I sat down to see The Curious Case of Benjamin Button with huge expectations. Somehow all the commercials had made me truly believe I was about to see something epic. This is usually a bad thing. Sports teams, movies, local bands or anything else I try to focus my short attention span on usually crash and burn when I expect them to be great. (Or I’m told by others they’re great.) In the glorious, and quite curious case, of this movie, it was all that I expected and then some.

The movie, which tells the entire life story of a man who is born with the body of an 80-year-old and as his mind grows normally his body ages backward, was directed beautifully by David Fincher, whose genius can be explained simply by saying that he pulled off a scene between a man who looked to be a shriveled up 72-year-old and a cute playful, 8-year-old girl and not only made it innocent but almost made it romantic.

The characters were beautifully cast, with Cate Blanchett as the love interest, Daisy, and Thomas Flemying as the biological father who leaves him after birth but catches up later. If you don’t know who plays Benjamin Button, you are obviously not a real person, and this site is not called Real Reviews for Odd Things Living In The Woods. I would just say you’ve been living in a cave, but even Osama bin Laden knows Brad Pitt stars in this movie.

The scene stealer in my shamelessly biased opinion was Taraji P. Henson, who plays Queenie, the woman who finds Benjamin on the doorstep of the retirement home she runs and raises him as her son. Henson has been one of my favorite actresses since I saw her in Baby Boy and is most well-known for playing the pregnant prostitute who reluctantly sings the hook for the song, “It’s Hard Out Here For a Pimp” in Hustle&Flow. Although that movie was a favorite of mine, and deserved the Oscar attention it got, this movie should bring Henson to the mass and, lets be honest, more diverse audience she deserves.

The movie is also littered with other great characters, such as Tylda Swinton’s Elizabeth Abbot, a woman stuck in Russia for reasons she can’t control and stewing over her dashed dream of being the first woman to swim across the English Channel. Captain Mike, played beautifully by Jared Harris, was another character that played a shorter role than others but made such an impact the movie couldn’t have been done without him.

The thing that made this movie such a curious case for me was an ongoing relationship it held in my mind with another movie: Forrest Gump. As I began seeing actual commercials for this movie I had heard about while they were filming , I remember leaning over and telling whatever sad friend was sitting next to me and putting up with my drunken blabber, “That movie looks like it could do to the first half of the 20^th century what Forrest Gump did with the second half.” And maybe it was for this reason that I so quickly began picking up the similarities.

The characters were the main sticking point to this argument I began formulating as I watched. From the similarities between watching Daisy and Queenie grow old, just as we watched Jenny and Sally Field’s mother character grow in Forrest Gump, to the long, Southern drawl of the two main characters. Also, the significance of correspondence between the love interests (postcards) and the way in which historic news was broken to the main characters through news broadcasts truly cemented my belief that someone pulling the strings back there had something to do with, “Run, Forrest, RUN!!” And alas, I come to find out that the screenplay was written by Eric Roth, best known for the screenplay for everyone’s favorite movie quote manufacturer.

This is, when all is said and done, not a bad thing. And the similarities are noticeable but it is far from a rehashing of the Gump story thrown in a different era and given a strange plot twist.

The cinematographer of The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Claudio Miranda, deserves a shout out for beautiful scenes, most memorable being the scene in which Benjamin Button is brought in a preacher’s tent and “healed” in front of the congregation, and the shuttle lift-off witnessed by Ben and Daisy in Florida, which has been shown in most of the ads.

As much as I would love to sit here and continue to ramble on about the symbolism, used by Fincher purposely or not, throughout the movie, such as the significance of women removing their shoes and the hilarious character who keeps telling Ben the stories of all seven times he’s been struck by lightning, but this review has gotten far too ridiculous. Hopefully, you walk away from this review thinking what I was thinking when I left Benjamin Button, “Man, that was long…..but it had to be.” And David Fincher used every minute perfectly.