I saw this film on the day my new niece, Clara, was born, and it could not have been a better capstone to an already joyous day. Before seeing the film, I’d been thinking of the significance of this newborn life—that today was its first day, the first of many days and years and moments (by the grace of God) that will constitute her life. Like the many thousands of other babies born that day, she sucked in the earth’s air for the first time, just as, simultaneously, hundreds of other humans did it for the last time.

And so as I watched David Fincher’s The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, I couldn’t help but reflect: what is life, indeed what is time, if not a series of entrances and exits and movements and moments? It all happens so quickly, and yet it is so vast.

This is a film about life.