Brad Pitt plays a man who ages in reverse in David Fincher's 2008 fantasy drama The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, which tells the story of Benjamin's life from the strange circumstances of his birth in 1918, and ends a little time after his death in 2003. Based on the short story of the same name by F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button follows its unusual protagonist on journeys around the world, and the ending montage summarizes what he has learned from a life lived backwards.
Written by Eric Roth and Robin Swicord, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button is only loosely based on Fitzgerald's story, borrowing the central conceit of someone being born an old man and becoming younger over the course of their life, but adding a lot to the story as well. In particular, the movie expands upon Benjamin Button having a great love of his life, Daisy (Cate Blanchett), whom he first meets as a young girl. Over the course of the film, Daisy grows older and Benjamin grows younger until they are finally able to be together when they both appear the same age. However, after Daisy gives birth to a baby daughter Benjamin realizes his condition means he won't be able to be a father to her, and he decides to leave.
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button is told through the framing device of Daisy asking her daughter, Caroline (Julia Ormond) to read Benjamin's diary to her as Daisy lies dying in a hospital bed, with Hurricane Katrina raging outside. By reading the story, Caroline comes to learn the truth about who her father was. The movie ends with Benjamin finally dying as a baby in the flashbacks, and Daisy dying in the present day. So what does the ending reveal about Benjamin, and what does it all mean?
Before the story of Benjamin's life begins, the dying Daisy first tells her daughter a story about a clockmaker called Monsieur Gateau (Elias Koteas), who was commissioned to build a clock for a new train station. M. Gateau was left distraught when his son was killed in the First World War. When the clock was finally unveiled in 1918, the gathered crowd were stunned to see that it was running backwards. Mr. Gateau explained that he designed it that way in the hope that time itself might start turning backwards, and that all the boys who were lost in the war might come home.
There's an obvious link between the story of M. Gateau and the story of Benjamin Button, who is born on the night that the war ends: November 11, 1918. Shortly before Benjamin reaches the end of his life, the backwards-running clock in the train station is replaced with a digital clock that runs normally, meaning that both the clock and Benjamin's lifespans are roughly the same. However, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button exists in the genre of magical realism rather than full fantasy or science fiction, and therefore Benjamin Button's condition and the clock are never explicitly said to be linked to one another. Rather, the clock and Mr. Gateau's wish are instead a metaphor for what Benjamin's life represents: a wish for the return of youth.
Towards the end of The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Daisy is reunited with Benjamin after a period of several years. Now bearing the appearance of a 12 year-old, he was living on the streets when Child Services picked him up and brought him back to the old people's home, since the address was in his diary. Moody and averse to being touched, Benjamin is apparently developing dementia, and struggles to recognize Daisy when he sees her again. Viewers may be confused as to why Benjamin is development a disease that usually only afflicts old people when he is growing younger every day, but the answer lies in the exact nature of his aging.
It's true that most of the afflictions that come with old age - from arthritis to cataracts - were present in Benjamin when he was born. However, only his body ages backwards, whereas his mind ages forwards. That's why when he was growing up he had a childlike curiosity and naivete, an was mentally the same age as Daisy. Benjamin's particular form of dementia may also be tied to the fact that, as his body turns from an adult into a child, he is mentally deteriorating in the reverse of a normal child's mental growth. In Fitzgerald's story something similar happens; though Benjamin is born fully-grown and talking, in his final years it's said that his memories "had faded like unsubstantial dreams from his mind as though they had never been."
Following Benjamin Button's life from its start to its logical endpoint, some viewers may have been expecting the movie to conclude with some kind of horrifying reverse-birth. Instead, Benjamin simply grows younger and younger until he is physically a newborn baby. One day, when Daisy is holding him in her arms, he looks up at her one last time and then dies. Since he was born with the appearance and ailments of an 84 year-old man, his lifespan is defined by the condition of his birth. Fitzgerald's story ends in a similar manner:
"He did not remember. He did not remember clearly whether the milk was warm or cool at his last feeding or how the days passed -there was only his crib and Nana's familiar presence. And then he remembered nothing. When he was hungry he cried - that was all. Through the noons and nights he breathed and over him there were soft mumblings and murmurings that he scarcely heard, and faintly differentiated smells, and light and darkness.
"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."
Since Benjamin develops many of the symptoms of Alzheimer's disease, his death might be attributed to dementia, which in its end stages causes a person to lose the ability to coordinate basic functions like swallowing or breathing. A less grim and more poetic interpretation of Benjamin's death is that he had simply come to the end of his natural life.
The somewhat surprising message at the heart of The Curious Case of Benjamin Button is that Benjamin's strange condition doesn't really matter. As Roth explained to Cinema 24/7, "It doesn’t make any difference whether you live your life backwards or forwards - it’s how you live your life." From the very start of his diary, Benjamin conveys that the circumstances of his birth and death - as bizarre as they might be - are the least significant parts of his life. Ultimately, after all, he goes out of the world the same way he came in: "alone and with nothing."
Though Benjamin's backwards aging certainly helps him to make the most of his later life, the final montage of the important people he has encountered throughout his life sends a message that opportunities don't end when youth does. Elizabeth Abbott (Tilda Swinton), who abandoned her dream of swimming the English Channel after failing to do so as a young woman, finally succeeds when she's in her sixties. Daisy is distraught at the loss of her dancing career after her accident, but in her later life starts a dance studio and teaches other girls how to dance. Benjamin's father, Thomas (Jason Flemyng), lives with the great regret of having abandoned his son, but manages to reconnect with him and is able to tell Benjamin the truth before he dies.
Fincher said in an interview with Film Comment that he made The Curious Case of Benjamin Button "with the idea in mind that it showed the fallacy in the idea that youth is wasted on the young." To his surprise, some of the people who saw the film came out of it with the opposite idea: that it proves youth is wasted on the young. This may simply be the result of the movie telling a universal story with an Everyman character at the heart of it. Audiences bring their own ideas and experiences into the film, which in turn influences what they take away from it at the end.
