Many questions few answers

Rating: 1/10 (31 December 2009)

Either film-goers are a totally different species than I or they ask a lot less of a film than I. I started off reading the book. (I'm in a book/film club where we do both and then discuss both together.) The book was a mere outline of a story not yet written. It just told events that happened with almost no dialog, expression of feelings, or even descriptions of where they were. It was a very short story and the facts were very different. His father denied his age and dressed him in shorts (he also kept custody which got changed in the film.) His wife came to resent him as did his teenage son.
The movie went with the bare bones plot outline and wrote an entirely new story. What both had in common was that the characters didn't act like humans in the face of a scientific impossibility. They were shocked but that was the extent of it. No one contacted the media or the scientific community so that Man could study this "miracle." So the movie is now some sort of science fiction tale where people don't act like people yet in every other way they do. That inconsistency ruined both tales for me. I might have tried seeing it like one would GULLIVER'S TRAVELS, or Kafka's METAMORPHOSIS. But in those the goal was to share an insight and the unreality made the story fresh and helped drive the point home. The BUTTON twist did neither for me.
And the love story made no sense to me, particularly when the Brad Pitt character leaves his wife (loving wife.) He didn't trust that her love for him was substantive enough (not superficial) to weather the onslaught of old age and sickness. She had the same affliction when she got injured in France--she hid from him and married someone else she didn't really love. Why? Because she was afraid she wasn't really loved for herself but for her looks and talent. Those aren't symptoms of love but impediments to it--it's not love if you start off thinking you're not really lovable for who you are inside. So I had no admiration for them as the relationship unfolded.
Only in the end as he got really "old," did he allow her to love him and that didn't seem like a real choice but a result of him running out of options. I've read the laudatory comments and they do not resonate.