Born to a woman who died during childbirth, Benjamin is left on the steps of a retirement home by his despondent father Thomas (Jason Flemyng), who has discovered that his son is afflicted with a bizarre condition that leaves the infant looking wrinkled and decrepit. He is discovered by Queenie (Taraji P. Henson), a caretaker at the facility, and she raises him as her own son. Both Queenie and Benjamin soon realize that the young man is aging in reverse—a discovery that enchants his playmate Daisy (also Blanchett) but disturbs others, who can see him only as an old man.

Restless after a childhood spent with Queenie and her elderly charges, Benjamin embarks on an adventure with a tugboat captain (Jared Harris), who introduces him to life on the open seas, the charms of women, and eventually, World War II. After a fling with the wife (Tilda Swinton) of a foreign dignitary, Benjamin returns home to Queenie realizing that the affection he previously felt for Daisy has matured into true love. Though Daisy is initially otherwise romantically occupied, a series of near misses eventually throw the two of them together again, and Benjamin begins to understand that finding love is a matter of knowing not merely who you want to be with, but when.

A synthesis of style and substance

A film with the epic scope of a crowd-pleaser but the subtlety of an introspective character study, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button is at once intimate and sweeping, and one of the year's very best films. Fincher, perfectly balancing his own idiosyncratic style with clear-eyed, straightforward and (maybe most importantly) mainstream-friendly storytelling, shapes F. Scott Fitzgerald’s source material into a work that synthesizes his two strongest impulses—technical excellence and visionary creativity—into a masterpiece about the value of love, loss and life.

As evidenced by the subject matter of almost all of his films—from Alien 3 to Se7en to The Game, and especially last year's spectacular Zodiac—emotional catharsis, rather than triumph, has always seemed to be David Fincher's artistic goal. While the same can certainly be said about The Curious Case of Benjamin Button—it ends on a note of thoughtful melancholy instead of cheerful victory—it's absolutely his sweetest and most romantic movie to date, if one no more sentimental than its predecessors. Reimagined by Eric Roth from Fitzgerald's short story of the same name, Fincher's latest sincerely believes in the notions that make real relationships meaningful, but without the manufactured drama or manipulative treacle of most movie love stories—which comes as no small achievement for a film about a man whose entire life is largely fantasy.

The special effects are remarkable to behold, mainly because they're almost invisible; the first hour or so features a powerfully authentic performance by Brad Pitt as a seamlessly frail and diminutive old-young man. Amazingly, however, it's Fincher's camerawork, not computer-generated trickery, that holds this film together, because he transforms the film into a sort of travelogue that deconstructs our collective memories in terms of specifically cinematic rather than generally historical generations.

Because most of the film is told in anecdotes and flashbacks, each segment is represented by the filmic era from which it would have emerged: a retiree's memories of being struck by lightning in the early 1900s are shot like hand-cranked silent films, '60s-born Caroline imagines Benjamin's travails with the grainy realism of 1970s cinema, and so on. Perhaps obviously, the film's structure owes a great debt to screenwriter Roth, who similarly (if more conspicuously) chronicled pop culture in Forrest Gump. But it's to Fincher's exclusive credit that Benjamin Button weaves these visual hallmarks inextricably into the fabric of the film, so they're visible to those interested in looking deeper but unobtrusive in the context of the actual story.

When David Fincher graduated from music videos to motion pictures with 1993's Alien 3, few could have predicted he would be capable of the kind of contemplative, resonant work with which he's now associated. After his early work demonstrated his facility for crafting masterful, even transcendent films within the strictures of genre conventions and more recent ones showed he was equally committed to servicing the demands of real stories, no matter how potentially uncinematic, Fincher seems to have reconciled the two halves of his directorial personality with Benjamin Button: The film manages to be both gorgeous and intelligent, finding substance in style (and vice versa) and achieving a poetry that binds the two in a harmonious and meaningful way that should resonate with both cinefiles and casual moviegoers.