"The Curious Case Of Benjamin Button"

 

From Lagniappe in the Times-Picayune:

It's right there, writ large on the Paramount Pictures movie poster: "Brad Pitt" and "Cate Blanchett." They are the marquee stars of David Fincher's fantasy-epic "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button," but they are by no means the film's only stars.

It's not spelled out there on the placard, but within the film's opening minutes another key character makes a grand entrance: the city of New Orleans. And the general consensus seems to be that the movie, which opened on Christmas, is better for it.

To think, it almost didn't happen. After all, Baltimore was the setting for the F. Scott Fitzgerald short story that inspired the film, about a man who is born as an 80-year-old and, as everyone around him ages, keeps getting younger.

Grandpère and I went to see "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button" Saturday night. As the TP says, the movie stars Brad Pitt, Cate Blanchett, AND the city of New Orleans. Although F. Scott Fitzgerald's story, on which the movie is based, is set in Baltimore, the costs of filming there would have been prohibitive. When the promoters of the film industry in Louisiana, which offers extensive tax-credits to moviemakers, pushed for filming the movie in New Orleans, Frank Kennedy, the producer, agreed.

Oh, and am I glad that he did. Once I suspended disbelief and accepted the magical realist basic premise of the film and let go to groove with the ambiance of New Orleans as a major character in the movie, I was entranced. Brad Pitt's acting was the best I've seen since "Seven". Cate was excellent as a free spirit, a ballet dancer. Taraji P. Henson, Benjamin's adopted mother, is wonderful as a woman who well knows the vicissitudes of life and accepts Benjamin just as he is.

Kennedy added, "When you're dealing with a kind of sense of magical realism, which is inherent in this kind of storytelling, it just felt like New Orleans was perfect, because you just believe a story like that could come out of a place like New Orleans. So Eric just embraced that and made that a part of the script."

For Roth, the task really wasn't that difficult, he said. The Oscar-winning screenwriter of "Forrest Gump," "The Insider" and "Munich" did some slight tinkering with his script -- throw in a Sazerac here, a streetcar there -- but, for the most part, the city boasts such a singular quality that four simple words took care of most of it.

"As soon as I wrote 'Exterior, New Orleans, day,' it became like a whole other character," Roth said. "It was amazing. It was like you could see right away there was nothing you had to add to that. In other words, you don't have to do a big description of what that means. It carries such a sort of febrile quality to it. In fact, everything about it -- the sound, the smell, the taste of New Orleans -- is so distinctive and so American."

In some of the scenes, the locations seemed familiar, but I couldn't quite place them. I think of one restaurant. The Peristyle and the lagoon in City Park (pictured above) were obvious, along with the St. Charles Avenue streetcar. Benjamin grew young in a house on Coliseum Street. I'd love to know the locales of the other local scenes. If I'd waited for all the credits to roll, I suppose that I would know. I searched around the internet, but I wasn't able to find a list.

Some of you may think that I make up stories, but I don't - at least, not from whole cloth. I plead guilty to the occasional embellishment. After all, I'm from the South, and if a little tweak of the truth improves the story, then I'll do it. Grandpère knows the local contact for movie people when they want extras, locations, and whatever for the film. The movie paid money for a boat from the boat museum that GP directs and an old wooden picnic table of ours that we were about to throw away. Neither of us remembered to look for the boat or the picnic table while we watched the film because we were caught up in the story, so we don't know if they were used or not. When the movie comes out on DVD, we'll watch again to see if they made it onto the screen.

Jason Flemyng, an Englishman, who plays Benjamin's biological father, won my heart even before I saw the movie when I read this:

Jason Flemyng ("Snatch," "The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen"), the gregarious English actor who plays Thomas Button -- the father of Pitt's title character -- said his time in the city "changed my opinion of America."

He had never been to New Orleans before the film, but he still lights up when he talks about the city.

"I listen to WWOZ on my laptop still, to this day, check the Saints results every week," Flemyng said at the Beverly Hills press event. "It changed my life. That city changed my life."

He added: "I know Finch (David Fincher) sees this film as an apology to the city. It's an apology to the city for having let it down so badly, internationally and nationally, and I think Finch is very clear about that."

Amen!