I saw The Curious Case Of Benjamin Button the other night. And when I say night I mean night. I went to an 11pm show at the Galleria in Poughkeepsie. Mind you this is a 3 hour movie. But I was due for a surprise overnight visit at work by the end of the month and wanted to get one in later than usual. I have to send an e mail with a time signature when I do these things and I knew it would look impressive having one stamped after 2 a.m. With the movie length and the drive back I knew I was good. Ended up being there at 2:40.
Of course I could have just gotten up from my recliner at home and been there in under 10 minutes. But it’s always more preferable to do these things when already out. Especially if I’m doing it later than 1 which is when I usually do them.
Anyway, there I am wondering what kind of audience you get at 11pm for a movie in Poughkeepsie. Turned out to be a pretty large one. And there were even later times for other movies. I was impressed. Until I noticed that the majority of the crowd were at least 20 years younger than me. Once you observe the fact that I was alone you can see why I might have felt like a creepy old pervert. In fact I felt so bad I almost turned around and went right back home. That’s about a 45 minute drive each way to go in the lobby and leave. The idea of wasting that gas for nothing but a late ride bothered me so I wander over to the automated ticket booth and start pushing buttons still not committed but wanting to see how it worked and how much a ticket was. About a quarter short of $10. So by not spending that I could justify heading home right there. Cut my losses. By not going in I’d be saving money even with the gas expenditure.
Perhaps purposefully, perhaps not, I hit the curious buy ticket to Benjamin Button button along the side. Still not sure, I could have walked away since I hadn’t slid my card in. Then an older couple turn the corner just after I saw a middle age couple with a baby, the woman wearing some kind of backwards culture headdress denoting her inferiority to her man. They all seemed to be heading into the same show so i decided I really wanted to see the movie and that I wasn’t the only freak there so i pulled out my card and got my ticket.
I got a coffee that tasted more like a milkshake, found a seat in one of their many spacious and comfortable theaters and settled in. Some middle age guy with 3 older people eventually sit right next to me and I realize this makes me look like I’m with them to everyone but them. So the creepy loner stigma is removed until the end of the movie. Except to the people next to me who know the truth. But I’m willing to make that trade off. I’m buying their judgment in return for becoming invisible to the rest of the room. Plus they were my age and up and could presumably understand the vicissitudes like takes and learned not to jump to hasty judgments.
I looked clean and did my best to send telepathic signals to them that I was doing this to facilitate my managerial job as well as possible. So I sniffed broadly and tried to look important as I settled in for the trailers keeping an eye on the peripheral lights which were dimmed but which i couldn’t wait to go out completely so i could disappear further.
So most people know the premise of the movie. Brad Pitt ages backwards. The movie is a slow meditation on many things and youth and aging seemed to be one of them. Or two of them. Anyway, feeling the way I was in the situation I was in, I could certainly feel the sting of not only age but a feeling of having lived life wrongly. ::::::::::::Slight Spoiler in next sentence:::::::::::Because whatever TCCOBB is about, and I wasn’t always sure just what the movie was on about, I think most are left with an impression of the wrongness of living and dying the way he lives and dies.
I think David Fincher was also trying to say something about being what you want to be and reinventing yourself. And how any life relies heavily on waiting for those few precious periods where things come together, the timing is right, and it all falls into place. That doesn’t happen much. And I got to thinking how it never really has for me. That and that feeling of having lived life wrongly, gotten the timing all wrong, and passively watched it happen with a growing sense of inevitability and irreconcilable despair. Being there amongst all these kids while I sat alone waiting to check in on my middle management job brought those timing issues and wrongness home a bit louder than usual.
Because they’re always there. It’s certainly not the first time I’ve gone to the movies alone the past couple of years. It always stings but somehow less so at the Hudson Valley Mall or Upstate Theater in Rhinebeck during late afternoon or earlier evening shows. I remember seeing Good NIght, And Good Luck at HVM at a 10pm showing. i was the only one in the theater and I felt pretty bad for keeping people there and forcing them to show a movie to one person. That felt wrong. It’s felt wrong and accompanied by a growing sense of heading inexorably into an unavoidably horrible future since then. But Friday night at the Galleria with the curious Ben Button mocking my growing obsolescence on a huge screen it felt like that future was more manifest than ever and I didn’t even get my chance to meet in the middle for whatever short time things could be perfect like Button does with Daisy.
And that kind of sucks because it doesn’t get any likelier as you get older. And I got that aspect of the movie because it’s something I had came into it with. It’s been a long time since I wanted to live a happy life full of decades of bliss, companionship, and happiness. Somewhere in the past decade or two I decided my case was too curiously wrong for that. But I did hang on the hope that a few years of semi-bliss could be squeezed out of the old boy. And I was more than willing to cooperate fully in accepting and creating one good decade of life where it came together. The right girl, in the right place, with the right job, and with enough health, youth, looks, and mental acuity left to embrace it to its fullest.
And I realized that the past decade may have been that time and was as good as it got. Or will get. And that felt so terribly wrong. And fuck Benjamin Button for doing so little with his old man’s wisdom in a young man’s body. Or fuck the idea that being out of time and living backwards make it impossible to do more. Fuck whatever it was it was all supposed to mean. I didn’t hate the movie. I didn’t love the movie. Sure like many critics I thought they should have done more with the big conceit of a man aging backwards. But I also thought those critics missed some things they did do and that the idea did matter to the film. I like David Fincher (especially Fight Club) and think he made a good movie. But it wasn’t great and fuck his main character for being such an abomination of nature and for reminding me how much of a gift a chance at a brief and fleeting joy can be and how curious my own life spent walking out of time with much of the world has been.
So i give The Curious Case Of Benjamin Button 3 Fuck You’s.
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