Old storytellers, like old fishermen, never really die. At heart, Tim Burton's Big Fish is no more pretentious than the occasional bumper sticker or needlepoint pillow, though--for the most part--more intelligent.
Big Fish is the story of reconciliation between a dying father, Edward Bloom (Albert Finney) and his son Will (Billy Crudup). Edward's the family storyteller, who embellishes stock family tales with embarrassing enthusiasm. Father and son stop speaking after Dad steals the spotlight one too many times, but Will finally returns home to make peace with father and fiction. The film's constructed as a series of flashbacks, featuring Ewan McGregor as the young Ed Bloom.
Burton is best known for visual imagery (think Sleepy Hollow, Beetlejuice and The Nightmare Before Christmas). What makes Big Fish a success is Burton's ability to finally reconcile startling visuals and an equally unusual story, without having to oscillate between the two. Where Burton has been criticized in the past for placing style before substance, this is a movie about style turned substance--a happy coincidence of material and technique more than a real breakthrough in Burton's style.
For a little truth-stretching and myth-making, Big Fish gets tagged with indulgent epithets like "whimsical," "free-spirited" and so forth. But like any good blood-and-guts Grimm fairy tale, stylistic incongruities rescue the story from cloying sweetness. And, like the clumsy phrases of a foreign novel, these incongruities actually make Burton's images more potent by virtue of their oddities and inconsistencies. There is such a thing as expecting the unexpected, and Burton perpetually hovers just beyond that boundary of the conceivable.
A jerky start-and-stop chronology actually works to Burton's advantage, helping us recognize the temptation--and the ease--of exchanging one world for another. There's a moral, of course, and the story winds down with head-scratching perfection; but Big Fish is at once a spectacular exercise in storytelling and a nod to the old-school admonition that half a story lies in the telling. There's nothing here we didn't already know, but perhaps that's the point: that there are no new stories, only new tellings.
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