Big Fish Reviews

Tim Burton's tall tale, in which a peevish son tries to let the air out of the whoppers his dying father has told him — and everyone else — since childhood, is a deft blend of fantastic noodling and astute psychological drama. Journalist William Bloom (Billy Crudup) has been estranged from his voluble father, Edward (Albert Finney), since Edward monopolized William's wedding with the umpteenth telling of a fabulous yarn about catching the biggest, wiliest catfish that ever trolled the bottom of a muddy river. When William's long-suffering mother, Sandra (Jessica Lange), calls with the news that Edward is dying, William makes the pilgrimage home — hugely pregnant wife (Marion Cotillard) in tow — with one goal in mind: a heart-to-heart talk with his dad. No amusing anecdotes, no shimmering fables, no cleverly spun stories: William just wants to hear the plain, unvarnished truth about his father's life. But Edward can no more tell a straightforward story than he can send the grim reaper packing. Young Edward's (Ewan McGregor) spooky encounter with a swamp witch sets the tone for a series of picaresque adventures that include rescuing his hometown from a misunderstood giant named Karl (Matthew McGrory); finding and escaping a rustic Shangri-La buried deep in some spooky woods just off a lost highway; joining the circus of Amos Calloway (Danny DeVito); and wooing his one true love, Sandra (Alison Lohman), away from her bullying fiance. Even Ed's hitch in the army has a fairytale quality, involving as it does a miraculous escape from near-certain death abetted by beautiful conjoined-twin chanteuses Ping and Jing (Ada and Arlene Tai). Though Burton's prodigious gift for visual invention has always been apparent, his sense of narrative is less than rock solid; spectacular images trump story logic in many of his films. Daniel Wallace's Big Fish: A Novel of Mythic Proportions, predicated on the profoundly simple paradox that legends can be more deeply true than cold, hard facts, gives Burton a sturdy framework on which to hang the darkly whimsical images for which he's famous. Burton's fanciful visual inventions, in turn, keep Wallace's homespun messages in check; such astringent details as a banjo player plucking a few ominous notes from "Dueling Banjos" when Ed first lays eyes on the Norman Rockwellian beauty of Spectre ensure that the story's fundamental sweetness never becomes cloying.