The Curious Case of Benjamin Button

As I drove home from Leominster in the dark this evening, I meditated on the film I just saw. I couldn't quite put it together yet. Was it a great film? It would take time to figure it out, to let the emotions sink in. Maybe by next week, or next month, I could decide. Was my very hesitation on this issue a sign of the power of the film, despite its obvious gag-based plot?

First things first: the special effects and make-up (not sure where one left off and the other began) were amazing. Oscars will be flowing in these categories come February.

In some ways the movie just blew my mind. What did it most was the framing story. Something happened to the United States in World War I---the war that never ended. History was altered, and time was warped into some kind of antithetical flow of itself. It was finally stopped when Hurricane Katrina flooded New Orleans. Amazing. Just amazing. It spoke directly to me, like a private laser beam, almost making me sputter in disbelief at the power of art to broadcast the lurking hidden truths that are swirling out there in the collectivity of our souls.

The most powerful themes of the movie seemed to be about the universality of loneliness, and the denial of its existence within our culture. I've come to believe this is the most repressed cultural issue, and any movie that tackles it head-on gets an automatic upgrade in my book.

But it went beyond a simple analysis to link this theme to another hidden issue of our time, one that I've seen crop up in movies repeatedly over the last decade in almost cryptic form, namely the issue of intergenerational love, both in platonic and erotic form.

It is perhaps the great hidden taboo, and perhaps the source of great loneliness around us---the utter stratification of our society by age. It is so pervasive that we have come to see it as completely natural. Yet by historical standards it is very un-natural. It is arguably the reason that aging has become the greatest source of terror to many of us, since it automatically condemns us to increased removal and isolation from the things that once seemed to be the source of life and joy to us.

It's worth pointing out that The Curious Case of Benjamin Button is the second cryptic presentation of intergenerational romantic relationships to emerge in the last months of this year. In many ways, Twilight was based on the same theme. How so? Because the story, if taken literally, is about a romance between a 17-year-old girl and a 104-year-old man (or man-like entity at least). Before you say that it doesn't matter, consider this: would the story have worked as well if he weren't that old, if he were, say, an immature vampire? Moreover, would it have been the same if it were the other way around: a 17-year-old boy and a 104-year-old-but-still-beautiful female vampire?

The power of the gag of the Benjamin Button is that allows an examination of the issue of age-definition from multiple facets and angles. The film took full advantage of it to create a powerful dissertation on how age defines us and limits us, at times so arbitrarily, making every era of our life needlessly more tragic than it could be.

In that respect, the most poignant moment in the movie is when Benjamin (Brad Pitt) and Daisy (Cate Blanchett), are both in their early forties, nearly the same age. For a few brief years, the barriers of circumstance that have kept them apart are lifted. They are happy, and she is able to conceive a child.

I couldn't help but thinking of how this has become such a dominant image in our culture---the idea that when husband and wife both must give full time to their careers, there is but a small window when it all must come together, in one's late Thirties or early Forties, when one finally has a limited autonomy, when fading youth is still in living memory, when one must seize the last opportunity for happiness, to make a mad scramble for fertility before the clock runs out. It is millennial America in a nutshell.

There were a few historical anachronisms in Benjamin Button that rattled me. First was the idea that the war in Europe began with Pearl Harbor. In Russia? WTF? What a stupid dumbing down of history for American audiences to digest. Can't they give us the real thing anymore? Also the racial relationships in the movie seemed to strain credibility even under the license of revisionism. The movie's escape valve in this respect is that it is set in New Orleans, which operated by its own set of rules to a certain degree. But in any case I forgive the film for these slight failings.

When I bought my ticket this evening, there were signs indicating the heat was off in several of the auditoriums. I was afraid that the movie would drag out and be unbearable, but the story keep my attention the whole time. If nothing else, it was simply good storytelling.

Literature fans will note that the movie really is nothing like the short story by F. Scott Fitzgerald, which I read a couple weeks ago. In this case at least, this is a very good thing, since the short story is fairly vacuous. I really couldn't figure out what they were going to do with it, but they sure did make something. The screenplay used only the barest premise of the story around which to construct entirely new layers of plot and character.

When I first saw the trailer to this movie last summer, I was sure it was going to be a sentimental wreck. I'd even taken to calling it The Curious Case of Beavis and Butthead. I take it all back...for now...I think.