Ten years ago this month, Hollywood finally achieved
what it had pursued relentlessly but unsuccessfully for the past 80 years: a
big-screen adaptation of work by F. Scott Fitzgerald that was as successful commercially as artistically.
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, an adaptation of his
1922 short story about a month who ages in reverse, grossed $127.5 million in
the U.S. and $333.9 million worldwide. (Five years later, after upteen misses
on the big—and small—screen, Hollywood saw the novelist’s classic work, The Great
Gatsby, gross $144,840,419 in America and $351,040.)
Benjamin Button was in the race for the Oscars the year it came
out, with 13 nominations, including for Best Actor (Brad Pitt), Supporting Actress (Taraji P. Henson),
Screenplay (Eric Roth), Director (David Fincher), and Best Picture. But, though early
handicapping placed it within striking distance of winning big, it lost Best
Picture to Slumdog Millionaire,
winning only in technical categories: Art Direction, Makeup, and Visual
Effects.
Those involved undoubtedly felt pleased by the
results, especially considering that the property had languished in the form of
limbo known in Hollywood as “turnaround” for over a generation. (Among those mentioned
in connection with the project, at one time or another: directors Steven
Spielberg, Ron Howard, and Spike Jonze, and stars Tom Cruise, John Travolta, and
Jack Nicholson.)
Fitzgerald’s misadventures as a
screenwriter are an essential part of his legend: the incandescent writer
whoring in Hollywood in a job far below his talent, for an industry blithely
uninterested in maintaining any fidelity to his work.
Given all of that, he would have had one good, long laugh over
all the money that Benjamin Button
made for everyone involved, starting with the fact that he didn’t see a penny
of it, having died 68 years before it opened. But—if he didn’t hit the bottle
first over the manifest injustice of it all—he would have guffawed over how it
repeated a pattern he was so familiar with from his own days writing for the
movies: virtually none of his original creation ended up being used.
Even in the only film for which Fitzgerald earned a
credit, Three Comrades (1938), producer
Joseph L. Mankiewicz used only about one-third of the original screenplay. Far
less than even that was used in Benjamin
Button. Among the key differences between Fitzgerald’s work and the film:
*Locale:
Instead of the story’s setting of Baltimore (home of Fitzgerald’s much-loved
ancestor, Francis Scott Key), the movie was shot in New Orleans in order to
take advantage of Louisiana's filming discounts.
*Time frame:
Instead of starting on the eve of the Civil War, Benjamin’s half-century-plus
life story on film begins near the end of World War I.
*Upbringing:
Though Roger Button is continually discomfited by his son’s unusual physical
changes (so much so that at one point he wishes Benjamin had been black), he
adapts and even turns the family business over to him; on film, unable to deal
with the both the death of his wife in childbirth and a son he regards as
monstrous, Mr. Button (renamed “Tom”) leaves Benjamin on the steps of a nursing
home, whose barren African-American housekeeper, Queenie, raises the "boy."
*Chief female
character: Roth and Fincher changed the first name of Button’s love
interest from Hildegarde to Daisy (almost certainly in tribute to the
novelist’s most famous female character, Daisy Buchanan of The Great Gatsby).
*Tone:
Roger Ebert’s review
may have put it most succinctly: “Fitzgerald wrote a comic farce, which Roth
has made a forlorn elegy.” Fitzgerald might have engaged in a bit of hyperbole
when he declared it “the funniest story ever written,” but all these years
later it’s hard not to chuckle at the multiple ironies he sneaks in, as when he
notes that Benjamin’s father-in-law, General Moncrief, grew more amenable to
the marriage “when Benjamin gave him the money to bring out his ‘History of the
Civil War’ in twenty volumes, which had been refused by nine prominent
publishers.” Little such levity survives in the film. While Fitzgerald's Benjamin emerges from the womb with a beard and smoking a cigar, Fincher's protagonist merely looks awfully wrinkled and wizened.
Anybody encountering Fincher’s adaptation is going
to simply have to accept or reject it on its worth as cinema, because it
virtually no details of characterization, time, setting, or plot are common
between the printed and “screened” word except for the aging-in-reverse
premise.
In contrast, the 2013 Great Gatsby, despite serious miscasting (that means you, Tobey
MaGuire, as Nick Carraway!), a misbegotten soundtrack, and overall excess,
sticks fairly closely to the original plot.
In another sense, however, Benjamin Button reflects the spirit of Fitzgerald in its overall
melancholy arising from the beautiful but evanescent moment. It’s entirely
appropriate that another time-haunted novelist, William Faulkner, especially
admired Fitzgerald’s original tale.
Even in a comic fantasy tale such as this (imagine a
Twilight Zone episode written by S.J.
Perelman), Fitzgerald could not resist displaying how besotted he could be with
feminine beauty, as in his description of the first glimpse of 50-year-old
Benjamin of the late-teenaged Hildegarde:
“The girl was slender and frail, with hair that was
ashen under the moon and honey-coloured under the sputtering gas-lamps of the
porch. Over her shoulders was thrown a Spanish mantilla of softest yellow,
butterflied in black; her feet were glittering buttons at the hem of her
bustled dress.”
But, as Benjamin grows younger instead of older,
Fitzgerald is equally precise in describing how male desire can cool toward
wives who can’t help but age:
“In the early days of their marriage Benjamin had
worshipped her. But, as the years passed, her honey-coloured hair became an
unexciting brown, the blue enamel of her eyes assumed the aspect of cheap
crockery – moreover, and, most of all, she had become too settled in her ways,
too placid, too content, too anemic in her excitements, and too sober in her
taste. As a bride it been she who had ‘dragged’ Benjamin to dances and dinners
– now conditions were reversed. She went out socially with him, but without
enthusiasm, devoured already by that eternal inertia which comes to live with
each of us one day and stays with us to the end.”
Such ironies are absent from the screenplay. Roth
had engineered a similar tonal shift in his Oscar-winning script for Forrest Gump, in which the tart
description in Winston Groom’s novel (“Bein’ an idiot is no box of chocolates”)
was softened to the far-better-known “Life is like a box of chocolates; you
never know what you’re going to get.”
Surely, that same sense of loss and grief
informs a remark by Mrs. Maple to the film’s Benjamin: “We're meant to lose the
people we love. How else would we know how important they are to us?”
Admirers of Fitzgerald’s short story should not
believe that they will see onscreen even a reasonable facsimile of this most
experimental entry in the writer’s considerable body of short fiction. But in the unabashed lyricism endowed by Roth, The Curious Case
of Benjamin Button accidentally hit upon how to solve what long bedeviled
anyone hoping to translate to cinema the ecstatic lift of Fitzgerald's novels, what he called in Gatsby man’s “capacity for wonder.”
