He closed his eyes, and then, opening them, looked again. You get the flavor of the thing in this early scene where Benjamin’s father is introduced to his newborn son in the hospital: In short, while Ben Button the movie is a love story, Ben Button the short story isn’t. As Benjamin gets younger and friskier and she ages, the marriage collapses and she goes off to live in Italy, disappearing from the narrative. More to the point, she and Benjamin aren’t soul mates. Daisy, Benjamin’s love interest, is named Hildegarde and isn’t a dancer. Benjamin is born in 1860, not 1918, and fights in the Spanish-American War, not World War II. The setting is bland Baltimore, not New Orleans. Most of the memorable film characters appear nowhere in the story: There’s no Queenie, the black woman who takes in the abandoned baby Benjamin, no Captain Mike, the drunken tugboat operator. The cover of the movie tie-in edition describes the short story as “the inspiration for” the movie, which indicates the very loose connection between the two. Besides Button the young Fitzgerald produced several other fantasy stories, The Diamond as Big as the Ritz being the best-known. Collier’s published it - this was back in the days when a writer could make a living writing short stories for general circulation magazines - and Fitzgerald included it in Tales of the Jazz Age, his second story collection. I’d liken the two hours spent turning its 52 pages to sitting around a campfire and listening to someone relating a tale without a moral but with a modest power to discomfort.īutton is a young man’s piece of work. That doesn’t mean the short story doesn’t have its charms. As a book guy it pains me to admit it, but the movie is better. Having seen the movie and read the story, which Scribner has conveniently reprinted in a little movie tie-in paperback, I’d say there’s no comparison.
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