Films and Feelings: The Curious Case of Benjamin Button

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button was released in 2008, starring Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett (one of my favorite actresses), to critical acclaim and thirteen Academy Award nominations.  Brad Pitt plays the titular character, and the movie traverses through the life story of a man who ages backwards.  Born as a baby with cataracts, impaired hearing, and all the hallmark symptoms of an 80-year-old man, Button would live his whole life with the constant reminder that he would not experience time like everyone else while also struggling to reconcile his unusual love with Cate Blanchett’s character, Daisy Fuller.  At the time the movie was released, the digital film production was considered something quite ambitious: the task of rendering a man to look 30 years his senior and 30 years his junior all within one movie.  Human faces have always been tricky to render, and I am constantly amazed at how accurate we are at perceiving authenticity in facial expressions (see here and here) and at how disgusted we feel when we perceive that a face is not real (Uncanny Valley anyone?).  The Curious Case of Benjamin Button managed to surpass all expectations, and it featured some of the most winning performances by Cate Blanchett and Brad Pitt.  

More than just a technological feat, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button is a story about the importance of time.  The film is entirely structured around the constraints of time, most obviously represented by Button’s reverse aging and the constant mismatch between his age and his circumstances.  He falls in love with Daisy as a “young” boy (though he looks he’s in his 70s), and for most of their lifetime, their love story just seems inappropriate.  He experiences sex for the first time at a brothel as a 12-year-old, and is employed as a tug-boat man as a young teenager. As a 20 year old, he has his first affair with a 40 year old woman, weighed down by regrets and a bland marriage.  He travels the world as a 60 year old, able-bodied and energetic with a body fit for a man forty years younger.  

Benjamin and Daisy finally meet in the middle.

Benjamin Button lived a life that I was sure I wanted.  Wouldn’t we want a young body when we finally had the maturity and focus to know what to do with it?  In that case, Benjamin Button’s life may be a warning to use our time as wisely as we can before we begin to regret the things we didn’t do in our young age.  But you start to see that even Benjamin Button’s life had its drawbacks.  For one brief moment in their lives, Benjamin Button and Daisy Fuller manage to meet in the middle, when they’re both about 40, and live out the love affair they had been waiting for.  When Daisy becomes pregnant with their daughter, Button realizes he cannot be a father in his state, reasoning that “[Daisy] can’t take care of both of us.”  It hurt my heart a little bit to see that even after more than four decades of waiting for each other, the couple couldn’t win.  

Button leaves behind his lover and daughter, traveling all over the world.

It’s a tale of mismatched circumstances and I feel like I’m in a Craigslist missed connection throughout the 2 hour, 40 minute movie.  Button always just misses it by the width of a hair, though it seems that Button has accepted the unfairness of it all even as a young (but old-looking) man.  I suppose the original appeal of Benjamin Button for me was seeing a man transcend the mortal limitations of time.  A man who aged backwards?  The things he could do by the time he was in his 80s, as a man confident in his abilities and assured in his mental acuity.  He could be the oldest man to climb Mt. Everest.  The oldest man to swim the English channel.  The oldest man to basically do anything. But when he inhabits the body of a 5-year-old, Button, much to everyone’s bewilderment, begins experiencing symptoms of dementia and dies in a nursing home. The Curious Case of Benjamin Button tells us what we’ve all known all long: time weathers all things and waits for no one.     

Button even lives in a nursing home for most of his life (he was raised and ended up in one), surrounded by senility and death.  From start to finish, Benjamin is reminded of the futility of it all.  What made him special and unique means nothing because we all end up in the same place.  It’s a sobering fact of life that we may die, leaving on this Earth nothing more than a whisper of our presence.  And while I may agonize over the possibility of leaving no legacy, Benjamin Button does not seem worried by it.  It’s a heavy film, but with a lighthearted protagonist who accepts his circumstances without much anguish.  He lives his life with no fanfare, going day by day, doing the best he can.  And I suppose that’s how we’re supposed to live, just day by day, doing the best we can with the time we have.