The other night, once the roads had cleared up enough for safe driving, my wife and I went out to celebrate a few milestones in our life — our birthdays and our 35th wedding anniversary. We went for dinner at Milestones, an appropriate Christmas gift from a colleague of mine, and then to the Colossus cineplex for a movie.

I was taken aback when the cineplex clerk asked if we were senior citizens and qualified for the discount. After all it seems like only yesterday I was flattered when a bartender asked me for ID while I was in my 30s.

As I blurted out a confused “no” my wife nudged me and said to the clerk, “Yes, I am.” And I remembered that, yes, she had just entered her senior years as of her recent birthday. And I’m not far behind her.

And I suppose it was only apropos that we settled on seeing the new “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” flick. Based loosely on an F. Scott Fitzgerald short story, it’s about a couple’s life from birth to death, albeit in this story the male lead (Brad Pitt as Benjamin Button) lives his life backwards. Benjamin Button is born an old man and eventually dies as a baby in his wife’s arms.

I was intrigued by the concept as I had been enthralled by a Martin Amis novel, “Time’s Arrow”, which employed a similar literary device, and I was curious as to how the filmmakers would pull this feat off. In Amis’s book, everything is reversed, including conversations, and once I wrapped my head around it, surprisingly, it pulled me in deeper.

In Amis’s story, Tod Friendly is a doctor who is initially baffled as to why happy, healthy children arrive at his clinic and leave as shrieking and deathly sick patients. As he travels further back in time he starts to see some meaning in his life when, as an assistant to Dr. Mengeles, he raises Jews from the dead at Auschwitz, then sees them released, healthy and free, to the Warsaw Ghetto.

Amis takes an unorthodox approach to examine the meaning of life, and like Oscar Wilde’s “The Picture of Dorian Gray” it has a strong Faustian theme.

I was not so impressed with the film version of Benjamin Button, however. It had some sublime moments, and I could hardly help but cheer when Tilda Swinton’s character realized her lifelong dream of swimming the English Channel. But too often the film plodded along painfully and it was far too lengthy at close to three hours.

And all too often the pathos turned into bathos.

Sylvia didn’t mind the movie as she enjoys watching Brad Pitt (and I can’t fault her for that as she doesn’t object to my collection of Angelina Jolie DVDs) but I should have taken her to see “Marley and Me” instead.

I was skeptical of seeing any movie with Owen Wilson and Jennifer Aniston in it, but while visiting my son’s family in Hamilton at Christmas I treated my daughter-in-law to the film because she not only is a dog fan (Marley is a huge yellow Labrador retriever) she had also enjoyed the book, written by journalist John Grogan.

While I found it hard to visualize the botoxed and plasticized Aniston as a 20-year-old at the beginning of the film, that was my only criticism of it. Both Aniston’s and Wilson’s characters were real people, not so different from you and me, on the road to find out the meaning of their lives together — as a couple who work their way through their foibles and faults to a lasting and deep love, as parents of boisterous children who grow up all too quickly, and of course, as owners of an incorrigible dog who’s just doing what comes naturally to a dog brain.

I suspect just about all of us have owned a dog just like Marley. And I’m certain that all of us live lives not very different from the characters based on Grogan’s family.

In the end you don’t have to go that far, or far out, to find meaning in your life — it’s right there in front of your face.

But if that thinking doesn’t satisfy you, I liked the way a woman put it on the radio the other day: “Most of us spend all our days searching for the meaning of life, and a few of us find it just before we die. Therefore, be happy if you’re still searching.”