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Big Fish
**1/2
Cinema
Review - February 23, 2004
Rated on a 4-star scale. Certificate PG. USA.
125 minutes. Directed by Tim Burton. Produced by Bruce Cohen, Dan Jinks,
Richard D. Januck. Written by John August; from the novel by Daniel Wallace.
Starring Ewan McGregor, Albert Finney, Billy Crudup, Jessica Lange, Alison
Lohman, Helena Bonham Carter, Robert Guillaume, Marion Cotillard, Matthew
McGrory, David Denman, Missi Pyle, Loudon Wainwright III, Ada Tai, Arlene
Tai, Steve Buscemi, Danny DeVito.
According to Tim Burton, the making of this movie
helped him work out issues -- issues about the death of his father, who passed
on just before Burton received this script. I find this touching, but also
surprising: The story of the movie is disjointed and unaffecting, and what
we remember are all the little moments, for their visual splendour, their
joyful flights of fancy.
Billy Crudup plays a journalist whose father (Albert
Finney) is on the verge of death. The man and the boy have had hard times
of late; daddy used to tell great stories, the kid ate them up, and then
he grew into adulthood and realised he didn't know who his father really
was. Crudup resents the old man: He's always hogging the limelight, going
on and on with the same old fantasy anecdotes, and as far as the son is
concerned, he never lets anyone in.
Please, dad, tell me who you really are. Well,
of course, this is a case of not seeing the forest for the trees: What he
is is a guy who tells big stories. But Crudup can't settle for that, as much
as he wants to feel the love. The movie cuts between the present and the
past… or the present and the imagination, as the family tries to resolve
its issues and we see recreations of Finney's grand
adventures.
The younger Finney is played by Ewan McGregor,
in a performance where his glazed-over eyes and phoney Alabama accent did
not annoy me, but helped add to a feeling of dreamy largesse. It's as if
these adventures have too much gusto to look us straight in the eye -- they're
off on their own tangent, and we just have to go with the swooping, rushing
flow. Sure enough, they're beautiful: McGregor plays a young free spirit
who rescues a friendly giant from the clutches of a fearful town, who meets
an oracle witch and sees his own future, who discovers a town called Spectre
where every day is perfect and the folk walk barefoot while munching apple
pie. Burton's shots are crowded with bouncy, energetic, full-bodied colours
-- he sweeps around his camera and revels in McGregor's grin, he shows us
a field of yellow flowers when the guy proposes to his sweetheart, he has
a circus literally stop in time, with popcorn suspended in the air and the
gaze of a beautiful girl paused over there like the moment is not meant to
end.
Scene to scene, "Big Fish" is all
good. I got involved, admired its beauty. But how did Burton think that the
film would come together? Aside from the way Finney and McGregor seem to
play totally different personalities, there's an uncertainty about how to
take the tall tale flashbacks in terms of an overall context. Did they really
happen? Does it matter? Are we okay to be having fun with them when the movie
makes the point that they messed up Crudup's mind? Not that the modern-day
story works too well in itself -- it doesn't seem real-world enough to provide
a contrast to the whimsy, and I don't understand how Crudup becomes so forgiving
in the end. What is the significance of what Helena Bonham Carter tells him?
At the end it seems like he decides, what the hey, stories are fun -- and
that's just what everyone has been telling him all along.
Nonetheless, the last sequence has a surprising
power in its own right, and it's hard to look on "Big Fish" with anything
but affection when it looks so fluffy and tries to hard to please. I kinda
liked it, although to quote my flatmate, "It ain't 'Forrest
Gump'."
COPYRIGHT©
2004 Ian Waldron-Mantgani
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