Benjamin Button’s body ages backwards. So when he is mentally and biologically young, he has the body of an old man, and vice versa. Abandoned as a monster by his biological father, Benjamin (Brad Pitt) is taken in by a loving black couple who, conveniently, run a home for the elderly in New Orleans at the end of World War I. By the time Benjamin is a teenager, he has the body of a healthy, if elderly man, and is able to strike out on his own to explore the world.
His curious aging means that biologically, he never stays in sync with anyone. As a young old codger, he meets the truly young Daisy (whose older self is played by Cate Blanchett). While Benjamin is smitten, they cannot go through life together because of his apparent age. Or can’t they? The movie follows Benjamin through his entire life, and at some point he and Daisy “meet in the middle”, when they are both truly middle-aged and apparently middle-aged. But ten years earlier, when Daisy is a young woman in her twenties, living a bohemian life in the big city as an up and coming ballerina, Benjamin is also actually a young man. And while his body at that point might be that of someone in his fifties, as someone approaching that decade myself I was put off by the suggestion that that physical difference made him less likely to think and act like a 30-year-old. Especially since he actually was 30 years old. I don’t want to belabor this point, but I felt that here Eric Roth’s screenplay made Button age in reverse mentally as well as physically, in order to better serve the theme of the movie.
In reality, we all drift together through time in parallel, caught in the same approximate currents until some random eddy separates us from ones we love. For Benjamin Button, these eddies are so strong that he can only connect with any individual for a brief spin around. The pull of time is stronger, and so his loves and connections are that much more fleeting. This is the theme of the movie, which is technically beautiful, and full of wonderful side characters. Taraji P. Henson as Benjamin’s adoptive mother, Queenie, for example, is terrific. And the direction is also superb. But in telling the episodic tale, the movie relied too much on voice over for my taste. Benjamin, for his part, is a quiet soul. Pitt gives a very understated performance, but in the end Benjamin Button remained curiously unknown to me.