Has not cut off the link to the past 1920s

Rating: 8/10 (22 February 2009)

The central idea of the film is the fact that Benjamin Button was born old and was thus able to get younger day after day and hence to die by regressing or progressing to his very own birth. If we accept this idea then we can see the potential of the film. It is going to reveal the attitudes of most people around the child who looks old or the old man who looks like a child. Rejection will be the main reaction. It is not made in anyway funny but it is always shown as dramatic, though Benjamin Button is developing a tremendous flexibility and is able to adapt to all situations. He crosses the world, history like a recording beacon and he reveals in his journal what he has been able to see and witness, always from a certain distance because he is never what they think he is, so he is always aloof. The film does a good job at that task and the actor does a very good job at living front side back. The saddest part of the film is the way Benjamin's father rejected him and the way Benjamin himself, for the very same reason rejects his own daughter. His father could not face his child and thought he was a monster. Benjamin does not want to have his daughter witness his regression for her not to think he is a monster, which she will think eventually but not as applied to her father. There is something even more morbid in that situation. The way love is discriminatory. One loves only the persons that fit a certain slot. We do not know the slot most of the time and so we think we are open to everything. This films reveals in very dramatic ways that this is wrong. We only love those who satisfy our most secret, deepest and most unconscious impulses, demands and requests. Benjamin Button is loved by his father only when he has become young enough to look like his son and when he needs him to die. Benjamin Button is loved by the one who is going to be the mother of his daughter only when he fits with her career, with her desire to become stable in life after various accidents and mishaps, when she cannot play the star anymore. She will love him to the end for sure and yet she will raise her own daughter, his daughter, on a lie that she will only reveal before dying in the midst of the famous Katrina hurricane. She will be the one who closes his eyes but that will be done for the world around her out of charity, compassion not love because no one knew her real relation to him. And she accepted that hypocrisy. If her husband was such a marvelous father, Benjamin should have found the proper place in this family, without disrupting it but enriching it with a knowledge that no one should have been ashamed of. In fact I find this film too close to Fitzgerald who was a born representative of the America of before the big crash, vain, hypocritical, self-satisfied and self-righteous, hating differences, cultivating normalcy. The film transposes this short story to our modern world and there is the rub: today we cannot really accept that kind of norm-cultivation. But the actor and actress are so good, the directing is so good that we try to forget that old "happy 20s" gene inherited from Fitzgerald.
Dr Jacques COULARDEAU, University Paris 1 Pantheon Sorbonne, University Versailles Saint Quentin en Yvelines, CEGID