Directed by David Fincher and written by Eric Roth, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button tells the epic story of its title character—played by Brad Pitt—Benjamin, born November 11, 1918, the last day of World War I. The doctor attending him describes the strange little creature, “He has all the deterioration, the infirmities of a man well in his 80s on the way to his grave.” But Benjamin doesn’t die. Instead, he begins to age in reverse. By 7, he looks like a little old man in a wheelchair with thick glasses. Thanks to the film’s deft use of computer-generated imagery, those eyes are recognisably those of Pitt, and they continue to be as Benjamin moves on.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, the love of his life; at 60 he’s a teenager, who learns about drinking and sex; he’s a young man in his 50s when he travels to Russia, and has his first great affair; 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. 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. Now as a screenplay essentially written from scratch by Eric Roth, it saw many directors come and go before Fincher saw it.“The producers wanted to know if I thought it was technically feasible,” 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, ‘Oh, yeah, anything you can think of, you can do,’ “ recalls Fincher.“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 ageing is about, even though it may not be foremost on their minds,” said Roth.And in Benjamin Button, age is indeed visible, in ways it has never been before in a movie. The team did sculptures based on life casts of Brad. They would hollow away material, take mass away from his cheeks, get more skulling around the eyes, do very fine wrinkling, and scan it into a computer. When it came time for 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”.“This film is about death,” says Fincher, “He’s a character whose entire childhood is defined by the people that die around him and by how comfortable he gets with that. It’s not a special-effects movie, that’s for sure.”_Dave Kehr, NYTRETURN TO OZShe’s changed, or something. She tells Oprah about going skinny-dipping in a pool beneath some Australian waterfall last year with a half-dozen other women, and how they all got pregnant within weeks of that magical bath. She tells Elle magazine about the enormous zucchini she grows in her Tennessee garden, on some secluded acreage in the hills an hour out of Nashville—where she lives with her freshly rehabbed country pop-star husband, Keith Urban, the father of her baby daughter. She’s added new glow to her old glow, and managed to lose some of that Stepford frozen-robot face. The new movie is ludicrously huge. Australia took 10 months to film. It’s Baz Luhrmann’s first movie since Moulin Rouge, the 2001 musical that more or less reinvented Nicole Kidman.Baz has described Australia it as his attempt to revive “a moribund genre”, the epic romance. Kidman participates in strange movies, and willfully so. She has said over and over that for her it’s about the director. When a director wants her to do a graphic sex scene, she’ll do it. She’ll do rape, abuse, deep pain. Generally, she’ll rip her heart out in take after take. But she won’t do any of these things without the right story, the right script and the right director. “If it’s small or big, it doesn’t matter,” she says. “I’m just not interested in a laissez-faire, oh-we’ll-just-see-how-it-comes-out moviemaking process,” she says.What’s it like to have a big movie like this coming out, critics ready to pounce? “Does it keep me up at night? No,” she says. “Do I care deeply, do I not want to see the people who are involved in it fail? Yes, of course. I would love it to be a success. Will I be able to step foot in Australia after this? I hope so.”She’s found a whole new continent she likes: America. The one between Los Angeles and New York, which she’d hardly seen before. She rides around in her husband’s luxury tour bus to his concerts. She likes to sneak away and go to people’s garage sales. “All I need is a hat, and I go,” she says. She bought little ceramic candle holders at one sale, she says, and embroidered Christmas stockings at another, “when it wasn’t anywhere near Christmastime. I love it.” According to Kidman, the people at these garage sales almost never know she’s Nicole Kidman, which is the highest sort of compliment, in her world._Hank Stuever, LATWP
