Benjamin Button

Image by FoXMuLD3R via Flickr

Last night I watched Benjamin Button for the first time. A few months ago I read the short story by F. Scott Fitzgerald.

Talk about taking license with a story! The general premise was the same, but there the similarity ends. Events, characters, settings – all different. The movie changed the books events to coincide with Hurricane Katrina.

I feel robbed. I would have liked to see Benjamin Button ride with Roosevelt and the Rough Riders, as well as show up as a 15 yr old in his uniform for the reunion. The movie really rode rough-shod over the latter half of Benjamin’s life when it truly became hard for him for him to deal with his very unique way of aging. The movie romanticized it to the point of being nearly unrecognizable.

In the story, he goes to college, marries, has a child, and raises his son, all while aging backwards. This causes a similar set of problems as when he was first born.

If you are so inclined, please read the story in Fitzgerald’s Tales of the Jazz Age. Or you can read an excerpt here (provided by Google Books):

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