The Filtnib’s Progress

This film is about time. Specifically, what if time went backwards, or rather, what if one person got continuously younger while the rest of the world aged?

One of the first things I learnt working in the film industry was that it takes a long, long time to make a movie, a fact entirely borne out by The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, which has been in the works since 1994.

Since I was thirteen years old.

Since then I have done my GCSE’s, learnt to drive, taken A-levels, perfected the art of blow-drying my hair, completed a three year degree, a post-grad diploma and ended a war of attrition between myself and arachnids (ok I’m still working on that last one).

Meanwhile Benjamin Button – adapted loosely from a short story by F. Scott Fitzgerald – has been washed and spun and wrung to an inch of its life by the ponderous Hollywood machine.

Numerous writers have had a shot at the script, including Charlie Kaufman (Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind), Jim Taylor (Sideways and About Schmidt) and finally Eric Roth (Ali, Munich, The Good Shepherd).

Directors Spike Jonze and Gary Ross were attached at different times, but the job finally went to David Fincher, whose CV – including Fight Club, Se7en and The Game – guaranteed a safe pair of hands for a tricksy narrative.

Fincher will have had his work lightened by a stellar cast – Brad Pitt as Button, Cate Blanchett as the woman Button loves, plus Tilda Swinton and our Julia in supporting roles – but on the other hand he’ll have been burdened with hours of make-up work and visual effects to depict an unprecedented cinematic transformation: “I was born under unusual circumstances,” confides our narrator, “while everyone else was ageing, I was getting younger – all alone.”

Thus Pitt goes from elderly man-baby (?! yep), to a Robert Redfordian wrinkly 55-year-old, to a young dad (cradling real-life daughter Shiloh Jolie-Pitt), to a teenager, to a baby proper.

The narrative incorporates a kind of magic realism that may test the patience of mainstream audiences, but with the right touch, I’m hoping it could prove transcendent.