Languages of Truth by Salman Rushdie

Author:Salman Rushdie [Rushdie, Salman]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2021-05-25T00:00:00+00:00

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I’m writing this on Oscars night 2009, so let’s take a look at a couple of recent highly praised adaptations of books into films, both up for multiple Academy Awards.

To begin with, there is the curious case of F. Scott Fitzgerald and Brad Pitt. In 1921, F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote an odd little story called “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button,” about the birth, to “young Mr. and Mrs. Roger Button,” of a male baby who is born as a seventy-year-old man and who then lives backward, getting younger all the time, until at the end of his life, baby-sized and shrinking slowly in his white crib, he is sucked away into nothingness. In 2008, this little squib of a tale was turned by Brad Pitt and the director David Fincher into a $200 million motion picture, which, as I write, is in contention for no fewer than thirteen Academy Awards. (A note from the future: It ended up winning just three, for Best Art Direction, Best Makeup, and Best Visual Effects.)

However, the difference between the story and the film is unusually great. In Fitzgerald’s story, Benjamin is born as a full-sized septuagenarian male. It is never explained how Mrs. Button managed to give birth to such a large baby without being torn in half. Indeed, Mrs. Button never gets a look-in, and it is several pages before a casual reference to her shows that she somehow survived her magnificent parturition. The manner of her survival is not discussed. In the film, however, Benjamin is born old but baby-sized; he is a seventy-year-old robot baby that looks a little like Brad Pitt. And Mrs. Button, regrettably, does not survive, even though her baby has been so helpfully downsized. In the story, Mr. Button undertakes the work of raising and educating his child; in the film, Mr. Button, horrified by the swaddled little monster he has helped to bring into the world, abandons it on a doorstep to be raised by Taraji P. Henson. In the story, Benjamin’s life is lived largely in the private sphere, apart from an excursion to fight in the Spanish–American War, while in the movie he becomes involved in so many of the public events of his time that the picture might almost have been called Zelig in Reverse, or perhaps Forrest Gump Goes Backward. (The screenwriter of Forrest Gump, Eric Roth, who adapted Winston Groom’s novel, is also responsible for the screenplay of Benjamin Button.)

Perhaps the biggest difference between the two works is that, other than sharing the idea of a man who lives backward in time, their stories are entirely different; the film is not really an adaptation of the book but almost entirely Eric Roth’s creation. And while Roth and Fincher’s film is essentially a bravura special-effects display helped by two fine acting performances, by Pitt and Cate Blanchett, it doesn’t finally have anything in particular to say, while Fitzgerald’s story is at least a comedy of snobbery and embarrassment

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