Brad Pitt meets Fitzgerald in ‘The Curious Case of Benjamin Button’
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F. Scott Fitzgerald’s 1922 story ‘The Curious Case of Benjamin Button,’ about a man who is born old and ages backward, is coming to theaters in December, starring Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett.
The film has recently been shown to a test audience on the Paramount lot (note to self: stop for those people with clipboards asking whether you’d like to go to a free screening). Two capsule reviews have hit the Internet: One viewer loved the film; the other thought it was a little long.
The movie departs from the original storyline in a couple of significant ways. The time frame has been moved up: Benjamin Button is born a few decades later than 1860. The setting seems to have been transplanted to the South rather than its original Baltimore. And it appears that instead of being born a fully grown old man, Benjamin Button is a tiny baby with an aged face (a little creepy, but somehow more believable that the issuance of a fully-grown adult from a pregnant mother).
Most important, the film seems to have a tragic love story at its center, as Pitt’s Button gets younger while Blanchett, as his wife, grows older. Fitzgerald’s original wasn’t nearly so nice.
In his short story — which can be downloaded or read online here (with a few typos) — Fitzgerald seems to be commenting on the superficiality of Benjamin Button and his wife. He falls for her beauty; she for his stability. Those are the very things each loses as they grow older (and younger), and they’re distinctly unkind and ungenerous to each other as their rift grows.
Hildegarde was a woman of thirty-five, with a son, Roscoe, fourteen years old. In the early days of their marriage Benjamin had worshipped her. But, as the years passed, her honey-colored hair became an unexciting brown, the blue enamel of her eyes assumed the aspect of cheap crockery — moreover, and, most of all, she had become too settled in her ways, too placid, too content, too anaemic in her excitements, and too sober in her taste.... ... even as he kissed her he felt with a sinking of the heart that these three years had taken their toll. She was a woman of forty now, with a faint skirmish line of gray hairs in her head. The sight depressed him.... ‘Well,’ he remarked lightly, ‘everybody says I look younger than ever.’ Hildegarde regarded him with scorn. She sniffed. ‘Do you think it’s anything to boast about?’ ‘I’m not boasting,’ he asserted uncomfortably. She sniffed again. ‘The idea,’ she said, and after a moment: ‘I should think you’d have enough pride to stop it.’ ‘How can I?’ he demanded. ‘I’m not going to argue with you,’ she retorted. ‘But there’s a right way of doing things and a wrong way. If you’ve made up your mind to be different from everybody else, I don’t suppose I can stop you, but I really don’t think it’s very considerate.’ ‘But, Hildegarde, I can’t help it.’ ‘You can too. You’re simply stubborn. You think you don’t want to be like any one else. You always have been that way, and you always will be. But just think how it would be if every one else looked at things as you do — what would the world be like?’ As this was an inane and unanswerable argument, Benjamin made no reply, and from that time on a chasm began to widen between them. He wondered what possible fascination she had ever exercised over him. To add to the breach, he found, as the new century gathered headway, that his thirst for gaiety grew stronger. Never a party of any kind in the city of Baltimore but he was there, dancing with the prettiest of the young married women, chatting with the most popular of the debutantes, and finding their company charming, while his wife, a dowager of evil omen, sat among the chaperons, now in haughty disapproval, and now following him with solemn, puzzled, and reproachful eyes.
The movie version seems to put the couple in a more caring, understanding relationship. But maybe that’s just how they’re selling it. Director David Fincher — ‘Se7en,’ ‘Fight Club,’ ‘Zodiac’ — certainly hasn’t shied away from darkness or human weakness in the past. Maybe he will bring in haughty disapproval and solemn reproach.
The film’s trailer is now online. And if you’d like a print copy of the original, it’s in the F. Scott Fitzgerald story collection ‘Tales of the Jazz Age.’
— Carolyn Kellogg
