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Early in the The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, a New Orleans clockmaker and his wife see their son off at the train station. The boy is leaving to serve in the First World War, never to be seen again..

And while it isn't until later, over breakfast with his wife, that the man receives a letter informing him of his son's death, he immediately begins work on a new clock for the station, driven by an impulse we don't yet understand.

Cate Blanchett and Brad Pitt star in The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. - photo courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures

At the unveiling, the attendees stares in confusion and disbelief: the immaculately-designed clock runs backward, not forward. "It was built this way," the man says, saying nothing more.

Then we are propelled into a vision, or maybe a dream: soldiers - once seen marching in advance over the muddy terrain of some European theatre of battle - begin to sway backwards in motion, retracing their steps in an odd ballet, defying physics. Their broken limbs reattach themselves - their lives come together again. The slate has been wiped clean. The boy lives.

Nothing that follows in The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, directed with uncanny precision by David Fincher (Seven, Fight Club, Zodiac), matches this sequence in emotional power and visual poetry. Perhaps it's because these sequence manages to convey the film's key message so succinctly, while the remainder of the film - impressively mounted as it is - frequently works against itself, until a point.

The problem is the script, written by Forrest Gump scribe Eric Roth, which inevitably invites comparison to that 1994 hit about a man, a park bench and a box of chocolates. The similarities between the two films can't be ignored, and that's a problem.

Like Gump, Button - about a man named Benjamin (Brad Pitt) who is born old and grows younger over time - is framed as a series of encounters with oddly endearing characters who teach him lessons about life, death and everything in between.

That's fine, but for the first half of the film, as Benjamin grows from a creaky, wheelchair-bound old man to a more sprightly, later-middled aged world traveller, the encounters - each one culminating in some folksy idiom like "You never know what's coming for you" - become tiresome, nearly bringing the film to a dead, premature (or middle-aged) halt.

But then the real story begins, as Benjamin is reunited with the woman meant, by some strange logic, to be his soulmate: blue-eyed ballerina Daisy (Cate Blanchett), whom Benjamin firsts meets as a lively five-year-old girl while he's whittling his days away at a nursing home, where death is a constant presence.

Once the film strips itself of its come-what-may beginnings, the romantic attraction between Daisy and Benjamin becomes the emotional through-line of the film. But the circumstances of their relationship - he grows younger by the day, while she naturally gives way to age - do not permit them a life of bliss. Instead they settle for a very concentrated period of happiness until one of them realizes it can't possibly last forever.

This is where the film delves into some very difficult territory and its true, fatalistic outlook begins to emerge. David Fincher is nothing if not uncompromising, and a less courageous filmmaker would have conceived of some contrivance to bring Daisy and Benjamin's troubled existences into harmony. But this is not that kind of film.

So big are the ambitions, I had to see it twice to take it all in. The first time, I marvelled at its sheer scope and beauty. It takes in nearly a century of American life, from the beginning of the Great War to the early days of Hurricane Katrina, when, Daisy, on her deathbed, looks back on Benjamin's curious life and her role in it.

But the film left me a little cold, perhaps because Daisy and Benjamin's relationship seems, on the surface, based purely on lust. I blame Roth's flimsy screenplay, but also Brad Pitt's inability to convey any sense of inner life. Perhaps the makeup weighed him down.

During a second viewing, I was more forgiving of the film's flaws and began to suspect that Pitt's reserve was a calculation on Fincher's part, meant to telegraph the film's central message: "Time - you never get it back."