Brad Pitt sat down for a lengthy interview with the Los Angeles Times to promote The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, and he’s still talking about Angelina and their family, aging, politics and New Orleans. Honestly, I didn’t realize that the film carried on to 2005, I thought it was just a straight-up period piece only going as far as the immediate post-WWII years. Apparently, it goes up to Hurricane Katrina.

“Once you hit 40, you start reexamining 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 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 still 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.

In some ways, “Benjamin Button” plays as an elegy for New Orleans and for a lost (or rapidly vanishing) part of what culture critic Greil Marcus called “the Old, Weird America.” Personally, Pitt says, he won’t be sorry to see the current White House administration exiting stage left. But he thinks it would be premature to start writing a national obit.

“America’s known for our ingenuity,” he says. “We put a man on the moon, for Christ’s sake. And it’d be a shame to lose that definition because of some kind of fear of losing what we were, or what we had. That’s the quickest way, I think, to end it all. We’re going to be all right.”

Because it spans the character’s entire life, “Benjamin Button” inadvertently serves as a showcase for Pitt’s various cinematic personas. At one point in the movie, he evokes Jack London’s Sea Wolf as a craggy sailor of fortune. Later in the film, when Benjamin reaches his prime, Pitt brings to mind James Dean on a motorcycle, or John F. Kennedy on his sailboat, navigating the swells of destiny.

“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.”

[From LA Times]

I really like that line – “The greater the love, the greater the loss.” It’s a little Oprah-y, but it communicates volumes beyond the normal public relations shenanigans. Brad talks more about Angelina and his acting process. The most ZOMG moment comes when he refers to his life before Angelina as a “dead end,” although I don’t care for the way the LA Times guy refers to Brad’s children – separating them between “their own” and “adopted”. My feeling is that the best, most politically correct way to refer to these (or any) children is biological and adopted, not “their own”.

As everyone but a handful of Himalayan monks doubtless knows, the woman who sleeps by Pitt’s side these days is Angelina Jolie, with whom he shares parenting duties for six children (three of their own, three adopted). During an interview of an hour’s duration, Pitt refers repeatedly to his satisfying home life and the way it has refashioned his priorities.

“I had a whole other life and I got to experience a lot. And I probably got away with more than I should,” he says. “And it kind of ran its course, you know, it kind of hit a dead end.” Fatherhood, he notes, is “the direction I always thought I would go in. But not until, with Angie and it felt like a natural evolution, a natural direction.”

Pitt agrees that, as he has matured professionally, “I don’t have to grope as much for the character. I can get there quicker, so it’s not as much trial and error,” he says. “Also, as I get older, more experiences, I’m more fine-tuned in what I’m after, what I think speaks in the piece. And lastly I want to hurry and get home to my kids.”

[From LA Times]

David Fincher, the director of Benjamin Button, is also quoted in the piece. He talks more about how Brad’s acting process has changed, and comes close to saying that Brad’s a better actor now then when they first met, some-odd 14 years ago. Personally, I agree. I always that Brad was rather “pretty but dumb,” but his personal and professional choices the past few years have really impressed me. The Curious Case of Benjamin Button is getting great reviews, with a lot of people singling out Brad’s performance, and he’s an early favorite for an Best Actor Oscar nomination. Benjamin Button is in theatres now.

[Thanks to Daisy242 for the heads up on the LA Times piece!]

Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie are shown at the premiere of The Case of Benjamin Button on 12/8/08. Credit: WENN