Across his filmography, David Fincher's work has been noted as dark, foreboding, chilly, cynical, cutting. and irreverent. The curious case of Benjamin Button is a striking anomaly in his filmography as the allure of the project makes some sense, but the execution is a ush, unabashed romance bubbling with mawkish sentiment. The movie is graceful, beautiful, poetic, and yet oddly distant. The whole production feels gilded as Fincher made a deeply moving film out of a fairly terrible script. The most curious thing about The Curious Case of Benjamin Button is how it manages to be a tearjerker despite its craven desire to elicit emotion from a director who rejects sentimentality. In an interview in David Prior's excellent The Curious Birth of Benjamin Button documentary, Fincher says he was attracted to the project because he wanted to make a movie about death since his father had recently died. He explains that being at his father's deathbed was so much more profound than having a child. "You want it to be over as quickly as possible," says Fincher, "and yet you don't want it to be over." This led to him wanting to tell a story about "Love measured against this graph paper of something we try so desperately to ignore. That's a really lovely sentiment, but yes, love and death are intertwined as they give each other meaning. However, Fincher says that unlike Brad Pitt, he didn't see Benjamin Button as a love story. He saw it as a "death story, and not a tale of co- dependency. And at the end of the documentary, he says (halfjokingly, "I don't want to see anybody together I want to see everybody as unhappy as me. Everybody in this movie dies. That's how I was able to stomach the rest of it." Cate Blanchett describes Fincher as a cynic, and although I've never met him, as l've stated before, I don't think