Fincher Filmed The Wrong Backwards-Aging Story

There are two literary works depicting a mankind age rearward — a Fitzgerald chronicle , and Andrew Sean Greer ’s novel . One of them would make a outstanding picture . Too spoilt they take the other one .

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The motion picture in interrogation , The Curious Case Of Benjamin Button , issue forth out in a couple of day , and it ’s nominally establish on the Fitzgerald story of the same deed of conveyance . ( Besides the title and the main character who ages backwards , they have almost nothing else in common . )

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In fact , the Button film has one of the essence similarity to Andrew Sean Greer ’s 2004 novel , The Confessions Of Max Tivoli : they ’re both structured as a making love story . In both kit and caboodle , a man who ’s bear old and ages backwards fall in love as a child . And he bed the same woman for his full lifetime . And in both the Greer novel and the new flick , the human and the charwoman connect at three different leg of their aliveness , as he grows younger and she grows older .

The Divine of the Benjamin Button moviedeny that their cinema is based on Greer ’s novel , of course . The movie was in evolution before 2004 , when Tivoli came out . ( But the movie did n’t start production in earnest until after that , and I screw there were legion script rewrites at various tip . ) But even if screenwriter Eric Roth has never register Greer ’s novel , he was intelligibly groping towards the same estimate .

After I saw Button a few weeks ago , I was struck by the law of similarity , and asked Greer about it . Here ’s what he tell :

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Have n’t seen the film or record the story , if you’re able to think it ! I was so freaked out , when Max Tivoli came out , to find out about both that I stayed away from the Fitzgerald . the great unwashed tell me it is very dissimilar from my book in secret plan , tone , paper , etc . I do n’t know anything about the movie except that it looks gorgeous in the way I wish my volume would have looked , if it had ever been a movie … . But the truth really is that I ’d never heard of Benjamin Button when I wrote my book , and they ’d never heard of me when they started making their movie . We ’ve both heard of each other now . The downside is simply that I ’ll never see a movie made from my book — but there are defective things in the world ! Mostly I ’m intrigued how they handled such a similar idea .

The lamentable thing is , even with the similarities between them , Tivoli would have made a much better moving-picture show than what Benjamin Button ended up with . ( As Bookslutput itback in 2004 , “ Greer ’s indite words would call for picayune interlingual rendition were they to be put on screen . ” )

To be fair , Roth did n’t have much to work with in the Fitzgerald tarradiddle . It ’s a very slim piece of comic fable . Fitzgerald ’s main character is born former ( and speak unadulterated conviction ) and then turn younger until he ’s a baby . His male parent is blockade by him , and he ca n’t go to college because he look too old . He takes a married woman , who thinks he ’s a mature older man , and then he get bored with her as she gets older and he gets young . eventually , his big son starts treating him like a young jackanapes , and he finally move off to college . Then he retrogress to childhood . The remainder . None of the graphic symbol are more than one - dimensional , and the wife , in particular , is a moment of a joke :

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There was only one thing that worried Benjamin Button ; his wife had quit to draw in him . At that clip Hildegarde was a woman of thirty - five , with a son , Roscoe , fourteen yr honest-to-goodness . In the other daylight of their marriage Benjamin had hero-worship her . But , as the years passed , her dearest - color hair became an unstimulating brown , the blue enamel of her eyes assumed the aspect of cheap dishware — moreover , and , most of all , she had become too settled in her fashion , too placid , too content , too anaemic in her inflammation , and too drab in her gustatory sensation . As a bride it been she who had “ drag ” Benjamin to dances and dinners — now conditions were reversed . She went out socially with him , but without exuberance , go through already by that interminable inactivity which comes to live with each of us one mean solar day and stays with us to the ending . Benjamin ’s discontentment waxed strong .

Suffice to say , the Fitzgerald story is not a dear story , precisely . ( And , as John Updikenotes , it ’s not one of Fitzgerald ’s best . )

In Greer ’s novel , meanwhile , the master grapheme learns too soon on to blot out his consideration from everyone except his just acquaintance Hughie . ( His mother advises him , “ Be what you seem . ” ) When he ’s xvii , he falls for the 14 - yr - sure-enough missy who experience downstairs , Alice , who ’s the same age and thinks he ’s a dirty sometime military man . He vows to get her again , and does so at close to twenty year time interval for the rest of the novel . He ’s able to woo her and even marry her , but he can never uncover his truthful identity to her . Instead , he marries her under a false name , Asgar Van Daler . But they ’re separate by a grippe epidemic , and the next time they meet , she does n’t recognise her ex - husband once again . They gestate a child , but wind up parting again when she ’s creeped out to find some of her ex - husband ’s things among her raw lover ’s possessions . The terminal time they meet , he ’s a small fry , and she ’s an elderly woman .

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As I said , the new Button movie is closer in structure to Max Tivoli than to the Fitzgerald story . The main difference is , the cleaning woman ( Daisy ) somehow figure out betimes on that Benjamin Button is senesce rearward , and she always knows it ’s him whenever she come across him . They cope with as tiddler and meet together , and then hook up again in their early twenties , but do n’t end up together . They last do link in their thirties , and finally have a child together before separating . And , as in Greer ’s novel , they receive one last time , when Benjamin is a toddler and Daisy is an old lady .

The fact that Daisy cognize all along that Benjamin is aging backward puts a very different spin on the report , however . It means that alternatively of being a story of the stock split between psyche and body , and the impossible action of ever really knowing our loved unity , it ’s just a story of a couple facing logistical problem . In the movie , Daisy never suppose Benjamin ’s a unsporting one-time man , and she always recognizes him . What ’s more , she somehow manages to see through his appearance to his truthful age at every point in the story . Later , Benjamin and Daisy have endless conversations about how to handle the fact that he ’s produce younger alternatively of old . It saps all of the drama out of the situation , and what you ’re go forth with , instead , is curiously inert . In a weird room , it feels like vestigial rag of Fitzgerald ’s offhand handling of poor Hildegaarde survive into the picture show .

The estimation of score the story of a backward - age man into a lifelong dearest story is a expert one , and it ’s entirely possible that Roth and Greer both strike on it individually . But if you ’re going to do a making love taradiddle between a normal woman and a piece who is hurtling from agedness to puerility , you have a pick between the tragedy of deception and the banality of eubstance that do n’t quite fit with each other . Greer ’s novel opts for the former ; Roth ’s moving picture for the latter .

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