Eric Roth won an Oscar for best adapted screenplay for Forrest Gump. It would be cosmically appropriate as well as overwhelmingly deserved if he won another one a lucky 13 years later for The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. This movie turns everything on its head, including time, cliched notions of luck and destiny, and conventional notions of the art of adaptation. (Starring Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett, it opens nationwide on Christmas Day.)
Benjamin Button takes little from the F. Scott Fitzgerald short story beyond its hook and its title. Roth is loath to admit that his screenplay is not just an expansion, but also an improvement on Fitzgerald. All he will say is, "I love the story's lineage." Fitzgerald based his tale about a man who is born old and ages backward on a suggestion from his celebrated editor Maxwell Perkins, who took it from a notion of Mark Twain's. The finished film roams all over the globe but begins and ends in New Orleans; it has as much Twain (or Hemingway) in it as Fitzgerald.
The most Fitzgeraldian aspect of it is the hero's devotion to his true love, Daisy. Roth peppers the rest of the narrative with tall tales that could have emerged from Twain's short stories, such as an African Pygmy who makes a living in America by appearing with caged apes in zoos, or a man who says he's been struck by lightning seven times. Roth says the main reason the film evokes Twain is that the setting changed from Baltimore - the scene of the original story - to New Orleans, "and as long as you move on the Mississippi River, you're going to get some Mark Twain in there."
Watching The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, you can't imagine the film taking place in Baltimore. The filmmakers weave in New Orleans' rococo textures; Hurricane Katrina becomes part of the framing story. Yet Roth says he and the director, David Fincher (Fight Club, Zodiac), would have loved to root it in Baltimore, Fitzgerald's original choice. "The Chesapeake Bay was always a big part of it - quite honestly, it was a bit of a stretch for me to transfer the feeling of the bay and the ocean beyond to the Mississippi River. The story of Benjamin going on a tugboat came from research I did on the Chesapeake Bay."
