‘The Curious Case of Benjamin Button’

In many ways this re-imagining of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s short story has pleasures of its own, including the amazing performance by Brad Pitt

By Bob Brown
CONSIDERING F. Scott Fitzgerald’s disastrous relationship with Hollywood, one can’t help wondering what he’d make of Eric Roth’s screen adaptation of his short story “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” (Collier’s, May 1922). Perhaps “hijacking” is a better word, since all that remains of Fitzgerald’s tight, amusing experiment in fantasy fiction-cum-social comedy is the title and the premise.
   Admittedly, the concept did not originate with Fitzgerald, who was inspired by Mark Twain’s comment that it’s too bad the best part of life comes at the beginning and the worst part at the end. And after writing this un-coming-of-age tale, from Button’s senility to his infancy, Fitzgerald discovered that Samuel Butler (1835-1902) had already imagined the basic plot in his “Note-Books.”
   But the difference between Fitzgerald’s version and the film is instructive, because it shows the demands that commercial entertainment puts on the artist. One can imagine Fitzgerald in 1937, retained at $1,000 a week in an MGM bungalow, having run fresh out of ideas. He takes a meeting with a producer and pulls out of his back pocket a two-page treatment, based on a 15-year-old short story of his. It goes like this:
   A guy is born old, shocking his Southern gentleman father from Baltimore, who is constantly embarrassed by the boy’s appearance and his age-inappropriate needs — like a comfortable wheel-chair right out of the birth-hospital, and a proper suit of clothes. The geezer-baby does odd things, like ditching his rattle to rummage through the Encyclopaedia Britannica. Then when he’s 50 going on 20, he meets the girl of his dreams, who embarrasses her military father by marrying him (she prefers “older” men). Then when he reaches middle age, he tires of his aging wife and goes out partying with his young friends. By the time his wife has left him and his own son takes him in as a youngster, the boy-geezer is giving his son and his grandson as much grief as he gave his own father back when he was a geezer-baby, and…
   No, it just wouldn’t fly on the silver screen. It’s too heavy on the father-son/son-father relations, too neat and symmetrical. Besides, it’s too satirical and clever to draw in anybody but the art-house crowd. We’ve got to build box office with romance and pathos. Make it a tearjerker. Forget the father-son bit and make the guy a foundling who’s discovered by a black attendant (Taraji P. Henson) in a New Orleans nursing home. And tell it as a flashback, as a mysterious diary read by a young woman (Julia Ormond) to her dying mother (Cate Blanchett in heavy makeup). Gotta throw in a love interest that starts in youth and gets derailed as the old man-boy (Brad Pitt) goes to sea, then has a mistress (Tilda Swinton), then hooks up with a childhood friend who’s now a sweetheart (Blanchett). And put in lots of plot twists and turns so we can introduce eccentric characters that build it into a 2 ½-hour blockbuster. They’ll be weeping in the aisles…
   You get the picture. But perhaps one shouldn’t fault the movie for not being Fitzgerald’s work. In many ways this re-imagining of Benjamin Button, as directed by the excellent David Fincher (Zodiac), has pleasures of its own, including the amazing performance by Brad Pitt. No one does boy-in-the-body-of-an-old-man better (in fact, no one has quite done it before at all). The special effects are also commendable, especially in aging Pitt and “youthenizing” him (he looks remarkably young as he approaches old age). The makeup department is less successful with Blanchett’s geriatrics. It’s a challenge to make her look convincingly un-terrific.
   The film’s story turns on the curious relationships — and they are not single or linear — between Benjamin and Daisy (Blanchett and various younger actresses), always holding them as the center to which he returns, no matter where life takes him. Unlike the short story, in which women seem almost secondary, they are the core of the film, swirling about Benjamin as earth mothers, as seductresses, as carefree lovers, as wives, as daughters. By making this a story about a man’s relationship to women, and to one woman in particular — not just a romance, but a time-twisted dance of life — the filmmakers complicate the message in interesting ways.
   Other things that work include the moody cinematography by Claudio Miranda (Fight Club) and a rich score by Alexandre Desplat (The Golden Compass). Things that don’t work so well include the diary reading as a frame tale, while Hurricane Katrina swirls outside; and the lack of chemistry between Pitt and Blanchett (perhaps Mr. and Mrs. Smith drained Pitt of any more chemical reactions).
   Still, I am curious to know what a shorter, less sentimental comedy made from Fitzgerald’s story would look like on screen. I would have paid money to see that.
Rated PG-13 for brief war violence, sexual content, language and smoking.