at. All nine thousand nine hundred seconds of it.

I saw ‘The Curious Case of Benjamin Button’ yesterday. And until this very moment I am speechless. I really do not know what else to say about the movie, except that it is magical.

For two hours and forty-five minutes, my eyes were glued to the silver screen. It was not the typical story. Thank God it wasn’t.

Brad Pitt plays Benjamin Button, a man born with a peculiar disease – as a baby, he looks like an 80-year old man and carries in him a number of maladies that can only be seen in old – and dying – people. As a child he was blind from cataract and was in the advanced stage of rheumatism.

Daisy was brought to life by the captivating actress Cate Blanchett. I’d say Daisy lead a pretty ‘normal’ life, but when the two protagonists met – everything in both their lives took a strange turn.

Benjamin’s disease caused him to age backwards. The older he got, the younger he looked – at least on the outside. But this peculiarity did not hinder both of them to find love in each other.

If you haven’t seen the movie – please, make it a point that you watch it today. As I mentioned earlier – it wasn’t a conventional story – I do not want to simply categorize it as a ‘love story’ – as I know the movie attempted to present something deeper or more sublime than that and has actually succeeded in it.

I guess what I love about the story is the truth that the characters might have been doomed from day one but they went on and risked everything in their lives to share a love and to share as much time they can with each other. Perhaps a higher power was controlling what was happening to them, winding the hands of the clock back for these two love stricken individuals – they were in the same moment but their bodies – and their lives – were moving the conflicting directions.

There was a part in the movie when both Benjamin and Daisy were in the middle of their lives, he was 49 and she was 43 – they looked at themselves in the mirror – and Daisy said: ‘We finally met.’ And something struck me – we are looking at two people who have loved each other for as long as they can both remember, who were, by some wicked twist of fate – intended to share only that brief moment in their lives when neither of them were consumed by their fears of aging – or its reversal, for that matter.

Love is fortified by faith. Faith is betting on the most important thing in your life with your last cent. To love is to have faith in the other person and to have faith in the other person entails risking each day – all because you know that such a commitment would require having to fall in love with the same person over and over again – having to renew that love, that passion, that fire every single time you wake up.

These characters were star-crossed, ill-fated, tested by misery, but they did not succumb to their limitations nor did they let themselves be defeated by the inevitable. They redeemed, liberated and saved each other. Benjamin and Daisy had a child together, named after Daisy’s grandmother, Caroline. This fact was revealed to Caroline (played by Julia Ormond) only when she read Benjamin’s journal to her ailing mother.

Daisy died shortly after hearing the entries on the journal, hearing Benjamin’s words. Years back, Benjamin, on the other hand, has gone back to being a child, and died in Daisy’s arms. They have endured a lifetime filled with anguish and questions. In the end they found the certainty and answers in each other.

Alfred Lord Tennyson once said: ‘Tis better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all.’ Truly, there are things in our lives that transcend both time and space, there are truths that will remain long after we have passed away. Love is the same – regardless of which side or angle one sees it from, it is the same, regardless of our age.

More than anything, I think that it is not the moment that leads us to the person that we love the most – it is the person who guides us to that precise moment in our lives we will keep and cherish and remember – it is the one we love more than anything on this Earth that makes and will make everything stop – and make that brief second last an eternity.