Benjamin Button: Why the story is better than the movie

Kind of amazing how much they had to change "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button" to make a movie from the slight but haunting Fitzgerald story. The movie focused on lifelong, mutable love affair between Button (Brad Pitt) and, who?, Jennifer Connelly I think. The movie is about the pathos of his falling in love with her when he is young but in an old man's body, how the arcs of their lives come together, like ships passing or heavenly bodies in eclipse, and pass each other - a few years when their physical and actual ages make them a good and happy match, and then Button gets increasingly young with years till at last his wife is old and basically nurturing him as if he were a baby, which in a sense he is. The story has absolutely none of this pathos and romance. It's much more male-centered, even chauvinistic, the romantic aspects told entirely from Button's self-centered POV. He falls for the Baltimore heiress when he is very young but appearing to be mid-50s, and she says she loves an older man - but as he ages he is embarrassed to be seen with an older woman, and he jilts or ignores her. The story also has nothing of the strange sense of embarking on a journey of self-discovery late in life (Pitt take off on a motorcycle), other than a more juvenile desire to attend Harvard and play football for vengeance against old nemesis Yale - story seems very dated there. Still, the story is so much more spare than the cumbersome, overlong film and so much more matter-of-fact in its narration that the effect is more profound. Button's gradual loss of memory, consciousness, and context as he nears the end/beginning of his life is very mysterious and brings forth the point that the movie never realized: the end of life and the beginning of life are in some mysterious way identical. One of the best stories in "American Fantastic Tales."