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I have to admit, when I finally managed to lay hands on The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, I really wasn’t all that sure what to expect from it.  Of course, the plot was obvious enough…everyone had been talking about it since its Oscar bid.  But what I found when I watched it was unusual enough to make it worth talking about.

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button is about life in its most primal form, reversed—for most, life can only be lived forwards and understood backwards.  But for Benjamin Button, it’s lived backwards, and strangely, understood forwards.  Born in his eighties due to a bizarre condition that ages him in reverse, we follow Benjamin Button throughout his life, his loves, and his own inevitable end.

It’s a strange movie, this one—similar to titles like Forrest Gump, focusing on the unusual life of an unusual person, it’s a deep and rich epic with lots of stories to tell, both heartwarming and horrifying in their ways.  It’s told from the perspective of a woman dying in a hospital, her granddaughter reading the diary of the man that meant so much to her over the years—specifically, Benjamin Button.  There’s so much to see here that it’s a lot like being with an elderly person.  It has all the stories of a lifetime.  Not all of them are interesting, and some of them are downright sad, but some of them are beautiful.

And that’s exactly what this movie is, almost three straight hours of stories.  Benjamin Button will find love, find loss, find war, find peace, find hope and charity and everything in between.  You’ve got to really want a movie like this, because a movie like this is an undertaking.  It’s a project.  You’ve got to block out nearly three hours if you want to see this one, and three hours is not easy to come by these days.

But if you put the three hours into it, what you’ll get is a story of shocking depth for Hollywood.  You’ll get great performances—those who said that this is some of Brad Pitt’s greatest work were not kidding—and you’ll get some beautiful images.  Even when Benjamin went to war, they managed to make it look beautiful in a way.

And as I grew to realize, fumbling along through this…this enormous brick edifice of a movie…I began to wonder, maybe this was too much.  Maybe there’s too much going on here.  Maybe it’s made itself downright inaccessible to just about everybody by requiring so much of its audience.  And in a way, I’m happy that they thought enough of me to subject me to this monster, knowing that I could take it or leave it, but if I wanted to take it, I would have to EARN it.

This movie questions my worth to be part of its audience.  After years of being underestimated by movies, it’s nice to be challenged so blatantly.  The only question that remains is, do you want to take them up on their challenge?  Do you want to sit through a three hour movie and watch beauty and loss and pain and joy and everything else that makes up one man’s life?  Do you want to care this much about one guy?  If you do, then go.  Go and get a copy of The Curious Case of Benjamin Button.  If not, well, there’s plenty else for you out there.  You can get two, most of three movies into that same place.  But none of them will be quite like what you could have had with Benjamin Button.

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