The Answer to Yesterday's Curiosity:

More people must die in The Curious Case of Benjamin Button than throughout an average explode-‘em-up Hollywood picture. And that’s saying something. Infused with death and obsessed with mortality, the film is ostensibly about the passage of time as it relates to the ephemerality of life. “Babies are born, people die,” the title hero (Brad Pitt) says, and that’s the gist of the movie. It opens with a short parable about a blind clockmaker and his backwards-ticking timepiece that sweetly demonstrates the painfulness of time’s irreversibility. It then spends over two irreversible hours examining that theme more closely. [...]
Fincher maintains the fantasy’s credibility largely by divorcing the film from history. Though the film is framed by Blanchett’s daughter reading Button’s diary to her deathbed-bound mother—vaguely reminiscent of Edward Scissorhands’ frame—while Hurricane Katrina approaches their New Orleans hospital, the movie doesn’t hit very many real life touchstones, keeping us steeped in the film’s impossible logic. The Great Depression goes unmentioned, WWII is only briefly acknowledged (because otherwise the Senior Matinee Crowd won’t help build sufficient Oscar buzz), and the ‘60s are established with a spaceship launch (gorgeous!) and the Beatles on television (dangerously Gumpy). The Katrina frame actually turns out to be meaningful, although it doubles as one of the ways that Roth frequently tries to draw a comparison between Benjamin’s otherness and that of the African-American community, to an effect somewhere between offensive and laughable. Button was born on Armistice Day, the end of that generation’s greatest slaughter, and his love dies on hurricane touchdown, arguably this generation’s greatest disaster (hitherto). Although the final shot seems like the filmmakers may have simply exploited the tragedy to find a visual expression for The Floodwaters of Time, this is, after all, a movie about death. So shouldn’t it end with a whole hell of a lot of it?

Chosen & laid down thanks to Cinepinion's review.