Why Benjamin Button = Forrest Gump

...and why Forrest was a lot cooler.

I suppose a spoiler warning is necessary here. Consider this your spoiler warning.

We've got two boys growing up in the south. They both have something different about them--Benny is aging backward, and Forrest is dumb. They're both raised by mothers, not fathers. They both live a big house where they have guests staying with them. An old lady teaches Benny the piano, and Elvis teaches Forrest how to dance (or the other way around.) There's a big dramatic moment where Forrest breaks out of his leg braces and runs like a mo-fo. There's a big dramatic moment where Benny steps out of his wheelchair and walks... like an old man. They both meet their sweethearts as children.

Then they grow up. Forrest goes off to war, then becomes a shrimp boat captain (with ping-pong in between.) Benny works on a tug boat, then goes off to war (affair with married woman in between.) Meanwhile, their sweethearts go off and become hippies. The respective couples meet on and off again throughout their lives, until eventually they end up happy together. Yay. In Benny's story, the hummingbird symbolizes resurrection/regeneration;

in Forrest's, you have the feather which represents (essentially) the same thing.

Obviously some of those are stretches. But in general--they're both epic, semi-historical films of a romance through time told mostly in flashback, and that's the biggest similarity.

I like Forrest Gump better because I felt more for his character and more for the relationship between him and Jenny. When Forrest tries to propose to Jenny, she tells him, "You don't even know what love is." But Forrest denies that, saying, "I may not be a smart man, but I do know what love is." He stands up for himself and the love he has for his girl. Benjamin doesn't, or at least I didn't see him do it. He's more of a go with the flow kind of guy. When he goes to the party with Cate Blanchett, he realizes that he doesn't belong there, and so he just leaves (or tries to.) He never fights for her, never writes her a stack of letters that are returned. (He did for a while with the postcards, but then he stopped.) Anyway, I was never fully convinced that there was anything between them. (I'm not trying to say that the relationship was bad, that no one could be convinced, only that I wasn't convinced. I'm explaining my personal dissatisfaction, in other words.)

THAT BEING SAID, if I had to give Benny a thumbs up or thumbs down I'd give him a thumbs up. The similarities to Forrest Gump don't necessarily make the film worse (in my eyes), they were just a little distracting. The film was quite well made and (although a lot of people disagree) I didn't feel like it was dragging at all. I didn't feel like I had just wasted 3 hours of my life at the end of it. The hurricane bugged me though. I suppose its purpose was a time reference, but it was brought up so often I thought it would actually serve a greater purpose, which it didn't.

(I discovered just now that I really like parentheses.)

In other news, I finished Kafka on the Shore, by Haruki Murakami yesterday. It was a lot like Heart of Darkness, only it had a plot. I, er, think I liked it.

I want to go back to college. The end.