"Red social/The Social Network", de David Fincher (crítica - versión completa)

Versión completa, bastante más larga, sin editar y con algunas diferencias (la versión publicada fue modificada por razones de espacio, además de simplificada y alterada por mí en varias partes). Aquí, la versión del diario. La que sigue, será, calculo, un 50% más larga.

Por Diego Lerer

Las intenciones de David Fincher y de su guionista Aaron Sorkin eran claras: construir, con la historia del fundador de Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, y las disputas legales que surgieron de esos improbables inicios, una suerte de Ciudadano contemporáneo. Los elementos están ahí: el trauma iniciático, la soledad del multimillonario, el intento por ingresar a un mundo “ajeno”, la puesta en escena armada a partir de testimonios (la historia, tanto en el clásico de Orson Welles como aquí, está relatada por testigos de los hechos, de manera indirecta) y la idea de los costos que implica la creación de un imperio.

Pero el filme de Fincher es más modesto en su ambición temporal –es apenas el inicio de la carrera de Zuckerberg, hoy de apenas 26 años- y también estética, manteniéndose desde lo visual siempre funcional al relato y sin intentar replantearse la idea de puesta en escena en cada plano.

Las comparaciones son odiosas y más si esta dupla tiene el “tupé” de mirar de frente a la habitualmente considerada como la mejor película de la historia. Y si en esa partida pierde con Welles, hay otra en la que el filme revela sus mejores armas: “Red social” es una película acerca de su época, un relato fiel –en ritmo, en estilo, en comprensión del comportamiento de sus criaturas- a la historia que cuenta.

Resumiendo una trama algo compleja, el filme se centra en Mark (Jesse Eisenberg, en una actuación perfecta por su contención y su rigurosidad) y los inicios de Facebook, a partir de una ruptura sentimental que lo llevaron a inventar un website en el que se comparaba la belleza, o no, de las estudiantes de Harvard. El éxito de ese website lo llevó a ser convocado por dos hermanos (los Winklevoss), pertenecientes a la elite socioeconómica de esa universidad, a la que Mark (un chico judío, nerd y poco sociable, un outsider en esos mundos de privilegio) no podía ingresar, para armar otra página que conectara a los estudiantes privilegiados de allí.

Pero Zuckerberg, un genio de la programación, empieza a pensar en grande y toma esa idea para crear The Facebook (así se llamaba al principio), una red social que crece y crece a niveles insospechados y pronto sale de Harvard y del mundo de las universidades. Su gran colaborador en la tarea es Eduardo Saverin (Andrew Garfield, el nuevo Hombre Araña), acaso el alma del filme, el que le otorga un grado de humanidad que el mecanizado y aparentemente insensible Zuckerberg no tiene. Veremos, en paralelo, que entre ellos todo terminó mal y que él, además de los blondos mellizos de estirpe, le están haciendo millonarios juicios.

“Red social” tiene una pátina de thriller empresario que recubre lo que finalmente es: una suerte de cruda, pero nunca cruel, mirada a una generación obsesionada por los contactos más que por las relaciones, por la “pertenencia” más que por los afectos, en donde el dinero, la notoriedad y la posibilidad de ser “aceptados” es central.

Y si bien el guión de Sorkin –veloz, sagaz, lleno de frases recordables- pinta a un grupo humano con el que resulta difícil sentir empatía (Justin Timberlake como el fundador de Napster, Sean Parker, le otorga gracia y brillo a un papel bastante maquiavélico), el real logro de Fincher (Zodíaco, El club de la pelea, Pecados capitales) es reflejar cierta empatía por esos personajes tan brillantes como obsesivos, tan talentosos como solitarios, incapaces de comunicarse y, tal vez por eso, necesitados de fundar un sitio de Internet que les evite ese problema en la vida real.

Fincher ha demostrado en su carrera su comprensión por ese tipo de personajes apasionados y autodestructivos, y es gracias a él que Zuckerberg nunca es un monstruo, sino un chico confundido, sobrepasado y llevado por falta de carácter, inseguridad y acaso por una imposibilidad por entender ciertas complejidades del género humano (no por nada su ductilidad con las máquinas es inversamente proporcional a su torpeza e insensibilidad cuando el que está enfrente suyo no es una máquina) a ganar el paraíso de los billones y, a la vez, a perder a la poca gente que, en el mundo no virtual, lo tomaba en cuenta.

“Red social” –la amplitud de connotaciones del título deja en claro las posibles metáforas de la película- no es un filme sobre Facebook en el sentido de la experiencia del usuario. Si bien se habla de sus funciones, poco y nada de su estructura se ve en el filme. La red, si se quiere, es otra: la que liga y a la vez separa lo virtual de lo real. Cuando la experiencia humana se torna medible y cuantificable (en cantidad de amigos o de billones, es lo de menos), este notable e intenso filme parece querer decirnos que algo de lo que llamamos humano se nos escapa. O que, tal vez, lo que esté naciendo sea una nueva era, una en la que ciertas nociones del siglo XX –el espacio público, el humanismo en el sentido más tradicional del término- esté terminando para dar paso a un nuevo tipo de persona. Persona que hoy nos resulta, por un lado, distante y temible. Pero que, a la vez, sentimos reconocible, cercana, parte de la gran “red social”.

"The Social Network", de David Fincher (crítica - Film Comment)

Link

By Scott Foundas

It was E.M. Forster, of course, who scripted that immortal, oft-abbreviated imperative: “Only connect, and the beast and the monk, robbed of the isolation that is life to either, will die.” But had Forster lived to see the advent of something like the Internet, would he have been so quick to admonish the life bestial or monastic? As I write this, I am not nor have I ever been a member of those ubiquitous online communities known as Facebook and Twitter, which have separately and together transformed millions of us into the stars of our own reality shows, complete with “friends” and “followers” tuned into our every banal thought or change of mood, and where human popularity is tabulated in numbers as readily as the weekly box-office returns. In my Luddite way, I harbor a healthy suspicion for any technology whose adopters seem more its slaves than its masters. Above all, I cling foolhardily to the belief that the more time-honored methods of human interaction maintain a slight edge over the electronic ones. Indeed, though we may now live in public, we seem to see rather less of one another.

On the other hand, half a billion people can’t be wrong—or, rather, they can, but good luck convincing them of it. A scant seven years into its existence, Facebook is already an inevitability, a cultural axiom. Among other things, it is said to have played a role in rallying America’s youth for the 2008 election (even if some of those youths were actually the fictitious avatars of middle-aged men and women seeking a little masked-ball escapism, or something more sinister). Nor is its reach limited to these shores: recently, Facebook was banned in Pakistan for supposed trespasses against Islam, which is no small achievement for a website that traces its origins back to an Ivy League social misfit’s drunken act of revenge against a girl who spurned him. Like so many historic achievements in arts, letters, and commerce, Facebook was born of a romantic rejection.

This is very rich material for a movie on such timeless subjects as power and privilege, and such intrinsically 21st-century ones as the migration of society itself from the real to the virtual sphere—and David Fincher’s The Social Network is big and brash and brilliant enough to encompass them all. It is nominally the story of the founding of Facebook, yes, and how something that began among friends quickly descended into acrimony and litigation once billions of dollars were at stake. But just as All the President’s Men—a seminal film for Fincher and a huge influence on his Zodiac—was less interested by the Watergate case than by its zeitgeist-altering ripples, so too is The Social Network devoted to larger patterns of meaning. It is a movie that sees how any social microcosm, if viewed from the proper angle, is no different from another—thus the seemingly hermetic codes of Harvard University become the foundation for a global online community that is itself but a reflection of the all-encompassing high-school cafeteria from which we can never escape. And it owes something to The Great Gatsby, too, in its portrait of a self-made outsider marking his territory in the WASP jungle.

Adapted by The West Wing creator Aaron Sorkin from Ben Mezrich’s nonfiction best-seller The Accidental Billionaires, The Social Network was one of those “buzz” scripts that seemed to be on everyone’s lips in Hollywood for the past couple of years, and it’s easy to understand why. The writing is razor-sharp and rarely makes a wrong step, compressing a time-shifting, multi-character narrative into two lean hours, and, perhaps most impressively, digests its big ideas into the kind of rapid-fire yet plausible dialogue that sounds like what hyper computer geeks might actually say (or at least wish they did): Quentin Tarantino crossed with Bill Gates.

Consider the movie’s opening—a soon-to-be-classic breakup scene in which soon-to-be Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg (Jesse Eisenberg) verbally machine-guns his soon-to-be ex-girlfriend Erica (Rooney Mara) with a rant about the difficulty of distinguishing oneself “in a crowd of people who all got 1600 on their SATs.” From there it’s on to his conflicted feelings about that peculiar Harvard institution known as “final clubs,” elite secret societies that, sops to diversity notwithstanding, remain decidedly inhospitable to monomaniacal, borderline Asperger’s cases like Zuckerberg. As he holds forth, his face contorted into a tightly focused stare, looking through Erica rather than at her, she tries to keep up. “Dating you is like dating a Stairmaster,” she laments before delivering the delicious coup de grace: “Listen. You’re going to be successful and rich, but you’re going to go through life thinking that girls don’t like you because you’re a geek. And I want you to know, from the bottom of my heart, that that won’t be true. It’ll be because you’re an asshole.”

It was that rejection, or one like it—the details aren’t specified in Mezrich’s book—that led to an infamous late-night (and inebriated) programming session during which Zuckerberg created a crude comparison website allowing Harvard students to rank the relative desirability of the university’s female population based on photos hacked from the student directories (or “facebooks”) of various dorms. Soon, Zuckerberg’s prank went viral across the campus, making him a pariah to his female classmates, earning him academic probation, and bringing him to the attention of a trio of undergraduate entrepreneurs: the Indian-American Divya Narendra (Max Minghella) and the towering, blond and bronzed identical twins Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss (both played by the disarming Armie Hammer, himself a scion of corporate blue bloods). In between their rigorous course loads and heavy training regimen for the Harvard crew team, the Winklevoss brothers had conceived of a dating website open only to those who possess a Harvard e-mail address (the rationale being, quite simply, “Girls want to go with guys who go to Harvard”) and needed someone to design it for them. And Zuckerberg, as he would surely regret doing later, accepted the assignment.

The rest of The Social Network runs along two parallel narrative tracks—one tracing Zuckerberg’s development of Facebook and the other detailing the lawsuits later filed against him by the Winklevosses and by former Facebook CFO Eduardo Saverin (the superb Andrew Garfield), the latter being the closest thing in the movie to a wholly sympathetic character. From a legal perspective, it’s a thorny case of he-said/he-said, though the movie is less concerned with assigning blame than with considering Zuckerberg’s precise degree of assholedom, or lack thereof. And this is where things really get interesting. It would be easy enough, of course, to vilify Zuckerberg as a greedy twerp who betrayed his friends (what few he had) and partners on his way to the top—we are, after all, talking about a 24-year-old billionaire who once carried business cards reading “I’m CEO . . . bitch.” It would be even easier, perhaps, to exalt him as a nonconformist deity, a Holden Caulfield of the information superhighway. But to the sure nervousness of the studio, and the potential discomfort of some viewers, Fincher and Sorkin chart a more treacherous course straight down the middle of Zuckerberg’s many contradictions, one in which there are no obvious winners or losers, good guys or bad—only a series of highly pressurized social (and genetic) forces.

“I’m six-foot-five, 220, and there’s two of me,” notes one of the Winklevoss brothers upon learning of Zuckerberg’s Facebook subterfuge, contemplating physical retaliation—and indeed, one of the movie’s great visual gags is the recurring image of these two Aryan gods seated across the deposition room from the pale, slight Zuckerberg in his signature hoodie and “fuck-you flip-flops.” Yet at the same time, it’s hard not to see plaintiff and defendants as opposite sides of the same ambitious coin: gifted young men driven to separate themselves from the herd, two by moving to the front of the pack and one by going upstream against the current. Time and again the point is made that Zuckerberg doesn’t lust after riches, having turned down lucrative offers from Microsoft and AOL while he was still in high school (to buy another software program he designed), but status is something else entirely. “They’re suing me because for the first time in their lives, things didn’t work out the way they were supposed to for them,” Zuckerberg notes at one point—oblivious to the fact that he’s making himself sound equally petty. This leads to another of the movie’s most revealing scenes, in which a young legal associate (Rashida Jones) schooled in the fine art of jury selection advises Mark to settle out of court rather than face a jury destined to judge him on such factors as “clothes, hair, speaking style” and, above all, “likeability.” “Myths need a devil,” she reminds, and Zuckerberg fits the bill. Whereas the “Winklevi”—well, they could probably get away with murder.

Lest I seem to suggest otherwise, I hasten to add that The Social Network is splendid entertainment from a master storyteller, packed with energetic incident and surprising performances (not least from Justin Timberlake as Napster founder Sean Parker, who’s like Zuckerberg’s flamboyant, West Coast id). It is a movie of people typing in front of computer screens and talking in rooms that is as suspenseful as any more obvious thriller. But this is also social commentary so perceptive that it may be regarded by future generations the way we now look to Gatsby for its acute distillation of Jazz Age decadence. There is, in all of Fincher’s work, an outsider’s restlessness that chafes at the intractable rules of “polite” society and naturally aligns itself with characters like the journalist refusing to abandon the case in Zodiac and Edward Norton’s modern-day Dr. Jekyll in Fight Club. (It is also, I would argue, what makes the undying-love mawkishness of The Curious Case of Benjamin Button seem particularly insincere.) So The Social Network offers a despairing snapshot of society at the dawn of the 21st century, so advanced, so “connected,” yet so closed and constrained by all the centuries-old prejudices and preconceptions about how our heroes and villains are supposed to look, sound, and act. For Mark Zuckerberg has arrived, and yet still seems unsettled and out of place (as anyone who witnessed his painfully awkward 60 Minutes interview two years back can attest). And now here is a movie made to remind us that nothing in this life can turn a Zuckerberg into a Winklevoss.

"The Social Network", de David Fincher (poster)

First official poster for The Social Network — David Fincher’s cinematic adaptation of Ben Mezrich’s The Accidental Billionaires: The Founding of Facebook, A Tale of Sex, Money, Genius, and Betrayal. The film, which stars Justin Timberlake, Jesse Eisenberg, and Andrew Garfield, is scheduled to hit theaters October 1.

Journey of a Director, From Night Creature to Tender Time Traveler (The New York Times)

By DENNIS LIM

“The Curious Case of Benjamin Button,” an old-school Hollywood romance with an eccentric streak, provides an occasion to ponder the curious case of David Fincher, a big-budget filmmaker with a taste for perversity.

In a series titled Under the Sign of Fincher, which runs through Sunday, the Walter Reade Theater at Lincoln Center is showcasing “Benjamin Button,” Mr. Fincher’s seventh feature, alongside three of his earlier works — “Seven” (1995), “Fight Club” (1999) and “Zodiac” (2007) — and three other movies that he considers formative touchstones. On Sunday a screening of “Benjamin Button” will be followed by a conversation between Mr. Fincher and Kent Jones, the associate director of programming at the Film Society of Lincoln Center.

Though he has always been something of a polarizing figure, Mr. Fincher, 46, is ensconced within the creative elite of Hollywood auteurs, in the company of Steven Soderbergh, Christopher Nolan, Paul Thomas Anderson and a handful of others, who are able to maintain artistic control within the studio system. In many ways, however, he does not fit the standard profile of a personal filmmaker, which may be why it has taken critics a while to warm up to him. He does not write his movies and generally sticks to genre fare. His feature directing career began with the third installment of the “Alien” franchise, and before “Benjamin Button” all his movies were noirish thrillers of a sort.

There is also the matter of his technical virtuosity, which tends to inspire both admiration and suspicion. A teenage apprentice at George Lucas’s effects house, Industrial Light and Magic, and then a hotshot director of commercials and music videos (including a brace of enormously influential ones for Madonna, at the height of her image-making powers), Mr. Fincher has always been in the business of expensive illusion and manufactured beauty. To call him a superficial stylist misses the point; in many of his films the surface is the substance. It is easy to get lost in — and perhaps as a result, to underestimate — the sheer sensory pleasures of his movies: their dynamic compositions and kinetic rhythms, sinuous camera movements and seamless digital wizardry.

“Alien 3” (1992) was a baptism of fire for Mr. Fincher. He butted heads with the studio, 20th Century Fox, over the script, the budget, the edit — the experience was so traumatic that he distanced himself from the film and told interviewers he might never work in movies again. The project that lured him back was, of all things, “Seven,” a sick-joke thriller about a serial killer-cum-conceptual artist who poses his victims in macabre tableaus modeled on the seven deadly sins.

It is Mr. Fincher’s fastidious, even baroque handling of the material — and his suggestive approach to the violence — that elevates it far above exploitation. Working with the first-rate cinematographer Darius Khondji he cloaked the film in overwhelmingly dank and baleful atmospherics, even subjecting the celluloid to a chemical process that rendered the dark hues denser and murkier. Most of Mr. Fincher’s films, from the claustrophobic gloom of “Alien 3” to the textured nightscapes of “Zodiac,” are variations on the art of making darkness visible. (The Lincoln Center series opened Thursday with a mischievous double bill of “Seven” and “Mary Poppins,” the first film Mr. Fincher saw, at the age of 3.)

He hit his stride again with “Fight Club,” a film about the fragile, vain and divided male psyche that was itself a provocative paradox: a seductive commercial for anti-consumerism. Still, this adrenalized jolt of designer nihilism tapped right into late-capitalist disaffection and premillennial anxiety.

As with most of his other films, including “The Game” (1997) and “Panic Room” (2002), the dominant mood is paranoia, but the source novel, by Chuck Palahniuk, with its crisis-of-masculinity pathos and hysteria, also occasioned the first semblance of emotional investment in Mr. Fincher’s work. “Fight Club” screens Friday night with another era-defining buddy movie, “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid” (1969).

Just as the anti-materialist salvos of “Fight Club” seemed to repudiate the very values Mr. Fincher has had to perpetuate as an occasional corporate pitchman, “Zodiac” functions as a rejoinder of sorts to “Seven.” In this detailed, jigsawlike procedural, which cracks open the unsolved case of the symbol-mad killer who taunted and terrorized the Bay Area in the late ’60s and early ’70s, the thrill and confusion of the chase gives way to the slow burn and the haunting clarity of defeat.

Paired at the Walter Reade with Roman Polanski’s “Chinatown” (1974), another panoramic California crime story, “Zodiac” is a monument to obsession, and on some level a self-portrait of this most methodical and fanatical of filmmakers. It prefigures the big themes and sweeping scale of “Benjamin Button” and may come to seem a turning point in Mr. Fincher’s career: the moment that this ingenious manipulator of screen space turned himself to the challenges of time.

The film series Under the Sign of Fincher runs through Sunday at the Walter Reade Theater at Lincoln Center; filmlinc.com.

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (Variety Review)

A Paramount (in U.S.)/Warner Bros. (foreign) release and presentation of a Kennedy/Marshall production. Produced by Kathleen Kennedy, Frank Marshall, Cean Chaffin. Directed by David Fincher. Screenplay, Eric Roth; screen story, Roth, Robin Swicord, based on a short story by F. Scott Fitzgerald.

Benjamin Button - Brad Pitt
Daisy - Cate Blanchett
Queenie - Taraji P. Henson
Caroline - Julia Ormond
Thomas Button - Jason Flemyng
Tizzy - Mahershalalhashbaz Ali
Captain Mike - Jared Harris
Monsieur Devereux - Elias Koteas
Grandma Fuller - Phyllis Somerville
Elizabeth Abbott - Tilda Swinton
Preacher - Lance Nichols
Ngunda Oti - Rampai Mohadi
Daisy age 7 - Elle Fanning
Daisy age 10 - Madisen Beaty

By TODD MCCARTHY

"The Curious Case of Benjamin Button" represents a richly satisfying serving of deep-dish Hollywood storytelling. This odd, epic tale of a man who ages backwards is presented in an impeccable classical manner, every detail tended to with fastidious devotion. An example of the most advanced technology placed entirely at the service of story and character, this significant change-of-pace from director David Fincher poses some daunting marketing challenges, even with Brad Pitt atop the cast. Strong critical support will be needed to swell interest in this absorbing, even moving, but emotionally cool film, which is simultaneously accessible and distinctive enough to catch on with a large public if luck and the zeitgeist are with it.

Due to its history-spanning structure, blank-page title character and technical sleight of hand, the film "Benjamin Button" most recalls is "Forrest Gump," but in a good way; it is entirely possible to dislike the 1994 smash and embrace this one, which resists every opportunity for mawkish and sentimental displays. Still, it is no coincidence that Eric Roth wrote both of them, and Roth -- who followed many other writers, including credited co-story author Robin Swicord, in trying to crack the long-gestating project -- has veered far from the specifics of F. Scott Fitzgerald's 1921 short story.

Fitzgerald's original was inspired by a Mark Twain observation to the effect that it's a pity the best part of life comes at the beginning and the worst part at the end. Yarn began in 1860 Baltimore, had Benjamin, born looking like a 70-year-old man, raised by his father, marrying and having a son, starring for Harvard in football and ending his life by attending kindergarten with his own grandson.

Using precious little of the story save the central aging conceit, Roth's version ranges from World War I into the 21st century and creatively uses New Orleans as its base, with sojourns to distant corners of the globe. Scripter could have chosen to make the central figure a more exceptional, active character -- a doer of great things, or an intellectual with an acute awareness of his unique condition. Instead, Benjamin is a passive sort to whom things happen, a trait by no means an impediment to audience involvement. Gump was like that, as were Dr. Zhivago and others.

Fincher spends 13 minutes short of three hours telling this unique man's life story, and the time goes by easily, with no sense of dawdling, waste or indulgence. The film evinces a sure hand that maintains narrative confidence, steadiness of tone and a mature awareness of the temporal nature of life's opportunities and the fleeting quality of happiness.

Death pervades the film and Benjamin's life, but in a matter-of-fact, rather than depressing way; if you're raised among oldsters in a retirement home, death is never a stranger. Framing story is set in a modern hospital room, where the fading Daisy (a recognizable Cate Blanchett under heavy makeup) has her 40ish daughter Caroline (Julia Ormond) read to her from the diary of her late dear friend Benjamin.

Benjamin is born of the armistice and is lovingly raised by a black attendant, Queenie (Taraji P. Henson), at the rest home. An establishment awash in the gentility of the Old South, the place is ideal for a child who, with his bald pate, cataracts, deficient hearing and need for a wheelchair, fits right in with the other occupants.

When he's 12 and looks about 70, Benjamin meets a resident's lovely red-haired granddaughter, Daisy. No doubt named in homage to the immortal heroine of Fitzgerald's "The Great Gatsby," Daisy will zig-zag in and out of his life from then on and eventually embody his emotional touchstone.

With a solicitous stranger he doesn't know is actually his father (Jason Flemyng), as well as with an African pygmy bon vivant (Rampai Mohadi), Benjamin gets a taste of the outside world, including the pleasures of the flesh at a bordello. He also befriends hard-drinking tugboat captain Mike (Jared Harris) and, in time-honored tradition for a young man, goes to sea. In one of the film's most bewitching interludes, Benjamin, who has begun to realize he's looking younger, has an affair in Murmansk with the sophisticated Elizabeth (Tilda Swinton), from whom he learns what it is to be loved and desired. Pic's action highlight is a startling nocturnal encounter between the tug and a Nazi U-boat that has just sunk a troop transport.

Safely back in New Orleans after the war, Benjamin becomes reacquainted with Daisy, now a rising dancer and unashamed sensualist who comes on a little strong for her old friend. But after his father dies, leaving him his button factory and entire estate, Benjamin follows Daisy to New York, where he sees her dancing the ballet in "Carousel," then to Paris, only to continue being rejected by the headstrong young woman even after she suffers a terrible tragedy detailed in a suspense montage that by itself reps a dazzling display of directorial savoir faire.

Much of the film's romantic and philosophical posture hinges on Benjamin and Daisy getting together at the right time, and they do so in an entirely satisfying way; by the time of consummation, with Brad Pitt now in full physical glory and Blanchett at her womanly peak, they -- and the audience -- are more than ready for it. But their passion is all the more pointedly ephemeral due to the consciousness of being headed in opposite physical directions. The necessary acceptance of this fact produces a sincerely and genuinely earned sense of melancholy about the transitive nature of love and life.

The extent to which Fincher and his vast team of collaborators have succeeded in their storytelling can be seen by the fact that one comes out of the film thinking about the characters and narrative intent, not the admittedly amazing aging effects and other technical achievements. Truly, the visions of Benjamin and other central characters at different ages are sights to behold; baby Ben resembling a little E.T., Blanchett appearing a convincing 23. But truly the most unnerving image is Pitt looking more or less the way he did in "Thelma and Louise," or at least half the age of the man now playing the character. Clearly anything is possible.

In all his physical manifestations, Benjamin is a reactor, not a perpetrator, and Pitt inhabits the role genially, gently and sympathetically. Blanchett's Daisy is the more volatile and moody one and, after bluntly revealing the selfish impetuousness of Daisy's youthful self, the thesp fully registers both the passion and insecurity of the mature woman.

Henson, as Benjamin's surrogate mother, and Swinton as the calculating adulteress, are wonderful, and Harris and Mohadi etch particularly colorful supporting turns as two of Benjamin's rowdier cohorts.

Every scene is crammed with detail, from the nooks and crannies of the settings created by production designer Donald Graham Burt and the century-bridging costumes by Jacqueline West to the faces of the main cast and countless extras. Alexandre Desplat's score provides lovely and unobtrusive dramatic support. Fincher and lenser Claudio Miranda shoot mostly in deep focus images to maximize the information in every frame, and the depth of the blacks they achieve shooting on digital is extraordinary.

Still, for what is designed as a rich tapestry, the picture maintains a slightly remote feel. No matter the power of the image of an old but young-looking Benjamin, slumped over a piano and depressed about his fading memory and life; it is possible that the picture might have been warmer and more emotionally accessible had it been shot on film. It has been argued that digital is a cold medium and celluloid a hot one and a case, however speculative, could be made that a story such as "Benjamin Button," with its desired cumulative emotional impact, should be shot and screened on film to be fully realized. These are intangibles, but nor are they imaginary factors; what technology gives, it can also take away.

Camera (Technicolor, Deluxe color prints, widescreen, HD), Claudio Miranda; editors, Kirk Baxter, Angus Wall; music, Alexandre Desplat; production designer, Donald Graham Burt; supervising art director, Tom Reta; art directors, Randy Moore (Los Angeles), Scott Plauche, Kelly Curley (New Orleans), Michele Laliberte (Montreal); set designers, Lorrie Campbell, Jane Wuu, Clint Wallace, Randy Wilkins, Tammy Lee, Masako Masada, Ryan Heck (New Orleans); set decorator, Victor J. Zolfo; costume designer, Jacqueline West; sound (Dolby Digital/DTS/SDDS), Mark Weingarten; sound designer-supervising sound editor, Ren Klyce; re-recording mixers, David Parker, Michael Semanick, Klyce; visual effects supervisor, Eric Barba; visual effects and animation, Digital Domain; visual effects, Asylum, Lola Visual Effects, Matte World Digital, Hydraulx, Ollin Studio, Savage Visual Effects; special effects coordinator, Burt Dalton; special makeup, Greg Cannom; makeup effects supervisor, Brian Sipe; stunt coordinator, Mickey Giacomazzi; associate producer, Jim Davidson; assistant director, Bob Wagner; second unit director (India and Cambodia), Tarsem; second unit camera, Dan Holland; casting, Laray Mayfield. Reviewed at Paramount Studios, Los Angeles, Nov. 22, 2008. MPAA Rating: PG-13. Running time: 167 MIN.

A Curious Life, From Old Age to Cradle (The New York Times)

"The Curious Life of Benjamin Button", de David Fincher

November 2, 2008

Holiday Movies

By DAVE KEHR

GROWING 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.”

Trailer Trash: "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button", de David Fincher

Matt Damon será Elliot Ness

Matt Damon, otro de los famosos actores argentinos por adopción (el tercero después de Viggo Mortensen y Robert Duvall...) será el protagonista de la nueva película de David Fincher. El director de "Se7en", "Zodíaco" y de la inminente "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button" llevará al cine, con guión de Ehren Kruger, la novela gráfica "Torso", de Brian Bendis y Marc Andreyko, centrada en un asesino serial que aterrorizó el área de Cleveland en 1935. Damon será Elliot Ness, quien tomó este caso luego de su éxito en la captura de Al Capone y se dedicó a él durante años. Sí, lo sé, suena parecida a "Zodíaco", lo cual no tiene porqué ser un problema...