"The Curious Case of Benjamin Button"

You would think that we’d be jealous of – or at least empathize with- a character who’s born an 80 year-old man and then grows progressively younger, as is the case in “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button,” directed by David Fincher, written by Eric Roth, based on a short story by F. Scott Fitzgerald.

We’re not.

On the up side, there’s the benefit that, once Benjamin Button (Brad Pitt) realizes that he was not going to die any time soon of the affliction, he would possess a certain outlook: call it a zest for life or at least a heightened appreciation of things.

He would acquire wisdom early on and be able to apply it for the rest of his life (“If I just knew then what I know now.”).

He would take the various things that happen, directly or in-, to all of us – war, love, heartbreak, childbirth –and understand, preternaturally so, perhaps even as they occurred, that they are but individual strands in the tapestry of a life, nothing more, nothing less. That would explain Benjamin’s serenity he radiates throughout the film.

He wouldn’t have to look forward to the infirmities of age, having already born that burden, but he would have to deal with another set of issues, of which he wouldn’t have a clue.

These benefits confer an otherworldly grace on the character because they’re so different from our perception and experience of the aging process. Benjamin’s like Forrest Gump. He sees life in very simple, wondrous terms.

You would certainly like to know someone like him but could you really know him?

Would you like to be him?

No and no.

You could just admire him, from afar.

The problem with the film is that we can’t gain a foothold on the phenomenon of Benjamin’s reverse aging. This prevents our identification with the character. The fact that Benjamin’s character is all surface doesn’t let us in on what he thinks, for example, of the prospect of getting younger as he moves toward death. We know that he leaves his family and decamps to India, but we don’t know if he’s afraid, stoically resigned, or anticipating what’s eventually going to happen to him. The story is told, via a read diary. There’s chronological narration but no in-depth knowledge. Perhaps that’s because the movie was adopted from a short story in which the premise didn’t have to be so fully developed.

Because he’s reversed the aging process, he can’t belong to a generation or be in a relationship. Generationally, he may be numbered part of the Greatest one; but, while they’re trundling themselves off to reunions, marinating in memory, going to funerals, he’s dealing with acne and puberty.

Does his experience and wisdom deteriorate along with his body?

We don’t know.

He couldn’t grow old together with his wife Daisy (Cate Blanchett) because she would age while he would youthen. It might make for an interesting Mrs. Robinson scenario (what, you didn’t think of that?) but the last thing a woman wants is to be constantly reminded, relative to her husband, of her aging. The wife would know that over time she would become the mother and then the grandmother of her husband.

Ditto for having kids. At some point his daughter Caroline (Julia Ormond) would become a contemporary of and then an elder to her father.

These issues violate the film’s credulity. The visuals are there, especially the recreation of the 1930s Parisian bohemian scene. The acting’s fantastic, especially Brad Pitt’s, whose physical transformation is not just astounding, but his manner, carriage, and dignity as a wizened adolesecent has to be seen to be believed. He nails his youthful old man scenes (how do that make him so hunched over and withered?), as he waits to die, prematurely. He also nails the scenes when he seems to detach himself from the world, to hover above things, brought to a head in his departure to India.

Same with Blanchett’s whose transformation from a dancing prodigy to a housewife to a dance school owner who ages oh so gracefully in the conventional sense of the verb.

But the structure of the story simply doesn’t allow us to identify with Benjamin. He’s a sympathetic character, to be sure, but it’s hard to feel anything but pity for someone who, in his various human interactions, is going to cause heartbreak as time passes, through no fault of his own. This doesn’t make him a tragic hero, though. It suggests, rather, that as scintillating as the premise and its enactment might be, the story’s implications weren’t fully considered, much less developed. This is not meant to be a story of pity but that’s what it is.

This film doesn’t address the complexities of what it’s like to begin as an old man, de-mature into a teenager, a young man, a middle age man, an infant, and then, finally, a newborn.

Curious thing, that. Indeed.