Reflecting life

‘Life would be infinitely happier if we could only be born at the age of eighty and gradually approach eighteen,’ wrote Mark Twain. Not at all, says The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. Living backwards would create its own unique pain, not just for the one doing the living, but for everyone else too. Disappointment, loss and sadness are inherent in life as we all know it; there is no escape. Nor should there be.

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button is very loosely based on an early short story by F. Scott Fitzgerald, apparently inspired by Mark Twain’s remark. It tells the bizarre story of the backwards life of Benjamin Button (Brad Pitt), from an infant who has the physical characteristics of an old man to his death as a senile baby. Fitzgerald’s story is an amusing fantasy, a whimsy; David Fincher’s film has much grander ambitions. It seems to implore us to view it as a profound examination of the meaning of life. It falls far short of this, though Button’s mirrored life does reflect something important of what it means to be human.

This is a beautifully made film, deserving of some, though certainly not all, of the thirteen Oscars for which it has been nominated. It is a very fine achievement at a technical level, with visual effects and make-up wizardry rendering the various ages of Brad Pitt’s character with impressive believability. Its cinematography and production design are stunning, combining well with Alexandre Desplat’s score to create a lush texture.

The story, however, even leaving aside the ridiculous premise of someone ageing backwards, is problematic. The fundamental issue is that Benjamin Button’s character is rather dull. We like him, of course, because he has to contend with his unusual condition, and his early years being brought up in a New Orleans old people’s home are great fun. Benjamin’s mother died in childbirth, and his father promptly abandoned the monster baby on the steps of the home where he was found and taken in by the delightful black housekeeper, Queenie (Taraji P Henson).

Although a young boy in a diminutive old man’s body creates plenty of humourous situations, Benjamin is a very passive protagonist. The tension in films is generally created by the central characters pursuing certain goals and surmounting obstacles along the way. However, Benjamin has no clearly discernible goal: things happen and he reacts to them. Even when he meets Daisy, who becomes the love of his life, it is some time before we get the sense of him wanting to win her heart.

It is the relationship with Daisy (Cate Blanchett) that creates the tension to propel the story. They are just children when they meet, though Benjamin, of course, looks elderly. They meet periodically during Daisy’s childhood visits to her grandmother in the home. When Benjamin joins the crew of a tugboat and travels to Murmansk, Daisy is dismayed - particularly when he writes to tell her he has fallen in love (with a married woman, played by Tilda Swinton). The affair comes to an end, war breaks out, and Benjamin eventually returns to discover that Daisy has become a successful dancer. Just as it seems they are on the point of becoming lovers, Benjamin declines Daisy’s offer to sleep with him. Rebuffed, Daisy throws herself into her social life in New York, and it is years before they have both reached the point where their relationship can take off.

The key lesson Benjamin learns from all this, it seems, is nothing more profound than Queenie’s repeated observation, ‘You never know what’s coming.’ Life throws its storms at us, and there’s nothing we can do about it. We just need to make the best of it. Of course, to some extent we must simply react to events outside our control, but most people believe that a truly fulfilling life comes from proactively identifying goals and pursuing them. Button himself remarks that, ‘It’s never too late, or in my case too early, to be whoever you want to be,’ and he writes to Daisy saying, ‘I hope you live a life you’re proud of, and if not, I hope you have the courage to start all over again.’ These remarks suggest a rather more active approach to life than Benjamin demonstrates. In his review for National Review Online (23 December 2008), Thomas Hibbs observes:

The problem is that the film wants to make more of the romance and its circumstances than they merit. It wants to lay bare for us the important things in human life. As Benjamin says at one point, what matters is that ‘we’ve lived our lives well.’ Yet, the film has very little to say, beyond pious platitudes, about what it means to live well. ‘We all end up in diapers,’ is one of the film’s insights into aging.

Yet despite this passivity, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button is a charming film, and the love between Benjamin and Daisy is touching enough to make us care about it. While a number of reviewers have complained about the length of the film, the last half hour or so is very moving, as we see Benjamin lose his faculties and become utterly dependent on Daisy.

This film is about loss and separation. Brad Pitt comments, ‘People come and go. People leave, whether by choice or by death. People leave as you yourself will someday leave – it’s the inevitable. How you deal with this becomes the question.’ Above all, the film is about death. But therefore it is about life in the sense that we must live with an awareness that our moments are ticking away. If a life could be lived backwards, would it eliminate all its sorrows? No, because death inexorably takes those we care for, and ultimately ourselves. Some, like Benjamin’s friends in the home, slip away peacefully, and their passing leaves a silence, a void. Others, like the tug crew, are torn violently from the world.

The entire narrative of the film is framed by death’s inevitability as an elderly Daisy lies in her hospital bed dying of cancer. ‘Are you afraid?’ asks her daughter Caroline (Julia Ormond) at the beginning of the film. ‘Curious about what comes next’ is the reply. Daisy asks Caroline to read Benjamin’s diary to her. Before Caroline reads any of it, though, Daisy tells her about a grand clock made for the New Orleans railway station by the finest clockmaker alive. His son was killed in the First World War, before the clock was completed, and so the clockmaker engineered his creation to run backwards ‘in hope that our sons can come back again.’ The clock runs in reverse until Benjamin dies, but is put into storage when it is replaced by a dull digital clock.

While Daisy breathes her last, Hurricane Katrina gathers force outside, bringing catastrophic floods which overwhelm the old clock and the hope it represented. This recalls the words of the old hymn, 'O God, our help in ages past', by Isaac Watts:

Time, like an ever-rolling stream,
bears all its sons away.
They fly, forgotten, as a dream
Dies at the op'ning day.

There is a real poignancy about the moments of death within the film, perhaps particularly because screenwriter Eric Roth (who also wrote the screenplay for the surprisingly similar Forrest Gump) lost both his parents while he was working on the project.

‘Their deaths were obviously very painful for me, and gave me a different perspective on things,’ he reflects. ‘I think people will respond to the same things in this story that I responded to.’ David Fincher, too, brought his experience of loss to his work on the film. ‘My father died five years ago,’ he says, ‘and I remember the experience of being there when he breathed his last breath. It was an incredibly profound one. When you lose someone who helped form you in a lot of ways, who is your “true north,” you lose the barometer of your life.’

Life will one day be swept away, just as all the moments which constitute a life are carried away by the tide of time. Fincher notes that, ‘It’s coming for everyone, and we spend all our lives focusing on other things to avoid having to think about that inevitability.’ But Benjamin Button’s equanimity in the face of loss, separation and death is very positive. He accepts what is coming because there is nothing he can do to alter the fact. There is no raging ‘against the dying of the light’ for him. There are strong echoes here of the biblical book of Ecclesiastes: there is ‘a time to be born and a time to die’ (Ecclesiastes 3:2). The fate of human beings is to breathe and die – ‘they came from dust and they return to dust’ (3:20). ‘We all come to the end of our lives as naked and empty-handed as on the day we were born. We can’t take our riches with us’ (5:15).

While there is a dreadful finality about Benjamin’s and Daisy’s deaths, with only memories remaining, the Bible has a much richer view of death. While Benjamin and Daisy both seemed to be at peace with themselves, there is the more fundamental question of whether or not we are at peace with God. If we are, because we have been reconciled to him through Jesus’s death on the cross, then death is not the end. Rather it the gateway to a new, perfect and eternal existence, opened up for us by Jesus’s rising from the dead. Resurrection bodies (we will not be disembodied spirits) are not subject to deterioration and decay; there is no ageing, whether forwards or backwards (1 Corinthians 15:42–57). It will be what Mark Twain wanted: an 'infinitely happier' life. There will be no loss or separation; ‘no more death or sorrow or crying or pain’ (Revelation 21:4). This is a perspective on death that is not mere passive acceptance, but one which transforms every moment of every day. Life now can be wonderful or it can be painful. But it is not all there is.



This article was first published on Damaris' Culturewatch website (www.culturewatch.org) - used with permission.
© Copyright Tony Watkins (2009)


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