director
Tim Burton
screenwriter
John August
based on
the novel by
Daniel
Wallace
producers
Bruce Cohen
Dan Jinks
Richard D. Zanuck
cinematographer
Philippe Rousselot
music
Danny Elfman
editor
Chris Lebenzon
cast
Ewan McGregor (Young Ed Bloom)
Albert Finney (Senior Ed Bloom)
Billy Crudup (Will Bloom)
Jessica Lange (Senior Sandra Bloom)
Alison Lohman (Young Sandra Bloom)
Helena Bonham Carter (Jenny/The Witch)
Robert Guillaume (Senior Dr. Bennett)
Marion Cotillard (Josephine)
Matthew McGrory (Karl)
David Denman (Bon Price)
Missi Pyle (Mildred)
Loudon Wainwright III (Beamen)
Steve Buscemi (Norther Winslow)
Danny DeVito (Amos Calloway)
mpaa rating: PG-13
running
time: 125m
u.s.
release: December 25,
2003
video
availability: VHS -
DVD
official website
other tim
burton films
reviewed on this website:
- charlie
and the chocolate factory
- corpse
bride
- ed
wood
- mars
attacks!
- planet
of the apes (2001)
- sleepy
hollow
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Big Fish is the sort of autumnal, eligiac tearjerker
you expect from a director in his sixties, not from Tim Burton,
who's forty-five. It may be a little too early in his career
for glowing odes to the power of storytelling -- its transportive
magic, its warming and benign delusions. That said, I enjoyed
Big Fish more than any film Burton has been involved with
since maybe Nightmare Before Christmas. Working from Daniel
Wallace's slim, anecdotal novel (adapted by John August), Burton
allows himself clearer, purer access to emotion than ever before.
He actually pays attention to "normal" characters this
time, integrating them seamlessly with the misfits that have
always been his stock in trade.
This is also the rare tearjerker
that may inspire debate afterward. The main character, Edward
Bloom, played in old age by Albert Finney and by Ewan McGregor
as a young man, regales anyone who'll listen with outlandish
tales of his life. There are skeptics in the film, including
Edward's grown son Will (Billy Crudup), who wishes his father
had told him something real about himself just once. What
we see in flashbacks, as Burton faithfully dramatizes Edward's
stories, is most likely at odds with what actually happened --
or is it? Is this the story of a sad, self-deluded man who told
whoppers to make his life more interesting, or the story of a
man with a wild imagination who simply created a world he wanted
to live in? Burton obviously leans towards the latter.
We follow young Edward in his
travels -- to a carnival, accompanied by a giant (Matthew McGrory);
to a suspiciously idyllic town called Spectre, which may or may
not be Heaven itself; to the Korean War, where he meets a Siamese-twin
singing act. These colorful yarns -- acted by McGregor with his
trademark shining grin and disregard of irony -- are contrasted
with latter-day scenes of the dying Edward in his sickbed, attended
by his adoring wife Sandra (Jessica Lange in a somewhat thankless
role -- Burton seldom pays much attention to women in his work)
and badgered by Will into telling the truth. But it becomes
apparent that Edward's stories are his truth.
A plotless compendium of tall
tales, with many differently-bodied people to detain the camera
eye, Big Fish comes close to being Tim Burton In A Nutshell.
Whatever manic gothic energy distinguished his early films (Pee-wee's
Big Adventure, Beetlejuice, parts of Batman)
is gone, replaced by smooth, unobtrusive filmmaking, as if Burton
had finally developed the patience to let a movie unfold (to
be fair, 1994's Ed
Wood pointed towards a new, mature style for him). Edward's
stories ramble, and so the movie does, too. Helena Bonham Carter,
who I'm beginning to think does her warmest work for Burton (she
was the humanistic heart of his Planet
of the Apes remix), turns up in two roles, as a one-eyed
witch (whose glass eye tells you how you're going to die) and
as a native of Spectre who benefits from Edward's generosity.
It's typical of the movie that it never quite tells us
whether the two characters are really the same person.
In his travels, Edward bumps
into the likes of Danny DeVito (as a carny barker) and Steve
Buscemi (as a poet whose work is eternally "in progress").
Really, pretty much everyone Edward meets is a kind of storyteller,
or a character out of a fairytale. Are they real? The final scene
tells us but doesn't tell us. After a career of literal-minded
ghoulies and phantasms, Tim Burton has discovered ambiguity.
The filmmaking shows the assured control of a master summing
up his filmography at the twilight of his career, which may be
why I balk at Burton doing something like this at age forty-five.
I'd hate to think there isn't more where this comes from.
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