Directed by Tim Burton. 125 minutes.
Starring Ewan McGregor, Albert
Finney, Billy Crudup, Jessica Lange, Danny DeVito, Alison Lohman, Helena
Bonham Carter, and Steve Buscemi. Released
by
Tim Burton gets to have his cake and eat it too with Big
Fish, his latest film, adapted from the book by Daniel Wallace. The
director, known mostly for his technologically superior visual fantasies, gets
to take his shot at a serious film with Fish, which was
originally supposed to be directed by Steven Spielberg, while at the same time
employing the visuals that have helped secure his career this far. The movie is
a mixture of fantasy and dramatics and it mostly works,
For my money, I’ll just lay it out on the line here- Ed Wood is still Burton’s masterpiece. However, Fish is my nomination for runner up. In the film, he is able to slyly give his audience the pretense that he is growing up, which Spielberg has done gradually over the years with a variety of films, though he deftly sneaks fantastical elements all throughout the film. The visual style here is quite wonderful. The sets and costumes look nearly as obsessively thought-out as those in Burton’s Sleepy Hollow, Edward Scissorhands, or Planet of the Apes, which most will agree was the best part of that film, but at the same time hold a slight camp element to them. It’s almost as if they are too bizarre even for Burton.
The film’s lead character, Edward Bloom (Ewan McGregor, then a wonderful Albert Finney), is sort of a Forrest Gump without any learning disabilities. He seems to be at the right place at the right time, gaining multiple achievements at the turn of every corner. Or is he? That is the mystery that his son, William (Billy Crudup), seeks to uncover. Edward is the constant center of attention at every family function, which we see at the film’s beginning as William makes an announcement of his engagement. Edward (Finney) takes over the room, telling one of his infamously elaborate tales of how he once caught an enormous fish. William is angered that his father stole his night and the two do not speak for three years. Only Sandy (Jessica Lange), William’s mother and Edward’s wife, remains a bridge between the two men via telephone. Then Edward gets sick.
William comes home to help tend to his ailing father and hopes, in the process, to get a sense of who his father really is and why he was missing for much of William’s childhood. It would seem that he gets nowhere. Edward merely recaps the same old stories that William has heard for years- of giants, witches, big fish, how he meet Sandy, and his war stories, all of which are exaggerated to the point where no one really seems to believe them, but continue to listen anyway out of sheer amusement. In these flashbacks, which take up much of the film, McGregor plays young Edward, who comes into contact with a variety of interesting characters who all meet up towards the film’s end for a surprisingly magical and effective moment. There is Helena Bonham Carter as both a witch and a young woman who inhabits one of the towns where Bloom ventures. Alison Lohman plays the young Sandy. Steve Buscemi plays a poet who ends up being the victim of one of the film’s more charming punchlines. And Danny DeVito pops up as a circus owner who takes young Bloom under his wing, kind of.
Though it starts off well, the early stages of the film leave you thinking that Burton is going for straight fantasy here. There is nothing to allude to what comes along later in the film when Crudup speaks with his father both at home and in the hospital. These early scenes are charming, funny, occasionally creepy, always bizarre, and strangely light-hearted for a Burton film. McGregor does well here, sort of channeling the spirits of the character he played in Down With Love, but performing much better here. It is Finney that steals the show as old Bloom and it is without much of a doubt that he will be nominated for his work in the film. Crudup does well too, however, one of the film’s few problems, perhaps, is that we do not see him enough or learn enough about him to make his later revelations seem as relevant.
Nevertheless, Big Fish is a good example of a creative director, mostly confined to special effects extravaganzas, his last one somewhat lacking, often accused of choosing visual content over thematic content, finding a small personal story and turning into something special. The film uses all of the typical Burton techniques, in some instances more so than in his other films, but uses them to add up to something other than just two hours of entertainment. The film’s final moments are when everything comes together, much more so than I expected it might. William does learn something about his father and so do we. In a sense, we learn something about how to learn about others and how to recognize the aspects of the personality that truly make up the people we know. Big Fish is at once a personal movie for its director, a special effects show, and a poignant story that is grounded in the everyday, mundane world where little peculiarities and elements of magic are present if we look closely enough for them.