A Curious Review of Benjamin Button
The term "second childishness" comes from the 'Seven Ages of Man' speech ("All the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players...") in Shakespeare's play As You like It. Shakespeare describes the earliest part of life as "the infant, mewling and puking in the nurse's arms," and ends his summary with "the last scene of all, that ends this strange eventful history, is second childishness and mere oblivion...."I was reminded of this short phrase while I was watching The Curious Case of Benjamin Button because so much of the film's story is based on the chronological passing of life and the stages that we go through as we pass from birth to death. And I wonder about its significance, as well, because there is a key character in the movie who, at one point, recites Shakespeare.
It's a curious premise that gives us the foundation for the movie - Benjamin Button was born with a peculiar disease. He's nearly blind, his hands and feet are calcified and useless, and his skin looks like he has third degree burns covering every surface of his body. His mother died during childbirth, and his distraught father abandons the monstrous child on the steps of a nearby home.
Thankfully, the people who live there take him in and raise him as one of their own, and he lives and lives and lives years beyond the doctors' sad predictions. You see, Benjamin has a disease where he is born with the decayed body of a man in his 80's, and they are sure that his time will come at any moment, but as he
[caption id="attachment_20378" align="alignleft" width="300" caption="Taraji P. Henson as Queenie, Benjamin's adoptive mother."]
[/caption]gets a few years older, it becomes apparent that his body is growing younger.
There is a real disease that's somewhat similar to the one afflicting Benjamin in the movie. I'm not sure what it's called, but basically what happens is the aging process is wildly accelerated, so a 7 or 10-year-old boy, for example, would be wheelchair-bound and losing sight and hearing and memory and suffering all of the other unpleasantries of entering the advanced stages of life.
Benjamin's predicament is sort of a slightly altered version of this disease, combined with the fascinating story arc of Daniel Keyes' brilliant novel "Flowers For Algernon," which is about a mentally challenged young man named Charlie who volunteers for a scientific experiment to increase his intellectual capacity. Like a mouse subject before him, his intelligence slowly begins to increase, and then increases with astonishing speed, bringing his level of intellect beyond even the most accomplished scientists involved with the experimentation and ultimately leaving him feeling as intellectually isolated as he did before the experiment even began. Unfortunately, it soon becomes apparent that Algernon, the mouse, is beginning to lose his intelligence, and Charlie suffers painfully through a slow mental descent as his cognitive functioning begins to deteriorate.
[caption id="attachment_20377" align="alignright" width="300" caption="Benjamin at about age 7. And yes, that's Brad Pitt playing him. The visual effects team for this movie definitely deserves some recognition."]
[/caption]It's a wonderful story, and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button in many ways bears close resemblance, although the movie veers much more sharply into the world of fantasy than the book did.
It's told almost entirely through the reading of Benjamin's diary, which a young woman is reading to an old woman on her deathbed at the beginning of the movie. The old woman is Daisy (Cate Blanchett), and the young woman is Caroline (Julia Ormond). Daisy is dying, and she wants to hear her daughter's voice as much as possible, so she asks her to read the diary of this Benjamin Button, of whom Caroline has never heard but who's life has been in some way intertwined with her mothers for many decades.
The similarities to Forrest Gump are unmistakable and understandable, since it was Eric Roth that wrote both movies. Benjamin is an outcast from society and his life is juxtaposed with major historical events, and he has a charming curiosity and demeanor that makes him immediately likable. Roth has taken the basic premise of the story of the same name written by F. Scott Fitzgerald, but the similarities are surprisingly rare. For one thing, the movie is a much darker, more serious exploration of life than the story, which was more of an intelligent but farcical comedic romp. The kind of thing Dr. Seuss might have had a wonderful time toying with.
I should mention that even though it's a fantasy film, many people will have trouble accepting the premise. We can accept it for the sake of enjoying and understanding the story, but the problem is that Benjamin's reverse-aging process is too one-dimensional. When he's a kid, he's just an old man, and when he grows older, he appears in the vibrant height of his 20s, rather than a tortured soul who has to pass through life alone, or know that soon he will lose the ones he loves. There is never a sense that there is someone at a different stage of life trapped beneath whatever exterior we see at any given time.
But essentially the movie is about not only the way that people pass through life, but the way people pass through life affecting each other. In one of the film's most interesting segments, Benjamin, through his diary, tells a complex story of different people, all strangers, going through a certain portion of their day, and all of their actions are affected by a huge number of different variables, all of them ultimately affecting each other in some way, and the result of their actions is that Daisy gets hit by a car, instantly ending her successful dancing career. Benjamin notes with some amazement that if a single one of all of those people had done a single thing differently, altering their motion by even one second, the accident would have been avoided and all of the rest of Daisy's life would have been completely different.
Personally, I was a little more amazed at how he knew all of the details about what all those strangers were doing at that particular time on that particular day, but no matter. It's standard chaos theory, which resonates deeply within the film.
"We're all going to the same place, we're just taking different roads to get there."
It's important to realize that this is a fairy tale, however, because once you do that, it's much easier to see the film's meaning and to allow the characters' experiences attempt to bring some understanding to some of life's more difficult inevitabilities by introducing us to a man who experiences the same things but experiences them totally differently. There are a couple moments when the movie comes dangerously close to being openly preachy with its message, but it's packed with spectacular performances and overall it's a visually stunning and genuinely engaging character drama.
The Bean-Meter!
Bean gives the movie 4 1/2 out of 5 beans, and that's not at all bad. He's still confused, however, about where Benjamin's body weight actually went as he turned into a kid at the end of the movie. He has one theory, but trust me, you don't want to hear it... 
