"The Curious Life of Benjamin Button", de David FincherGROWING old is a subject American movies have largely avoided since the 1980s, when the commercial triumphs of Steven Spielberg and George Lucas made it clear that there was money to be made in never-never land — that world of the adolescent imagination where no one ever matures and death exists only as a punch line. It surely means something that Leo McCarey’s 1937 “Make Way for Tomorrow,” the most deeply moving Hollywood film about old age, has never been released on DVD in the United States and has not been seen on television in many years.
But suddenly and unaccountably, here is “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button,” a big-budget studio film, set to open Christmas Day, whose central theme is human mortality, a theme the film explores using the same special effects technology, now extended into the digital realm, that American movies have used for so long to keep us trapped in perpetual childhood.
Directed by David Fincher and written by Eric Roth, “Benjamin Button” tells the epic story of its title character, played by Brad Pitt. Benjamin, as he says in his voice-over narration, “was born under unusual circumstances” on Nov. 11, 1918, the last day of World War I. As the doctor attending him describes the strange little creature, “He has all the deterioration, the infirmities, not of a newborn, but of a man well in his 80s on the way to his grave.”
But Benjamin doesn’t die. Instead, abandoned by his wealthy father and taken in by Queenie (Taraji P. Henson), an African-American attendant at a New Orleans home for the elderly, he begins to age in reverse. By 7, he looks like a little old man in a wheelchair, peering out at the world through thick glasses. Thanks to the film’s deft use of computer-generated imagery — so deft and so sophisticated that, after a few minutes, it no longer seems remarkable — those eyes are recognizably those of Mr. Pitt, and they continue to be as Benjamin moves through all the stages of his life.
As a child in the body of a 70-year-old, Benjamin learns to play the piano and makes the acquaintance of the little girl, Daisy Fuller, who will be the love of his life; he seems to be in his 60s when, as a teenager, he goes to work for a tugboat captain (Jared Harris) and learns about drinking and sex; he’s a young man in his 50s when he travels to Murmansk, Russia, and has his first great affair, with the world-weary wife (Tilda Swinton) of the British trade delegate; and he is a handsome 40-year-old when he meets Daisy again, now played by Cate Blanchett as an ambitious dancer in her 20s, all fired up by George Balanchine and Agnes de Mille. As he grows younger, she grows older: for a golden moment, they meet in the middle. But time, obstinately, does not stand still.
“Benjamin Button” is based on a 9,000-word short story by F. Scott Fitzgerald, first published in 1922, that had been a long-unrealized Hollywood project. When the producer Ray Stark owned the property in the 1980s, he commissioned a screenplay by Robin Swicord (she adapted the 1994 “Little Women”) and took it to a number of directors, among them Mr. Spielberg and a young David Fincher, then working as a special-effects technician at Mr. Lucas’s Industrial Light and Magic.
“I don’t remember if Spielberg was involved, or about to be involved, or maybe he had already abandoned it at that point,” said Mr. Fincher, 46. “It may have been a fact-finding mission to see if it were possible. I read it, and I thought it was beautiful, but ultimately I thought it was a love story with a capital L, and I was more interested in other things.” Among those other things were, as it turned out, some of the most grimly intense films of the last decade: “Se7en” (1995), “Fight Club” (1999), “Panic Room” (2002) and “Zodiac” (2007).
“Benjamin Button” continued to make the rounds, but now as a screenplay essentially written from scratch by Eric Roth, an Oscar winner for the 1994 “Forrest Gump.” More directors came and went — including Mr. Fincher’s close friend Spike Jonze — before the project landed again on Mr. Fincher’s desk, this time presented by the producers Kathleen Kennedy and Frank Marshall.
“Kathy and Frank wanted to know out of the gate if I thought it was technically feasible,” Mr. Fincher said. “Was it possible to make somebody age, to make a character you could follow from the time he’s four feet tall and 85 years old until the time he’s 25 inches long and 6 months old and dying? And I said — not flippantly, but just because that’s what I’d been taught in my early years of working at I.L.M. — I was, ‘Oh, yeah, anything you can think of, you can do.’ And we went on to talk about everything else that was important about this movie other than how we were going to accomplish it technically. There was one full hour and a half where we talked about first love and first kisses and first hangovers, and what it was going to be like to follow this person and how we were going to dramatize his plight in relation to all our plights.”
With its historical sweep, wide-ranging locations and large cast of supporting players, it was clear that “Benjamin Button” would be expensive. More years passed, even as Paramount worked out a co-production deal with Warner Brothers and Mr. Pitt, who had worked with Mr. Fincher on “Se7en” and “Fight Club,” entered the picture. What finally brought the budget within range — around $135 million — were the tax breaks offered by moving the production to New Orleans.
The screenplay, like the story, had been set in Baltimore. “But as soon as I erased ‘BALTIMORE’ and wrote ‘NEW ORLEANS — EXTERIOR — DAY,’ ” Mr. Roth said, “it took on a whole other life. Because, even prior to the hurricane, New Orleans has such a life and a sound and a smell and everything else associated with it, that it brings a whole other character to the piece.”
Mr. Roth’s screenplay retained little of either the short story or Ms. Swicord’s work. “All that’s left is the central idea, maybe a name or two,” he said. “Robin thought of calling the girl ‘Daisy’ as a tribute to Fitzgerald and ‘The Great Gatsby.’ The Queenie character was a slight semblance of the nanny he had in the short story. Fitzgerald had the father, but he also had the mother stay alive, which we don’t.”
Queenie became pivotal. “In the short story, Queenie was just a nanny,” said Ms. Henson, who plays the role. “But when Eric Roth adapted the story into a screenplay, he made Queenie the surrogate mother. To me, that one moment where she tells Benjamin that people are going to judge you by the way you look sometimes, they’re not quite going to know how to receive you — that’s an African-American woman raising an African-American child; that’s a conversation I’ve had with my son several times.”
“That’s actually my favorite, most endearing moment in the movie,” she said.
Another major invention is the framing story, in which Daisy’s daughter, Caroline (Julia Ormond), reads aloud from Benjamin’s diary to her elderly mother, who is dying in a New Orleans hospital as Hurricane Katrina beats on the windows with growing intensity.
“I wanted to tell the story through somebody else’s eyes,” Mr. Roth, 63, said. “It might have had something to do with my mother lying in her hospital bed, although she was at home, wondering if there had been a story to tell that would have helped define her, something from her life that I might not have known about. I took a number of things from her passing, and the work continued through my father’s passing.
“My father, I remember, when he was a little confused, said: ‘Time has just slipped out of me. Someone will have to come and clean it up,’ which was pretty great,” Mr. Roth said. “But everyone has the same things happen, whether you like it or not. That’s why I’m hoping the movie gives people permission to kind of grieve together, in a good way. We’re living through the death of our parents and seeing our children get older and have their own lives and become adults. Yet I’m hoping that the movie will resonate with people who are younger, too, that it will speak somehow to a younger generation and let them see what aging is about, even though it may not be foremost on their minds.”
And in “Benjamin Button,” age is indeed visible, in ways it has never been before in a movie. “We put our faith in a higher power that we would be able to figure out the performance-capture methodology,” Mr. Fincher said, referring to the need to create a character who was clearly identifiable as Mr. Pitt while allowing him to age artistically. Benjamin “lives on a boat and is a seaman for most of his life,” Mr. Fincher said. “We had these photographs of Andrew Wyeth. We loved the wrinkles in his face and the great compassion and wisdom that his face betrayed. We started with that and did sculptures based on life casts of Brad. We would hollow away material, take mass away from his cheeks, get more skulling around the eyes, do very fine wrinkling, do all this and scan it into a computer.”
When it came time for Mr. Pitt to record his dialogue, a scanner was used to capture his facial movements. The results of the scan were used to manipulate the 3-D database of his digitally aged face, generating an almost literal “talking head.” “We would take that and put it back in the scene on the shoulders of actors who were cast to play Benjamin at the different ages,” Mr. Fincher said. “All of this would go into a pipeline, and 15 months after that we would be able to look at little Benjamin and know what he would look like when he was 5 years old.”
Mr. Roth, referring to Mr. Fincher’s track record of gritty, often violent films, noted: “People say, ‘Well, gee, how does David Fincher do this movie?’ It’s very different for him. But if someone is artistic, they can have all sorts of various interests, which is true of David Fincher.”
Mr. Fincher, of course, has his own perspective, “When I read the Robin Swicord draft, I thought, this is a love story,” he said. “But when I read the Eric Roth draft, I thought, this is a love story, but it’s really about death, about the total frailty of humanity. He’s a character whose entire childhood is defined by the people that die around him and by how comfortable he gets with that. Imagine that you’re raised with a bunch of 85-year-olds. They’re not sweating the same things teenagers are. And that’s where he learns everything.
“I don’t know if it’s a departure. I think it is. But don’t you hope that they all are, in some way? After my dad died and my daughter was born, I had other things, other movies that I wanted to make. It’s not a special-effects movie, that’s for sure. It ain’t spaceships. It’s not explosions. It’s about people, hopefully.”
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