Birthday Reflections on "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button"

A birthday is usually a happy occasion. It's also an opportunity to reflect on life, especially when you've reached a certain age. A birthday is a good time to assess one's strengths and weaknesses, to think about where you've been and where you're going. My birthday was an excellent time to see the movie "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button."

This isn't a feel-good film. "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button" is a bittersweet tale about a man who ages backwards. It's loosely based upon an obscure F. Scott Fitzgerald short story contained in the 1922 Fitzgerald work "Tales of the Jazz Age." The movie is better than the short story, although both combine humor with sadness and raise profound social questions about the life cycle.

We judge people, at least in part, by their appearance, especially in a physically oriented society like the United States. If someone looks considerably younger or older than his or her age, that circumstance will produce a significant advantage or disadvantage for that person. A big 15-year-old might get into a club; a prematurely aging star that refuses surgery might lose a lucrative role.

When I knew him, my father always looked about 15 years younger than he was. It, therefore, wasn't surprising that he started dating a 50-year-old woman when he was well past 60.

But his youthful looks hurt him when, at 72, he tried out for a television commercial about World War II veterans. The casting director, who liked my dad's acting, couldn't believe that my father was old enough to have served in the Second World War. When my father told the director that he was 72 years old, the man called him a liar.

"If I was going to lie about my age, I'd make myself younger, not older," Dad protested. He didn't get the part.

To see a picture of my father at 72, taken in late 1994, click here. He had no cosmetic enhancements of any kind.

"The Curious Case of Benjamin Button" received four stars from New York Post film critic Lou Lumenick. It's rated PG-13 for brief war violence, cursing, and sexual situations. At nearly three hours (167 minutes), it's a bit long, but never boring.

This is not the first time that reverse aging has appeared on-screen. Characters have reverse-aged on "Star Trek: The Next Generation" and "Star Trek: Voyager." In 1991, reverse aging was the focus of the television mini-series "Golden Years," co-written by Stephen King. "Benjamin Button," however, is the first film to seriously deal with reverse aging in a realistic setting, and the results are spectacular.

"Benjamin Button" is about a man out of synch with society. The movie opens with Benjamin as a wizened newborn in the condition of an octogenarian. He is not expected to live. Benjamin's horrified upper middle class father abandons the baby on the doorstep of a black family in 1919 New Orleans.

While the film contains just enough comic relief to offset its intensity, the Fitzgerald tale commences with glorious slapstick. In the short story, Benjamin is born to a wealthy family in antebellum Baltimore and begins life as a full-grown 70-year-old man who wisecracks to his unnerved father. Benjamin complains about noise in the nursery, grousing, "I haven't been able to get a wink of sleep. I asked for something to eat, and they brought me a bottle of milk." Benjamin then demands a suit and a cane from his dad.

Fitzgerald, whose writings focused on the wealthy, shows the father fearful of how this bizarre addition to his family will affect his social standing. In the film, bigotry is implied, but in the Fitzgerald story, it's overt. Benjamin's father would rather have an ordinary black child than his senior son. At 18, a 50-year-old-looking Benjamin is rudely rejected from college and dubbed a "wandering Jew." He is lower than the despised blacks and Jews of the late-nineteenth-century South.

By contrast, the movie demonstrates Benjamin's isolation by portraying him as a boy trapped in an old man's body. Although he possesses a healthy amount of curiosity, Benjamin Button is confined to a wheelchair for the first seven years of his life. He lives in a boarding house for the elderly.

Benjamin's reverse aging becomes an increasing advantage for him, but only up to a point. As his physical condition improves, he begins to engage in normal activities. In the short story, he goes into business with his father and marries. In the film, Benjamin Button (Brad Pitt) becomes a merchant mariner shortly before World War II, grows about eight inches, and has a brief affair with a lusty, classy middle-aged woman in a New Orleans hotel.

In one of the few funny scenes in the movie, an adolescent Button, who looks about 75, exhausts a young prostitute in a brothel. The advantage that Benjamin Button enjoys reaches its zenith when he's about 40. For a few precious years, he looks his age. At this point in the short story, Benjamin is fully accepted by his father and in-laws. In the film, he begins a deep love affair with his childhood playmate, Daisy (Cate Blanchett), who bears him a daughter.

But in his senior years, Benjamin's reverse aging becomes a growing burden to him and to those around him. His outcast status returns with a vengeance. In the short story, an aging Benjamin, trapped in an increasingly young person's body-- is once again scorned by his family, especially his son, who frequently upbraids him as the child which he has become. In the film, a 50-plus-year-old Benjamin Button, who appears to be in his early 30s, reluctantly abandons Daisy and his daughter. He advises Daisy to marry someone else because she "can't raise both of us."

"The Curious Case of Benjamin Button" provides a stark demonstration of how extreme youth and age often share similar characteristics, such as helplessness. Here, the film does a better job than the Fitzgerald story. The scenes of Daisy tending to Benjamin as he regresses into infancy are touching and nearly unbearable. The short story begins as a good joke that gradually turns horrid. The film and Fitzgerald express themselves differently, but they ultimately arrive at the same place.

The later parts of the tale are sadly fascinating, whether watched or read. I recommend doing both, in whichever order you prefer. Forwards or backwards, it's a mind-bender and a heart-render.

Downbeat ending notwithstanding, the film retains a silver lining. Benjamin accepts his fate. "There are no limits," intones Pitt in a gentle Louisiana drawl. He advises folks to make the best of what they have, while they have it. Shortly thereafter, an interview with a 68-year-old woman who just swam the English Channel appears on a television screen.

This movie will have special meaning for anyone who has ever felt "different" or "left out," which is probably most of us. It includes the physically, mentally, and emotionally handicapped; many healthy teenagers; people in strange places; and those with serious illnesses.

Benjamin Button has a limited amount of time in which to live with the woman and daughter he loves. Real-life analogies come to mind: the terminally ill; Alzheimer's patients; soldiers going off to war.

The story of Benjamin Button hits home for me because I grew up having an anorexic mother. You can read more about that situation in the archives of Suite 101.com, Part I and Part II. Suffice it to say here that the experience made me different and isolated.

With a copious amount of therapy, my outlook on life has significantly improved. You could say that I have emotionally reverse-aged, from deeply jaded to cautiously optimistic.

As a result of the ravages of extreme self-starvation, my mother in her mid-forties looked about twice her age. She died at 49. Like Brad's Benjamin Button, my mother in her later years cut herself off from friends and family. She rapidly forward aged. Benjamin Button reverse aged. Neither of them could help it.

There are other curious factors that drew me to "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button." Brad Pitt's character is at maximum chronological normalcy at 49, the age at which my mother died, and the age I'll be in another year. Don't worry; I expect to be around for a long time. I'm in excellent physical shape, and with one notable exception, I come from a long-lived family.

For some strange reason, the number "11" frequently recurs in my life. I live on the 11th floor and was born on the 11^th of January. The ticket at the movie theatre cost $11.00, and "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button" was playing in Theatre 11 of the Cineplex. Fitzgerald's short story has 11 chapters. My 50^th birthday will be on 1-11-11. I have no idea as to what all of this means, but it sure is curious.

In the film, water is a powerful metaphor for ripples in time. A chronologically young Benjamin Button goes off to sea, and an elderly Daisy, on her hospital deathbed, tells Benjamin's life story to her astonished daughter (Julia Ormand) in the wake of Hurricane Katrina.

There is a natural ebb and flow to life. Some things are meant to be; others are not. And, like Benjamin Button, we should all strive to live life to its fullest and make the best of what we have.