A Great Curious Movie

Went and saw The Curious Case of Benjamin Button tonight, and I am only just thinking now how great the title is. "Curious" is quite the understatement for the case of Benjamin Button, a man born old who ages backward. There's a kind of old timey demureness in calling something that is absolutely bizarre "curious." There is a sort of reserve in the word that is old fashioned, a withholding of judgment that I imagine was once very effective when society required more by way of polite or deferential filler in conversation. "That's curious" is less committal than "that's ridiculous" or "that's crazy" and it seems like in older literature one comes across it more. "Curiouser and curiouser" says Alice in wonderland. And that's the other thing that is nice about a word like "curious" in connection with events: it holds out the possibility that the fantastical actually could happen. "That's curious" is a suspended state of puzzlement in absence of an explanation. I imagine parents saying this to children who come in from a day outside with impossible accounts of supposedly natural phenomena. "That's curious, dear," they say, instead of "that's impossible," and in doing so allow for the whimsy of the world.

"Curious" is a great word for the title of Benjamin Button's case, both as an observed detail of an older means of expression and as an introduction to the fantastic, because Benjamin Button the movie plays its whimsy straight as if it all could have happened, rather than giggling over its own cuteness or basking in an implied imperative to make room for a little fairy dust in life. No one's life is made fuller by "believing" in Benjamin Button. Quite the opposite, he is taken for granted, and while the story is heart warming it is not life affirming. This curious case is a long (really long, over two hours) meditation on aging and death.

I heard somewhere, though I'm not sure if this is true, that the original story by F. Scott Fitzgerald was set in Baltimore, and director David Fincher moved the setting to New Orleans for the movie. If true that was an inspired choice, because a tale like this to me fits more easily into the fabric of things in the South than it would on the East coast. The South too likes its whimsy straight. It's geography, its heat, its layers of passersby feel like the environment that might harbor pockets of the unexplored or unexplained pressure cooked into curious incident. And the South is obsessed with aging and death. It is shot through with nostalgia, a fondness for the way something was, that is the reaction to the aging of the world and the passing of the familiar. I'm not referring here to the Civil War or a lost southern culture, although only today I saw a regiment of men in confederate gray fire muskets over a memorial to David O. Dodd, boy martyr of the Confederacy, next to the Arts Center. Rather I'm referring to communal memory, the way old houses and old spaces develop oral histories that are not allowed to die, the treasuring up of how people are connected, or if they are not now then how they once were. Who is related to whom and what were the spaces where it all played out. Southern cities are riddled with that sort of relational and spatial nostalgia. By choosing New Orleans for his movie, Fincher tapped into that nostalgia, that regret of age. This is a regret far more powerful to me than the regret of an aging body. Maybe this is because I am from the South or maybe because I am still young. Still my favorite thing about The Curious Case of Benjamin Button was that along with the aging bodies there was an aging city. Houses were old and in various states of disrepair. Houses were sold and the family histories on the walls went with them. New Orleans itself was on a clock, ticking down to Hurricane Katrina, as if it weren't simply the characters who were going to die but their stage too. I love the closing shot of the waters of the flood sweeping into the basement where the old backward-ticking clock was stored, implying that very shortly the waters would stop the clock that occasioned the tale of Benjamin Button. Of course they would sweep the city under too. This puts a new cast on the movie's repeated line about death requiring us to let go, because the whole movie is structured around not just the decay of individuals but of a city too. Was New Orleans itself a backward ticking clock, a reprieve from a natural decay that was no reprieve at all, but like Benjamin Button, just a different route to the same end? Maybe these devices will feel heavy handed to some, but to me they are what makes the movie. I'm calling it great.