The curious case of “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button”
I noted to myself a while back with some apprehension that F. Scott Fitzgerald’s wonderful short story, “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button,” was being made into a movie. Now, thanks to this fatuous New York Times article, I see that my fears were probably well-grounded.
The first offense announces itself early:
In the short story, Queenie was just a nanny,” said Ms. Henson, who plays the role. “But when Eric Roth adapted the story into a screenplay, he made Queenie the surrogate mother. To me, that one moment where she tells Benjamin that people are going to judge you by the way you look sometimes, they’re not quite going to know how to receive you — that’s an African-American woman raising an African-American child; that’s a conversation I’ve had with my son several times.”
“That’s actually my favorite, most endearing moment in the movie,” she said.
Interestingly enough, I’ve been looking around for a distributor for my adaptation of The Great Gatsby, in which Meyer Wolfsheim is the main character. Also, instead of ending up dead in a pool, Jay Gatsby joins up with him and opens a lucrative kosher deli.
Another major invention is the framing story, in which Daisy’s daughter, Caroline, reads aloud from Benjamin’s diary to her elderly mother, who is dying in a New Orleans hospital as Hurricane Katrina beats on the windows with growing intensity.
I suppose actually digging up Fitzgerald’s corpse ran into legal issues.
The final stab comes from director David Fincher:
I read it, and I thought it was beautiful, but ultimately I thought it was a love story with a capital L[.]
The story, for those who haven’t read it, is about the life of the eponymous character who for unexplained reasons lives his life backwards, being born an old man and ending his life as a mewling baby. What it isn’t is a love story:
And here we come to an unpleasant subject which it will be well to pass over as quickly as possible. There was only one thing that worried Benjamin Button: his wife had ceased to attract him.
What it is is a lovely meditation on mortality and aging that avoids the ponderous cliches that usually accompany such themes, thanks to the fantastical framing device of reversing the process and Fitzgerald’s remarkably light touch.
Like many of his short stories, especially “The Diamond As Big As the Ritz,” it is also very funny. Fitzgerald’s stories tend to be underrated, despite that they are collectively superior to all but two of his novels. I highly recommend them to those who only know him from Gatsby. And, I might add, with the holiday season coming up, they’d make a fine gift.