I walked out of Tim Burton’s new movie, Big Fish, feeling a little lighter. This is a boon not to be gainsaid in these days of Monster, the remake of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and, God help us, The Passion of the Christ. These are the kinds of movies (whether good or bad) that leave one feeling that much heavier; heavier in spirit, weighed down by exhaustion, disgust and despair at humanity.
Not that Big Fish is a great and timeless masterpiece. It is an improvement on Burton’s last movie, his remake of Planet of the Apes, but compared with his early movies, such as Edward Scissorhands and Beetlejuice, or even his Batman, it is rather thin, a bit too airy.
Burton is famed for his “imagination”, by which Hollywood usually means a new view of things, a fresh storyline or two. That suburb of Los Angeles is not very good at spotting originality anyway, but it did recognise in Burton at least a different kind of visual and narrative energy. Edward Scissorhands and Batman had a stunning nouveau-Gothic look, and Beetlejuice had that plus a crazy humour (courtesy of Michael Keaton’s demon, in particular). The humour went even crazier (though perhaps to diminished effect) in Burton’s space-invaders spoof Mars Attacks!, and he resurrected some of his Gothic look and feel in Sleepy Hollow a year or two ago, but that movie was clearly an adaptation and not something that issued from his own fevered brain.
That brain, it seems, is much less fevered than it was. Big Fish does everything it can to provide us with a nice feeling; it is whimsy rather than phantasmagoria. Its parade of oddities makes Burton seem a bit like Fellini Lite, and it certainly provides much to look at, but soon after one has seen it it has dissipated into mist; it seems to fade gently from the mind.
Albert Finney plays Ed Bloom, a charming old codger who has had a very interesting life, and has been dining out on his recollections for decades. Unfortunately, it seems that most of those recollections are invented or at least considerably embroidered. This rather frustrates his son Will (Billy Crudup), who understandably would like to know precisely where, in his dad’s life, the line between fact and fabulation falls. In the course of exploring this disjunction, we pedal through several of the old man’s stories as he tells them, flashing back to his own youth.
Ewan McGregor, who in the Star Wars movies plays the young Alec Guinness, here plays the young Albert Finney. This is surely unique in the annals of the British acting profession. Still, McGregor puts his goofy grin to good use as the adventurous Young Ed, encountering in his quasi-mythological travels giants, werewolves, singing Siamese twins, and much else.
Big Fish has a lot of charm, but it’s a cutesy kind of charm. Any hint of threat, such as the moment when Ed seems to be trapped in an idyllic village, is quickly defused. If the underlying theme is the battle of the imagination against the rational, fact-fixated mind, then Burton’s sympathies are clearly with the imagination. But he soft-pedals it: this imagination knows little of the horrors that can loom up out of the subconscious, barely willed, let alone the horrors that can be thought up by real humans in the plain light of day.
This all means that one does not feel oppressed by Big Fish. It’s easy to see in retrospect what’s wrong with it, including its own thesis. The most touching moment is an entirely real, almost kitchen-sink moment involving Jessica Lange as Ed’s wife — a triumph for realism.
Nonetheless, it’s a beguiling couple of hours’ entertainment, which makes no excessive demands on the viewer. One is almost tempted to say that Big Fish is a movie for the whole family —especially those with fishy, fabulist fathers.