Are The Many Tangents And Flights Of Fancy, The Reason The ‘Benjamin Button’ Budget Ballooned?

Don’t get us wrong, we kind of loved the sweeping, epic tale of “The Curious Case Of Benjamin Button,” as written by Academy Award-winning screenwriter Eric Roth, but the script isn’t without its flaws.

Yes, it’s magical in moments, romantic, sprawling and impressive, but it’s grand nature are also sort of it’s drawbacks as well.
One of the main reasons why ‘Button’ might have an exorbitant budget besides all the special effects?

The fanciful story adapted from a short story F. Scott Fitzgerald is filled with smaller side characters and the story goes into a litany of tangents to fill us with their backstory. So when we’re told in a voice over about two fighting brothers on a boat, we always have to cut to a scene showing the brothers doing exactly that.

For one, it’s a hallmark of bad writing, and crosses “the show don’t tell” rule of screenwriting (they do both here obviously) and while it works for the most part, the major problem with this technique is twofold: for one they’re excessive and these unconnected detours eventually become obnoxious in their predictability. And secondly they do a fine job of distracting us from our main love story between Brad Pitt as man born 80-years old who ages backwards and his lover Cate Blanchett (a woman who ages naturally, but is constant fear that their differences will never connect).

Let’s not forget that Eric Roth wrote the holistically cheesy and corny “Forrest Gump,” which is replete with the cliches of screenwriting (but does contain touchstones and film story beats that mainstream audiences are extremely comfortable and familiar with). There’s always a pretty contrived “rule of threes” in screenwriting which can sometimes skate by and feel natural and or sometimes just feel like moves telegraphed a mile away. In ‘Button,’ they do work often, but they’re their in spades and yes, obnoxiously so. So yes, when the aforementioned are mentioned once, you can be rest assured there’s two more examples of their pugnacious behavior to be dropped down the path of the narrative like breadcrumbs later down the road (this may tie into the complains of unnecessary “repetition” that Anne Thompson wrote about recently)

We don’t want to give away too many such examples, but trust us when we say they are everywhere. And again, we mostly were bothered by them because they took us away from the love story (and after a while, enough is enough, sheesh!).

Why this would effect the budget? Each one of these new tangents is a new set up, a new location and new cast of extras, film crews, set-design, etc. etc. One could imagine even without the special effects, this film could have cost a fortune (look at something much, much smaller in scale, but similar in Charlie Kaufman’s “Synecdoche, New York,” which cost more than $25 million dollars because there’s a ton of locations).

We’re honestly hoping director David Fincher didn’t shoot all of these fanciful little side-character flights and or had to cut some of them when he trimmed the film from three hours to two and a half, because not only would they been excessive onscreen, we grew tired of them on the page as much as they were delightful, creative and fun at first. Here’s to hoping anyhow. There’s surely many winning elements to this script, but the talk of trims are actually a relief that we’ll finally get to the heart of the story.