It's interesting that Tim Burton, a director known for a distinctive and wildly imaginative visual but not for handling story well, would take on a movie about a storyteller. I suppose that means he's challenging himself. It also probably means that he bit off more than he could chew.
The movie is about Ed Bloom, a teller of tall tales. Give him a second and he'll be off on yet another tale about his youth that stretches credibility right to the breaking point and often beyond. He loves his stories so much he tells them over and over again. His son Will has long since lost any sense of wonder for those stories and now just feels embarassment. Will is working as a journalist in France when his mother calls him home with word that his father is dying. Will comes home determined. Not so much to reconcile with his father but to force him to finally tell the truth.
Ed is played by Albert Finney in the present and Ewan McGregor during the actual stories. The resemblance between the two is uncanny. It isn't at all unreasonable to envision McGregor aging into Finney. That sounds like a minor point but it really helps to be able to accept them as the same man on different ends of life. Similarly, Alison Lohman and Jessica Lange play the younger and older versions respectively of Ed's wife Sandra. Again the resemblance is strong enough to go down easy.
Clearly Burton has the most fun with the stories as they allow him to go wild with his imagination, pushing reality right to the edge, finding ways to incorporate fantastic elements while still managing to hold on to a kernel of truth. He doesn't actually go overboard though. He shows a lot of restraint in keeping even the wildest story tied to reality. What's really interesting is that when a character other than Ed gets to tell a story of Ed's life, it is still something bordering on fantasy, just from a different perspective. Eventually it becomes very hard to say just how much Ed has been pulling our leg.
Finding out where that line is becomes an obsession for Will and that is often the movie's weak point. Set against the cheerful exageration of Ed's life stories, Will is cynical and ruthless. He's hard to find much affection for or really any connection to. Admittedly, his father can be pretty tiresome and frequently seems to be little more than a collection of wild stories rather than a full person. There never really exists a crystallization of the story's focus, some sense that this is all going somewhere. What does Burton want to say with all of this?
Give Finney and McGregor credit for breathing life into Ed. Between the two they develop a guy who is such a character that it's hard not to like him. We don't really understand him but it's tough to deny that things are never dull when he's around. There is a zeal for life that never diminishes. There is an endless well of charm and charmed luck. There is the mesmerizing set of teeth they put on McGregor. Seriously. Those choppers deserved their own credit.
Big Fish is best described as a shaggy dog story. It goes on and on and lots of weird stuff happens and when we finally come to the end the inevitable response is... That's it?
- John Shea
Directed by: Tim Burton
Written by: John August, Daniel Wallace (novel)
Young Edward: Ewan McGregor
Old Edward: Albert Finney
Will Bloom: Billy Crudup
Sandra Bloom: Jessica Lange
Young Sandra: Alison Lohman
Jenny/Witch: Helena Bonham Carter
Norther Winslow: Steve Buscemi
Amos: Danny DeVito
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