Benjamin Button Ages Badly in the Latest Curious Afterlife of Fitzgerald’s Short Story

Twenty minutes into watching “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” at the Public Theater’s press preview, I had the uneasy feeling I’d been here before. The sea shanties, the Cornish fishing harbor, the actors swinging cellos and double basses as they sang: all of it tugged at something. Afterwards I scrolled back through my WhatsApps with my friend Michelle Langer, a TV producer, and found the evidence. In January 2025 we had seen this very show together in London’s West End. I had forgotten it completely.I asked Michelle what her recollection was: “I remember thinking it dragged on. I just wanted to laugh. I couldn’t quite believe it was quite that bad. The music wasn’t memorable; it was over-acted. I hadn’t seen the film, but it felt like going to your kids’ school play and watching their version of something quite classic.”F. Scott Fitzgerald’s 1922 story ends with Benjamin as a baby, his whole life wiped away, in a sentence I can no longer read without flinching: “Then it was all dark, and his white crib and the dim faces that moved above him, and the warm sweet aroma of the milk, faded out altogether from his mind.” Was my amnesia as damning a verdict as Michelle’s, or a sign of my own failing memory? I’d like to think it was the former. The latter is the more frightening possibility, and it is precisely the fear this story, in all its incarnations, makes us face.Fitzgerald’s conceit belongs to that rare family of stories Hollywood calls “high concept,” whose whole appeal fits in a single sentence. A weatherman relives the same day until he gets it right (“Groundhog Day”). A 12-year-old wakes up in a grown man’s body (“Big”). On stage, Harold Pinter’s “Betrayal” tells an affair backwards, from its end to its first kiss. The best of them use one impossible rule to show us something we take for granted. “Groundhog Day” is about how to spend a day; “Benjamin Button” is about how to spend a life. Perhaps that is why it has proved as portable as anything in American fiction. It has traveled from Baltimore to New Orleans, to the Upper West Side, to Seoul and now, by way of London, to a harbor in Cornwall. Its power is a kind of Brechtian estrangement. By running a life in reverse, it makes the ordinary business of growing old strange enough that we actually see it.The musical, by Jethro Compton (book, lyrics, direction and design) and Darren Clark (music and lyrics), began at London’s Southwark Playhouse in 2019 and went on to win the Olivier Award for Best New Musical. Mr. Compton sets it in a Cornish village, from five weeks after the Armistice of 1918 until, to the minute, 70 years later. His Benjamin arrives complete with bowler hat and pipe, is hidden in the attic by a father ashamed of him, and slips out to the pub, where he falls for the barmaid, Elowen Keene.The show’s great asset is its company of 15 actor-musicians, who sing, dance and play all at once, with no band in a pit. Andrew Durand plays Benjamin without wig or prosthetics. Mr. Clark’s score of shanties, ballads and miners’ chorales has real beauty: a plaintive tin whistle that recalled Mark Knopfler’s music for Cal, a kettledrum that becomes a squadron of German bombers. One scene, in which Elowen argues with her mother and Benjamin with his father, simultaneously and in different rooms, is genuinely theatrical.Andrew Durand in ‘The Case of Benjamin Button.’ Joan MarcusYet for me the evening never took flight. At two and a half hours, it is a long way from Fitzgerald’s brisk 10,000 words, and time never passes more slowly than in a theater that isn’t working for you. A narrator keeps explaining that “a chain of events had been set in motion,” and the lyrics lean on phrases like “in the blink of an eye.” Mr. Durand makes no attempt at an old man’s stoop or shuffle, and his energy barely changes from his first scene to his last, so it is left to the narration to tell us that he is growing younger. Above all, I struggled to care about Benjamin. Mr. Clark’s program note describes him as “an individual with an open heart, generous of spirit and curious of mind.” The man on stage lies to his wife about his condition and walks out on her and their son.I was evidently in the minority. Around me people wept, as did the Sun’s own critic, and the standing ovation was instant. My companion, the actor Devin Ratray (best known as Buzz in “Home Alone”), was less effusive, asking: “What did I just sit through?”Similarly disappointed, I went back to David Fincher’s 2008 film, which I watched for a third time last week. Its Benjamin, played by Brad Pitt, also leaves his wife, Daisy (Cate Blanchett), and their baby daughter. Here, though, it lands as sacrifice. “How can I be a father,” he asks, “when I’m headed the other direction?”Years later, physically a teenager, he turns up at Daisy’s dance studio and meets the 12-year-old daughter who doesn’t know who he is. Long after, she reads the postcards he sent her on every birthday: “I wish I could have taken you to your first day of school… I wish I could have been your father.” As a parent, I found it almost unbearable: all the time with a child you can never get back, compressed into a few minutes of film. I cried four times. Only “Terms of Endearment” has caused me more griefMr. Fincher’s governing image arrives before Benjamin does. A blind clockmaker whose son has been killed in the war unveils a station clock that runs backwards, “so that perhaps the boys that we lost in the war might stand and come home again.” A clock running backwards, I worked out, is right four times a day: briefly in step with the world, then gone, like Benjamin and Daisy meeting in their forties. For all the film’s 13 Oscar nominations’ worth of craft, it is the simplest exchange that undoes you. Benjamin, now a small boy losing his memory, tells Daisy: “It’s like there’s this whole life I had, and I can’t remember what it was.”Fitzgerald, writing for the popular weekly Collier’s, was after something cooler. His Benjamin is born in Baltimore in 1860, sits up in his crib and demands, in “a cracked and ancient voice,” “Are you my father?” The story is social satire about a society family mortified by their freak, and it keeps Benjamin at arm’s length. Its tenderest moment belongs to Hildegarde, the young woman who marries him because she prefers more experienced men: “Twenty-five is too worldly-wise… sixty is — oh, sixty is too near seventy; but fifty is the mellow age. I love fifty.”Cate Blanchett and Brad Pitt in ‘The Curious Case of Benjamin Button.’ Wikimedia CommonsAll three versions share one curious absence: the mother. Fitzgerald doesn’t even give her a name; David Fincher’s dies in childbirth; Jethro Compton’s walks off a cliff. Two of them also share a sum. In Fitzgerald and on stage, Benjamin’s apparent age plus his real age always adds up to 70, the Psalmist’s “threescore years and ten.” Two verses later comes an ancient injunction which is the oldest expression of carpe diem there is: “So teach us to number our days.”The story keeps finding new hosts. Gabriel Brownstein moved Benjamin to an apartment on West 89th Street in his PEN/Hemingway-winning collection, and a 2024 Seoul musical, like Mr. Compton’s, refused computer trickery, using life-size puppets for his different ages.Each version ends with a lesson. The musical’s company sings “It’s what we do today!” Fitzgerald simply lets the lights go out. Mr. Fincher’s Benjamin, writing to the daughter he left behind, puts it best: “It’s never too late, or in my case too early, to be whoever you want to be.”As for me, forgetting the show gave me the rare chance to see it for the first time twice. Unlike Bill Murray’s weatherman, I won’t be going round again. Instead, I’ll take the rest of Benjamin’s letter as a roadmap for life: “Start whenever you want. You can change or stay the same. There are no rules to this thing… I hope you see things that startle you… I hope you meet people with a different point of view. I hope you live a life you’re proud of. If you find that you’re not, I hope you have the strength to start all over again.”

Benjamin Button Ages Badly in the Latest Curious Afterlife of Fitzgerald’s Short Story

Benjamin Button Ages Badly in the Latest Curious Afterlife of Fitzgerald’s Short Story

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