TURNING
BACK
by Douglas Messerli
Robin
Swicord [screenplay], based on a screenplay story by Eric Roth and Robin
Swicord (suggested by the story by F. Scott Fitzgerald), David Fincher
[director] The Curious Case of Benjamin
Button / 2008
The
tragedy of this tale, however, is that before long Benjamin is doomed to grow
too young to care for the child at the very moment when Daisy is becoming too
old to care for them both. Accordingly, he leaves her, and she marries another
man who is a good father to her young daughter. Benjamin disappears into youth,
meeting Daisy only once for a brief sexual encounter, and reenters her life again
as a young boy for whom she cares as he descends into infancy and, finally, as
a baby, dies.
Benjamin’s father, Thomas, faced with the horrific
specter of an eighty-year old infant, a child moreover that has ended in his
wife’s death, has cruelly abandoned the child on the steps of boarding house
over which a black woman, Queenie presides. Upon discovering the child, Queenie
readily adopts it, allowing it to grow up old in a house of old people. Yet
Thomas, upon encountering the child years later, at a time when Benjamin is
closer to 50, invites him to dinner and further encounters, ending, as the
father grows old, in his revelation to Benjamin that he is his son. At first, Benjamin
is outraged by the fact of the abandonment as opposed to the continued
kindnesses of his Black mother. But Benjamin, in some senses, is presented as a
blank slate, and ultimately a reunion between the two, however shaky, is
accomplished, and he nurses his father into death.
Similarly,
the older woman, Elizabeth Abbott (wonderfully played by Tilda Swinton) with
whom Benjamin has an affair in Minsk, is encouraged in his gentle love to look
back upon her failed marriage and her own lack of initiative. Once a great
swimmer who attempted, unsuccessfully, to swim the English Channel, she has
done little since except suffer the empty relationship of her marriage. By
film’s end, and at the unlikely age of 62, she successfully achieves the goal
she had previously abandoned.
So
too does the heavy-drinking captain Mike of a New Orleans-based tugboat shift,
upon encountering Benjamin, from braggadocio and whoring to heroic
accomplishments as his small craft rams a German U-boat that has destroyed a
large Allied warship.
Daisy,
intrigued throughout the story by Benjamin, rejects his proffered love simply
because he will not go bed with her the one night she is in town. Later, upon
his visit to her in New York, she resists his love because of an affair with
another dancer; and finally, suffering from an automobile accident that has
robbed her of the possibility of ever again being able to dance, she demands he
leave her bedside.
Months
later, however, she too “turns back,” returning to him in New Orleans where
they have their intense if brief love affair.
Her
own daughter, Caroline, has clearly been distanced from her mother, but in the
framework of the narrative, has returned to New Orleans to her hospital
deathbed during the advance of Hurricane Katrina. She too, accordingly, has
turned back, coming to the aide of her mother, as her mother, turning back one
more time, insists Caroline read the autobiography of Benjamin Button which
reveals the girl’s own parentage.
Los Angeles,
January 5, 2009
Reprinted
from Nth Position [England] (January
2009).
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