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Big Fish review
2004.03.01 — Entertainment | Movies | Movie Reviews | by Andrew Cole
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Ewan McGregor makes friends with a giant. [official site] |
Ed Bloom is a dying man who has lived a full life. Poor William just wants to get to know his father before it's too late, but the old man has nothing but tall tales and fish stories for the young man in Big Fish.
Albert Finney plays the dying Edward Bloom and Billy Crudup his son, with Ewan McGregor as the young Edward in fantasy flashbacks involving giants, fish, and more. A passel of A-list characters support, including Jessica Lange, Helena Bonham Carter, Steve Buscemi, and Danny Devito. They all play southerners, so of course Hollywood logic demands that the actors all be British or at least yankees.
The film is directed by Tim Burton, who gave us Pee Wee's Big Adventure, Beetlejuice, Batman, and Edward Scissorhands (but, most recently, Planet of the Apes). It is adapted from a Daniel Wallace novel by screenwriter John August, the "genius" behind both Charlie's Angels movies (but also the underrated Go).
Ahh, but I know what you're thinking: did Danny Elfman do the music? Yes!
Since it's a Tim Burton movie, expect childlike men and things that are simultaneously creepy and funny. This movie has it in spades. It follows young Edward on his journey thru life, meeting strange characters and having fantastic adventures, all safe in the knowledge—gained as a small boy by looking into the magic eye of a witch—of exactly how he will eventually die.
His son sees him as a blowhard, always taking over the conversation, always becoming the center of attention, even foisting his tales on the son's pregnant wife from his deathbed. This has created tension between them his whole life, and he just wants to get past it.
But the younger Bloom finds that to get past the stories, he must embrace them and accept the magic world that his father lives in—and accept that he lives in it too. For, in the end, he finds that his father's tales weren't so awfully loony. And the joke is on him....
There are places here and there in the narrative that double-back on themselves and don't make sense in the larger context of the story (the perfect little town that appears, thematically, to be heaven, for example but returns in another form). The characters make an effort to explain this away, but it's clumsy. It's the sort of explanation you find on movie message boards when one person insightfully questions a plot point and another clumsily replies: "Get over it; it's just a movie."
Burton does a more masterful job here than on virtually any of his other films I've seen. There's little here that's crazy just for the sake of being crazy, yet it adheres to Burton's fantasy that there's a whole other world of fantastic wonder just around the corner from your little tract house in the suburbs or in the woods just outside your hometown. If you only knew....
The acting, despite the strained accents, is marvelous. Warmth and sincerity ooze from the screen. It's all tainted by the melancholy of watching Finney's character die, of course, but die on his own terms, and that's heartening.
f e e d b a c k
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