Over Christmas vacation I was able to get down to the Sierra Theatre in Ruidoso, NM with Kara and my cousin and her husband Dan.  We caught the late showing of The Curious Case of Benjamin Button.  Dan and I had been talking beforehand about what we were expecting – mostly a Forrest Gump type narrative of one man’s life over the decades, a story as much about the changing times and history that he lives through as it is a story about the man himself.  Oh, and we thought it wouldn’t be quite as funny as Forrest Gump.  Wrong on both fronts.  Benjamin Button really is much more about Benjamin than it is the eras he lived through, and in my opinion much funnier thatn Gump.  Lightning is funny.

[spoiler alert... pretty much from here on out]

You likely know already that Benjamin Button is the fanciful love story of a man named Benjamin who is born with the body of an old man but the mind of an infant and over the course of his life his mind progresses as ours do – chronilogically speaking – forward.  Benjamin’s body however is headed in the opposite direction and with each passing year of maturity and wisdom Benjamin appears a year younger physically.

At first this seems miraculous.  As an infant no one expects Benjamin to live through the week in his frail and macbre state.  But he survives.  As a young (old) man he is as curious and rambunctious as you would expect a 12 year old to be… but with the body of a crippled old man in a wheel chair.

Somewhere in his teens Benjamin realizes what this all really means – all his closest friends, who are the elderly people he lives with will soon die, while he only gets younger.  Benjamin meets a young girl named Daisy about his same age and they hit it off as peers… of course the girl’s mother doesn’t see it this way and Benjamin learns that the world will not understand him as he is.

The story that unfolds is filled with both adventure and sadness.  Benjamin works aboard a tug-boat for a good part of his 20’s (when he appears to be in his 60’s or 70’s), he sees a great deal of the world, gets caught up in the War and comes home a much wiser (but younger?) man and finds that Daisy has grown up considerably.  He and Daisy are moving towards each other, at least moving towards the place where the world (and Daisy) can come to terms with their love.

But there are many more years of sadness and heartbreak before that time will come.

When it does, it’s everything Benjamin had hoped it would be.  They fall totally in love with each other (or so they would think), living a care-free, spontaneous life together.

But it is only when this phase of their life begins to fade away and they find themselves headed again in opposite directions that they really come to love each other.  A favorite theologian of mine, Stanley Hauerwas, is famous for saying something along the lines of this – when two people get married they do it in front of a congregation who will hold them to the promises they are making, because at the time they have no idea what those promises mean.  Indeed this is the case with Daisy and Benjamin, their love for each other comes into full bloom far after the care-free days of spontaneity.  We first see it with Benjamin, he is haunted by the countdown of his own mortality, every year he grows closer to becoming a teenager, then a child and finally a baby.  Benjamin knows that he cannot raise his daughter when he himself is a baby.  Benjamin sacrifices his own happiness with Daisy for the future of both her and his daughter.

The night Benjamin leaves is one of the saddest moments I’ve seen on film and I hated him for it at the time.  How could he just walk away?  But we meet Benjamin years later, as a pimple faced teenager when Daisy is well into her 50’s and his daughter is dealing with acne herself… and it starts to make some kind of sense.  It hurts, but it starts to make some kind of sense.

But most profound is Daisy’s love for Benjamin in the years when he is physically a young boy, but is dealing with dementia and alzheimer’s.  At this point in her life she is an old woman and Benjamin is ending life as a young boy and finally as an infant.  The way she cares for him in his final years is the full blossoming of her love for Benjamin.

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button is an incredible film that will stay with me for years to come.