Good call on spoilers tag.

Feel-good movie? Guess we experienced it very differently. To me, he could have stayed. He could’ve been a good father til the age that he got senile and a child at the same time, and died. Perhaps he left to spare them that pain. But, ha, he ended up coming back anyway! And she had to look after him anyway!

So, moot really. He just deprived her of his best years, and his daughter of her real father. Is nonsensical to me. Stay. She doesn’t have to raise him, he’s not becoming a child in his mind, only in his body. She can’t look past that? She told him she could- he should have gambled on that.

If he was really serious about remembering them as they were- he should never have gone back at all. That was cruel. At least have the balls to follow through on your abandonment. Instead he got lonely and returned, screwing it all up. Weak. Forcing her to look after him- weak. What a burden on her.

I would say Benjamin choosing to leave was an act of love, if not quite heroic, noble nonetheless. Daisy herself even later admits it was the right thing to do. No doubt Benjamin felt sad every day, he even wrote that he thought of them every day and later told Daisy he never stopped loving her.

He left because he wanted to go out on top so to speak. Remember in the dance studio when they were “about the same age” and Benjamin took Daisy to his side and told her that he wants to remember this moment just as we are. He knew things could never get better than that.

He also knew his child would need a real father, which he stated several times.

As we saw, in just a few years Benjamin had become a teenager, and then an adolescent both physically and mentally. At most maybe a few more years he could have been a good father, but like he said, he didn’t want the baby to be old enough to remember him and thus not have the memory of him leaving.

I loved how Daisy took care of the young-child Benjamin like a mother when once she was his lover and wife. I thought that was very kind of her and unquestionably a unique story line.

I felt good after the movie. I’d even go so far as to call it a feel-good movie.

I didn’t buy the third act, nor the message that you can change your life- not because I don’t think it’s true, but because I don’t think it was true here for Benjamin. The choice he made that sped us towards the end I just didn’t believe. He was the happiest he’d ever been. I believe that every day of his life after he made that choice- he’d be second-guessing it, regretting it. How could he forget what he’d left behind, it was his whole life, and he didn’t HAVE to leave.

I thought it was the coward’s way out, actually. He refused to suck up that it might be hard. Declare yourself, get it out in the open, and then get on with your life. He didn’t have to run away. Why would she have to raise him? Ludicrous. They couldn’t just look past the physical? Weak.

So everything after that point felt wrong to me, and just too damn miserable, a self-inflicted pain that didn’t have to be.

As for Forrest Gump, I definitely felt the same, though I rather think Gump the superior movie. Button had so much in common, the unusual life lived to the full, a battle scene and heroism, a crazy tugboat captain, a love that cannot be, a grand sweeping canvas, the concern about a baby born with the same defect, some grand sunsets, and a catch-phrase from the character’s mother- in Button something like- ‘you never know what’s coming’, repeated several times, and in Gump the infamous- ‘life is like a box of chocolates, you never know what you’re going to get’.

Same, no?

Only difference is, Gump ends well, with bold heroism, and misery only brought through acts beyond the principals control. Button has misery brought by the main characters, because of their fear, and ends in lonely and empty death.

Plus there are the gimmicks- stuff stolen from the sequences in Magnolia where coincedences are spelled out- like the ‘Green Bow Lane’ thing, or the kid shot by suicide. In Button it’s the history of the clock at the start, or the dramatizing of the lead female having an accident. all that build-up was irrelevant really. It didn’t matter, just a stylistic foible.

So, an interesting movie, but for me ultimately disappointing. I’d have ended it differently, with sadness sure, but also heroism and love, not quitting prematurely.