SOME MOVIES wait until their final moments to make their strongest impression, often helping you come away liking one you didn’t particularly enjoy all the way through. For a film as long as The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (almost three hours), the running time—and of course the poignant conclusion—is plenty to keep your mind off the slow-moving, slightly wooden first hour.

Benjamin Button is born to a well-to-do button maker in post-World War I New Orleans, wreaking instant havoc on his family: physically on his mother, who dies giving birth; emotionally on his father, who leaves him on the steps of a bed and breakfast-style retirement home to be found by a young black woman who works there. She accepts him immediately, believing he’s “special,” and Benjamin spends his “elderly” childhood happily puttering around with the old folks in the huge, historic house where his mother works. He often plays with a little girl—the china doll with brilliant red hair named Daisy that grows up into Cate Blanchett—who often comes to the home to visit her grandmother.

The opening act feels better than it is because the story’s concept is so novel. Adapted by Eric Roth (Forrest Gump, Munich) from a short story by F. Scott Fitzgerald, Button follows the bizarre backward trajectory of its titular character (a CGI-modified Brad Pitt), a man born old who becomes younger every day. Daisy narrates the film from her deathbed, sharing the story with her shocked daughter as Katrina roars outside the window. That narrative structure feels belabored until, somewhere about hour two, we finally have a grip on the characters and are beginning to feel something for them. Despite Pitt’s mostly uninspired acting in the scenes where he’s an arthritis-ridden, gray-haired 7-year-old, the implications of his predicament are so vast and fascinating that the movie’s unhurried beginning allows ample time to adjust to this odd world.

When Benjamin Button sails off to war with a tugboat man, the movie takes on the deeply colorful, atmospheric visual style that helped pack Fincher’s other films (Fight Club, Se7en) with an intense dread. Only Benjamin Button isn’t about underground anarchists or well-read serial killers, so that vividness—leafy streets of New Orleans, a snowy hotel in Russia, picturesque scenes of Paris—injects this movie with an adventurous sense of style and flourish. The always-stunning Tilda Swinton doesn’t hurt things, either (she plays the boringly married traveler with whom Benjamin has a fling while they’re both staying at a remote, wintry Russian hotel). Since Benjamin’s unorthodox childhood that deprived him of many natural learning experiences, it stands to reason that he’d be a bit of a “blank slate”—the way Pitt plays him through the film’s first half—waiting for interesting, well-traveled people to leave deep impressions upon him. When Swinton’s character abandons him abruptly, he’s perplexed but unbroken, grateful for the memories and eager to move forward.

Benjamin’s endless optimism makes this movie—much of which unfolds in mortality’s looming shadow—such an uplifting experience. He’s genuinely surprised when he runs up against cold selfishness, the state of existence in which he finds Daisy, now a world-famous dancer, when he grows young enough to pursue her. Pitt could be (fairly) charged with dull acting, but I read it as an effective interpretation of the easy-going, Southern-drawl personality Benjamin would have certainly developed around his warm adopted mother and the slow-moving existences of the elderly. Either way, his undaunted steadiness is an effective foil to Daisy’s flighty, bohemian self-absorption, and it’s that very quality that changes her mind about him.

As the story becomes complete engrossing, even the interspersed scenes with Daisy’s daughter reading Benjamin’s journal at her bedside begin to tie neatly into the final act, casting a revelatory light back on scenes that felt obligatory when they first passed. When the grim shadows of time fall on Benjamin and Daisy’s happy relationship, and Benjamin Button goes into its tear-jerking final scenes, the existential questions don’t pile up as much as they seem unimportant. Despite the fact that we’re looking at a handsome 18-year old, we’re aware Benjamin has lived a full, rewarding life, and we’re only seeing a time we knew would come. The jarring juxtaposition of the aged Daisy and the reinvigorated Pitt is a visual shock with a philosophical purpose: when life happens backward, there’s something about the certainty of death (foreshadowed since the first scenes) that feels both heartbreakingly tragic and completely unsurprising.

The existential issues in Benjamin Button are nothing more than a natural outgrowth of the story—they don’t get repeated ad nauseum and morphed into didactic “themes.” It’s that restraint that makes this movie so much better than its competitors in the current Oscar race. And its adept storytelling—never once veering into sentimentality or romanticism—is what makes it so much better than the expensively produced dramas that enjoy box-office success the rest of the year. Fincher is right to insist that Benjamin Button isn’t his “romantic” movie. It’s nothing of the kind. It’s a movie about death that turns away hopeful from a long, unflinching look at reality. And we all know how much we could use some of that right now.