Benjamin Button (Brad Pitt, left) loves Daisy (Cate Blanchett) in the Curious Case of Benjamin Button. (Paramount Pictures)

At birth, Benjamin Button (Brad Pitt) is closer to death than life. He is born an old man, in the raisiny shape of an Eraserhead baby, and abandoned on the doorstep of a senior citizen’s home in New Orleans. He has cataracts, arthritis — all the agonies of a body that has lived, though he has yet to do so. But as he does, he will grow younger. It’s a compelling inversion, one that’s emotional as well as physical: What becomes of a person deeply acquainted with pain, loss and despair so long before adulthood?

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button is a strange and pleasant cocktail of quirk and consequence, with grand, real-world investigations of mortality and desire.

This big concept comes from a throwaway short story by F. Scott Fitzgerald, a modern flight of fancy that somehow landed in the hands of a filmic brute, David Fincher, maker of Fight Club and Zodiac. In his first attempt at “family friendly,” he spins Fitzgerald’s slim story into a century-spanning epic that vacillates between whimsy and foreboding and has almost nothing to do with the original, comical text. The result is a strange and pleasant cocktail of quirk and consequence, with grand, real-world investigations of mortality and desire only slightly muffled by a major charm offensive (platitudes; sweeping love story; southern wisdom) known in filmmaking circles as The Gump. With his seat on the sidelines of history, wide-eyed Benjamin bears more than a passing resemblance to that other Southern truth-teller, Forrest G., and no wonder: these two American films — fantasies of a piece — share a screenwriter, Eric Roth.

Button is born in 1918, at the end of the First World War. He has the curiosity of a child, though Pitt’s old-man, apple-doll head (makeup and software) is grafted onto the small, ailing body of another actor. The childhood milestones arrive for wee Benjamin, but in a different form: When he learns to walk, he rises from the seat of a wheelchair. Fincher takes his time setting the tone, and the first hour of the film is a languid stroll through Benjamin’s boyhood as a loved foundling adopted by a black worker (Taraji P. Henson) at the nursing home.

Pitt handles the part smartly by playing small; in his hobbled body, he emits a childlike eagerness, a sense of wonder that sits in a slightly dropped jaw and his alive, listening eyes. Benjamin is always learning, observing. He is inherently an outsider, an Edward Scissorhands drifting through the world absorbing other people’s stories and insights, as he yet has none of his own.

Benjamin Button (Brad Pitt, left) learns more about Elizabeth Abbott (Tilda Swinton). (Paramount Pictures)

The film accelerates as Benjamin grows younger: he lands in a navy battle in the Second World War, hits his first brothel, falls in love for the first time. All of this flies along to get us to the meat, the great love at the centre of his life, and her name is Daisy (Cate Blanchett). Sparks fly upon first encounter when Benjamin is an old man and Daisy a little girl visiting her grandmother in the old age home. Late one night, the two are hiding under the table with a candle, platonically enraptured, when they’re discovered. Benjamin gets a dressing-down: “You oughta be ashamed!” That shaming is a striking variation on the age-old theme of forbidden love; it made me think of gay teenagers, or anyone whose desire isn’t allowed to make sense in the world. The moment also taps into the story’s potent strain of disgust. There’s horror in a body gone awry, as well as wonder.

Finally, in middle age, these lifelong friends cross timelines, and become the defining love affair of each other’s lives. Daisy is a dancer (Blanchett is also technologically de-aged in her youth), patrician and a little abrasive. Benjamin, ever observant, watches her dance and adores her, but it’s not entirely clear why. She’s unbearably beautiful – almost as beautiful as him. (When Pitt’s character reaches the actor’s own 40-something age, the women around me literally gasped; no living actor could better embody the physical perfection the character requires). But frankly, Daisy is a vain, self-involved pain in the ass in any decade. Maybe she isn’t meant to be a full-on character; she’s a mirror for Benjamin, a living lesson in the virtue of patience.

There’s a funny push-pull between Fincher’s pricklier sensibility and Roth’s carpe diem optimism. The script often retreats to sentimentalism: “You never know what’s waiting for you” is this year’s “Life is like a box of chocolates.” But The Curious Case of Benjamin Button is, in the end, Fincher’s baby, enlivened not only by the director’s obsession with technical perfection — the reverse aging is seamless — but also by a kind of existentialist sadness that burrows deep into all his work.

The southern Gothic sets are coated in grey; the sky over Benjamin’s fishing boat looks as inky black and star-pocked as a planetarium dome. We are always one or two steps removed from the real world. The film opens with the heavy-handed story — shot in the flickering textures of a silent film — of a blind clockmaker (Elias Koteas) who builds a backwards-moving clock to return dead soldiers, like his son, from the grave.

Caroline (Julia Ormond, right) reads Benjamin Button's diary to her dying mother, Daisy (Cate Blanchett), in The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. (Paramount Pictures)

Fincher pulls off the magic realism that is the film’s engine. A kaleidoscopic, lengthy diversion about fate — what if the taxi wasn’t late; what if the guy wasn’t tying his shoe, etc. — has been done before in films like Magnolia and Amelie, but Fincher is such a deft filmmaker that the familiarity doesn’t matter. It’s simply a beautiful moment when a hummingbird appears in the middle of the Pacific Ocean and catches Benjamin’s eye, a reminder of the daily expressions of magic that go unnoticed, of which Benjamin is the biggest affirmation.

But the momentum of the film stalls over and over as we return to the recent present, where an ill and aged Daisy is on her deathbed in a New Orleans hospital. As her daughter (Julia Ormond) reads to her from Benjamin’s diary, and they work through some confusing mother-daughter stuff, Hurricane Katrina approaches. Another random freak of nature, just like Benjamin? Even as I was sniffling away — deathbed scenes, no matter how manipulative, tend to have an oniony effect— I kept wondering how the film would have felt without this cumbersome structure. I suspect its absence might have meant that we could get lost in Benjamin’s world a bit more, and I wanted that.

A much better romantic match for the laconic Benjamin is Elizabeth Abbott (Tilda Swinton), the “older” woman he falls in love with as a seaman (when Daisy is off-limits). She is a British diplomat’s wife stuck in a hotel in freezing cold Russia, and they meet only at night, eating caviar and discovering one another in an ice-encrusted town so dreamy they could be two figures wandering inside a snow globe. Swinton is marvelous; she seems attuned to Benjamin’s difference in a way that self-involved Daisy never is. She’s fascinated by him, but terrified, too. This brief Russian sequence is where the film feels most alive; jittery with imagination and originality, a transcending sequence in a disarming biography of wonder.

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button opens Dec. 25.

Katrina Onstad is a film columnist for CBCNews.ca.