The Curious Case of Benjamin Button

You know this is something special when the very first image is the Paramount (followed by the Warner Brothers) logo formed by buttons dropping though the air. Originally a short story by F. Scott Fitzgerald that appeared in Collier's Magazine in the early 1920s, this is a story where a man is born as an elderly man and ages backwards. The spectre of death follows Benjamin Button during his life. In the Fitzgerald story Button grows up during the Civil War era while the film sets the story in the 20th century.
As an aside it should be noted that since the film opened on Christmas Day the movie is being reported by the weak-kneed media as a Brad Pitt movie versus the Jennifer Anniston movie Marley & Me. Neither is further from the truth but the media never gets the story correct anyway. Marley & Me is a dog movie and the actors are the supporting bananas while Benjamin Button is a David Fincher movie from start to finish. You know you are being digitally manipulated with every frame yet you cannot look away.
Yes, Brad Pitt stars as does Cate Blanchett and the film opens on her as an elderly woman dying in a New Orleans hospital on the eve of Hurricane Katrina. The story unfolds as a flashback by Blanchett. This device is aided by the old lady's copy of Button's diary, as read to her on her death bed by her daughter (Julia Ormond).
Button (Pitt) is abandoned by his father who considers the old looking baby a freak, and grows up in an old folks home nurtured by Queenie (Taraji P. Henson) a kindly woman who finds the baby cradled in a blanket on her doorstep. The stooped over young Button can barely walk and with his arthritic stance fits in with the home's elderly occupants. It's here he first meets Daisy (Blanchett) herself a fair-haired child. Throughout the film their paths cross but he's always getting younger while she's aging naturally.
Benjamin Button unreels with sheer beauty in all departments, although it's interesting to note that the film was shot digitally and may be the first film to so completely combine elements of analog emotion and computer enhanced precision. At one point Pitt walks into the frame as a man in his late 50s and you'll swear it's the same guy you saw in Thelma and Louise nearly 20 years ago.
As accomplished as Button is your humble scribe feels that Fincher's true masterpiece is his previous film Zodiac. That won't stop The Curious Case of Benjamin Button from totally sweeping awards from guilds and critics groups for the next couple of months.