HOLLYWOOD - The days might be numbered for the old Brad Pitt - the Hollywood heartbreaker, the absurdly handsome leading man who couldn't seem to keep his shirt on in a movie for more than five minutes, the prankster who once ran amok through the streets of Los Angeles in a gorilla suit.
History. Outta here. Going, going, gone.
Now it's time to meet the new, older (and presumably wiser, but no less photogenic) Brad Pitt, who a couple of weekends ago reflected on the themes of his latest film, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, which opened in theaters on Christmas Day. Portraying the title character, a man who's born as an octogenarian and ages backward into infancy, Pitt says he had some personal reckoning to do with the temporality of things - a fitting assignment for a man at life's midway point.
"Once you hit 40, you start re-examining the math of it all," says the actor, who turned 45 on Dec. 18. So far, he indicates, the pluses and minuses are adding up just fine. "I'll trade wisdom for youth any day," Pitt says.
That existential swap lies at the heart of David Fincher's film, loosely adapted by screenwriter Eric Roth from a whimsical 1922 short story by F. Scott Fitzgerald. Brought into the world on Armistice Day, 1918, as a slack-skinned, 80-year-old man, Benjamin bears witness to many of the century's epochal events, while the film leapfrogs from New Orleans to Murmansk, Russia, to New York to the Ganges. Finally, he and the film come home to rest in the Crescent City just as Hurricane Katrina is about to strike.
But none of Benjamin's picaresque adventures or brief encounters shapes him more than his passionate, odds-defying relationship with Daisy Fuller (Cate Blanchett), a ballerina who meets Benjamin when she's a child. Although the pair's prime years overlap oh-so-fleetingly, their souls merge in a lasting union. The bittersweet irony of their predicament raises the question of whether Benjamin Button is, in the end, a tragedy.
"It's a tragedy in the sense that any love involves loss, and that's the risk you take," Pitt responds. "And the greater the love, the greater the loss. I certainly feel that now with the woman I'm with, and the children that I have. But whatever the course may be, this time together is extraordinary."
