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 Brad Pitt stars in The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, about a man who is born old and gets younger as time goes by. |
People mad-love it, resent-hate it or just find themselves perplexed by the lapses in logic. But everyone will have to admit that The Curious Case of Benjamin Button gets the royal treatment on DVD.
Befitting a $150-million Hollywood heavyweight that earned 13 Oscar nominations while winning three, Benjamin Button debuts tomorrow in a special Criterion Collection edition. Thanks to generous bonus materials, this gilded DVD will satisfy all curiosities about how this strange movie happened, after more than two decades in limbo, and exactly how it was made, because it is a technical marvel.
The prestigious Criterion label is the Gucci of DVD. It appears on both the two-disc edition standard DVD and the two-disc Blu-ray. Exactly the same extras are on both, although the picture quality on the Blu-ray is obviously superior.
There is also a single-disc DVD version. This is for audiences who just want to watch the movie and not bother with extras, except for director David Fincher's odd, cynical, yet informative commentary. This Fincher fellow is a perfectionist, famous for multiple takes and exacting demands of cast and crew.
I recommend going the Criterion route. Even people in the resent-hate category will find real insight here. The key is a monumental making-of documentary, The Curious Birth of Benjamin Button. It runs two hours, 55 minutes and 10 seconds if you push "Play All." In addition, there are five other featurettes or galleries that are activated in the chapter menus.
The doc takes the project back to its roots as a 1922 short story by F. Scott Fitzgerald, in his collection Tales of the Jazz Age. As a film, it dates from 1987, when Universal Studios first optioned the story. Since then, directors from Frank Oz to Steven Spielberg, Agnieszka Holland, Ron Howard and Spike Jonze have mucked about with it. Actors such as Martin Short, Tom Cruise and John Travolta were attached.
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The truth is that no one could make it until the technology caught up with the demands of reverse aging. "The stumbling block for so long with anyone looking at this material," producer Kathleen Kennedy says, was casting this main role. "Everyone looked at it as if five or six different actors were going to have to play the part of Benjamin Button." That would, co-producer Frank Marshall recounts, turn it into a fragmented role that no movie star would take.
Digital technology changed the rules, although much of the refined work on Brad Pitt, and less so on Cate Blanchett, was made up as Fincher's crew went along. The DVD shows exactly how body doubles were used for Benjamin in his early days. Pitt's face was digitally imposed on the body. The production employed even more advanced motion-capture techniques than Peter Jackson used to create Andy Serkis' Gollum for The Lord of the Rings.
The processes are shown in meticulous detail. No one says it, but seeing how it was done puts Pitt's performance into question -- or at least into debate. Much of what we see, and what we were amazed by, is not even Pitt in person. Instead, it is the result of sophisticated digital manipulations. Oscar voters, who chose not to honour Serkis but did pick Pitt as a best actor nominee, will have to struggle with this complex issue in the future.
Meanwhile, there are a multitude of revelations on the DVD, some haunting, some striking, some just interesting details that may appeal to film buffs.
Among them is the role that Hurricane Katrina played in shaping the film, the role Pitt played in getting the project to stay there in the aftermath, or the role Montreal played standing in for both Paris and Murmansk.
On the personal side, Fincher reveals he made the film -- which he cites as an exploration of death, not love -- after his own father died. On the fluff side, we hear about how Fincher changed the tugboat's name to Chelsea to tease Manchester United soccer fan Jared Harris.
If the best DVDs are meant to elevate and deepen the viewing experience, the Criterion version of The Curious Case of Benjamin Button does its job splendidly. It even has welcome flashes of humour to balance the melancholy.