The recently released film The Curious Case of Benjamin Button is based on the short story of the same name written by F. Scott Fitzgerald . I intend to watch the movie after reading it and then write something about the comparison. Meanwhile, I leave here a link to the text:
A review of the film can be read in Vanity Fea.
After having read Scott Fitzgerald’s tale and watched David Fincher’s film, I’d like to make some remarks about 'The Curious Case of Benjamin Button'. Firstly, I’d say that the story told in the movie owes very little to the narration, not much more than its title and, of course, the central idea of a human being’s life going backwards from old age to just born, which conditions in both cases the events to be presented.
ReplyDeleteBoth narratives contain irony and humour, often derived from the absurd and surrealistic nature of the situations, but the film story turns out much richer in terms of characters, detail through anecdote and, above all, transcendence by means of a hindered love story. Furthermore, I find the cinematographic version much more consistent regarding the mismatch of physical and mental age. Whereas Fitzgerald’s Benjamin develops from old man to baby in body and behaviour, the character played by Brad Pitt shows a logical affective and learning development opposing his unnatural bodily evolution.
Some slight parallelisms could also be found in these two bildungsroman stories as, for instance, the characters’ initiation through work in a ship in the filmic version (at the right moment following Benjamin’s psychic development) and the participation of the ‘in print’ protagonist in the Spanish-American war in Cuba more in accordance with time flow.
Summarizing, I’d say that the strong point in the short written story relies on the portrait of a conventional middle class society reacting both with indifference and rejection when facing a ‘curious case’ in their structured system whereas I found the movie’s best in character portraits.
Thanks for the link to the Fitzgerald text! By the way, I didn't know this Calaméo thing, it's nice. And the film is so pleasant to watch, it's like a dream.
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