Greatest Film Ever Made

It may not be to everyone's taste, but I highly recommend The Curious Case of Benjamin Button.

The film is a gem and uses technology of the film crafts in a way it should be used.  We've come to expect the continuous cadre of science fiction, with its bleeps, booms, and unreal aliens using CGI and other bleeding edge technologies, where the technology is the excuse for making the film. In Button, the technology is used in an entirely new way:  to tell a story of life and death, love and respect of all life, and of the distortions of the bookends of life.  It makes you think about truth, which is art's loftiest goal.  In Button, they achieved it.

Unlike other uses of these new techno-arts, they're not the story or the motivation.  They enable this story, which is how technology should be used.

When it was over I realized how other composers felt when they heard Beethoven, and realized they could never compose anything of that level of mastery (some committed suicide because the realization was so great and so moving).

Suicide isn't necessary in this case, but there was an incredible sense that the bar of "art film" had been raised, not only by how effectively technology was used, but because of the performances of the actors, the director, the cinematographer, editor, and most especially the adaption of the F. Scott Fitzgeralds's short story (on which the film was based).

Only in The Last Tycoon has Hollywood come close to getting what F. Scott Fitzgerald was all about (but the critics panned the film, because they didn't get it either).

Hollywood generally treats Fitzgerald's characters as glorious and glamorous, completely missing the mark.  They've been treated as if they were special, but it is the fact that they weren't special that was the point. Fitzgerland was of the Southern school, made up of other writers such as Capote, Twain, Flannery O'Connor, and Tennessee Williams.  These writers and the Southern literary tradition treats eccentricity as a curiosity, not a blight nor stigma.  It doesn't do it to shock or entertain.  These authors just present these people as they are. It neither glorifies nor criticizes eccentricity, in all its forms. It casually accepts it and delights in it, and draws real people who make life interesting and worth living.  There is an acceptance of the usual person as normal (only the English have a similar treatment of those who live life accepting the peculiar as normal).

I had the sense that Fitzgerland would have approved, and been comforted by the fact that someone, most likely the "screen story author" (Eric Ross) got him... finally.

The film treated the dark subject lightly, as well as painting characters in a close to fourth dimensional way.  There were no Spielberg-like attempts to propagandize the subject matter, nor toy and tug at your emotions.  It presented the characters gently, and the actors delivered their performances with incredible restraint and mastery.  It was art and mastery of all the crafts that create film, in the tradition of Fellini, Ashby, and Truffaut.  We get to discover the story and the poignancy of the characters drawn (if there is any), by ourselves.

As I said, it will not be to everyone's taste, but it is a jewel. I have said to some that it is the greatest film I have ever seen and the makers have given something great to the world.  If those involved with its creation died today, they could die in peace, knowing that greatness was achieved in their lifetimes. I could go out of this world today in peace, knowing that I lived to see that kind of bar-raising in my own lifetime.