For his third and most recent collaboration with leading man Brad Pitt, director David Fincher (“Se7en,” “Fight Club”) teamed with writer Eric Roth for an adaption of the 1922 F. Scott Fitzgerald short story “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” (“Curious”).
Notwithstanding his feature debut (“Alien 3”), which he has since publicly disowned, “Curious” is the most “unFinchery” title on Mr. Fincher’s résumé as it includes elements of fantasy, and (unconventional) romance, and is the closest he has ever gotten to a chick flick. Bearing little in common with the source material, Mr. Roth’s screenplay owes a great deal to the spirit of Frank Capra by way of Alfred Hitchcock and Rod Serling (“The Twilight Zone”).
The story opens chronologically in early 20th-century New Orleans with the father of Benjamin (Mr. Pitt) abandoning his son on the steps of a New Orleans retirement home run by Queenie (Taraji P. Henson). The newly widowed father (Jason Flemyng) does this because his son is terribly deformed and looks more like an old man than a newborn child.
Toddlers and Seniors
Initially repelled, Queenie quickly comes to accept Benjamin as part of her life, as he easily passes for a man in the autumn of his years despite being a toddler, and here lies the brilliance of the story’s concept. More often than not, toddlers and senior citizens exhibit the same type of physical and mental behavior: confusion, an inability to grasp what is going on around them, and supreme restrictions in movement.One of Benjamin’s interactions is with Daisy (at first Elle Fanning, later Cate Blanchett), a girl with whom he has instant chemistry, although it takes decades for their respective ideal timelines to align. As she ages forward, he goes backward, and their “sweet spot” occurs in the 1960s when both are in their physically optimum mid-30s.
What would happen if your life moved in reverse? You started as your older self with limited mental and physical skills, and progressed to the ultimate specimen. Would it be any different? Would starting “old” and ending as an infant yield different results? It presents an interesting dichotomy. The fact that Benjamin reaches his “peak” at about the same time as Daisy supports the idea that chronology is absolutely relative. Time is the ultimate equalizer, no matter what form. No one has an advantage.
Produced at a time when CGI as we now know it was in its relative infancy, the success (at least from a visual perspective) of “Curious” was predicated on technical prowess, and it is due to Mr. Fincher’s impossibly meticulous standards that the film looks as good as it does without appearing dated.
Eve of Katrina
The biggest change that Mr. Roth makes to the original Fitzgerald text is starting the story in 2005 New Orleans with a near-death, bedridden Daisy in a hospital as Hurricane Katrina approaches. For reasons not fully revealed until the last 15 minutes, Daisy asks her daughter Caroline (Julia Ormond) to leaf through and read aloud a voluminous diary detailing her lifelong association with Benjamin.
It isn’t quite a traditional flashback, and it doesn’t always work as there are portions of Benjamin’s life that didn’t include Daisy—most notably a romance he had in Russia with Elizabeth Abbott (Tilda Swinton), the wife of a British bigwig, and a stint on a World War II-era tugboat captained by Mike Clark (Jared Harris). As Mr. Pitt’s character narrates these and other minor passages without Daisy, there is no loss in continuity.
Top 5
In every possible way, “Curious” was an unqualified success. Few movies lasting nearly three hours with quasi-downbeat material please both audiences and critics, yet it remains low on the lists of Mr. Pitt’s, Ms. Blanchett’s, Mr. Fincher’s, and Mr. Roth’s most notable efforts, which is unfortunate. It might not be the best movie that any of these four people ever made, but it easily qualifies (at least for me) as a career Top 5 title for all of them.For established fans of the movie, it is more than worth it to purchase the Criterion Blu-ray, which includes a separate disc containing over three hours of behind-the-scenes footage covering all facets of the production from the scouting of shoot locations through principal photography, and the meticulous special effects added in a post.
