Brad Pitt in The Curious Case of Benjamin Button

Director: David Fincher, modern proprietor of film noir, whose directorial credits read Se7en, Fight Club, The Game, Panic Room and Zodiac, is now directing the screen adaptation of The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, a short story by F. Scott Fitzgerald. Fincher has managed to develop his own noir style and been consistent in the slick and glossy treatment of a dark world of loss, nostalgia and insecurity that noir encapsulates. A tasteful absorber of the fleeting styles of Hollywood, twisted to reveal a mechanical process at the core of the film-maker’s art that challenges “the conventional means of representing reality in the cinema in such a way as to expose those means as a practice, as a product of ideology, and not as a manifest replication of reality.”

Background: Based on a 1922 short story by F. Scott Fitzgerald, it tells the story of Benjamin Button, member of a well-to-do family in Baltimore, who is born as a feeble old man, and ages in reverse until he becomes a baby at the end of his life. Fitzgerald noted that, “This story was inspired by a remark of Mark Twain’s to the effect that it was a pity that the best part of life came at the beginning and the worst part at the end.” He is able to live a relatively normal middle portion of his life when his biological and chronological ages are not too drastically far apart, but has more problems at either end. The story is in part comic and part melancholy.

Stars: The project has been developed for more than a decade in several different incarnations. Fincher’s project managed to be on track and has now reached its post-production stage. Brad Pitt reunites with his Se7en and Fight Club buddy David Fincher as the protagonist, and his Babel co-star, Cate Blanchett, as Daisy, for the big screen. The cast also includes Tilda Swinton as Elizabeth Abbott, Jason Flemyng as Thomas Button, Elias Koteas as Monsieur Gateau, Taraji Henson as Queenie.

Release Date: November 26, ’08.