The child is born as an old man, and grows smaller and shorter until he is finally a bottle-fed baby. As I watched the film, I became consumed by a conviction that this was simply wrong. We begin a movie or novel and assume it will tell a story in chronological time.
It’s true that Benjamin’s condition imposes a certain detachment: he is at once innocent and ancient, almost never who he appears to be.
It has been proposed that one reason people marry is because they desire a witness to their lives. How could we perform that act of love if we were aging in opposite directions? Later in the film, when he is younger and she is older, they make love. This is presumably meant to be the emotional high point. I shuddered. No! No! What are they thinking during sex? What fantasies apply? Does he remember her as a girl? Does she picture the old man she loved?
In 2005, just as Hurricane Katrina is approaching the city. The imminence of the storm is a superfluous and unduly portentous device, since Katrina brings to mind precisely the hard, real-life miseries the movie has done everything in its power to avoid.
But it's so hard to care about this story. There is no lesson to be learned.
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