Big Fish does have some neat stuff (I laughed hardest at the Communist ventriloquist act), and superb special effects (the heart-shaped Siamese twins with a single pair of legs are a marvel, and the movie manages to keep its giant in consistent proportion to the normal-sized people far better than Lord of the Rings did), but everything is slower than Burton at his best, and softer. And though the cinematography is by the great Philippe Rousselot (Jean-Jacques Beineix's Diva (1981), John Boorman's Hope and Glory (1987), Stephen Frears's Dangerous Liaisons (1988), Philip Kaufman's Henry & June (1990)), the movie doesn't have the saturated-but-diffuse glimmer you'd expect from him. The lighting is washed out which makes the sets look like they were built in the backyards of suburban tract homes for a neighborhood picnic. And yet they don't have a homey look (like the friendly-fake design of David Byrne's sole directing effort True Stories (1986))--they're synthetic-festive but drab. Burton trained as a Disney animator (click here for career information) and visually his movies are all about bringing buggy ideas to life, not about the almost tactile beauty of celluloid, and so Rousselot was probably wasted on him anyway.

And when you start thinking about the elements at the soft center of the story, they don't add up. I never could pin down the period it was supposed to be taking place in. In one flashback to the Alabama of the 1950s? 1960s? we see Edward as a boy with a group of friends including a middle-class black kid and you want to know whether someone's rewriting history--either Edward or the moviemakers--or what might explain this oddity. The obstetrician who delivers Will in the 1960s? 1970s? is also African-American. (Just a few of the many places where contrasting realism would add dimensions to the movie.) There's much more feel for the fantasy world than for the American South--again, romance chosen pre-emptively over realism. (One sign of this is the fact that Burton has not cast a single Southern actor in a major role. Can he really not hear how inadequate Danny DeVito's vocal technique is for the character of a blowhard Southern ringmaster?)

In addition, Albert Finney as the dying father doesn't come across as an older version of the enchanted young Edward we see in the stories. He's (too believably) an old bore who can always find a way around people's insistence that they've already heard a story, while his wife looks on with amused tolerance. Finney has had the misfortune to become one of those English actors who are cast for their names regardless of their fitness for a role. He hasn't furthered his technique but seems to have sunk into his gouty bulk. At times he can barely get the words out past his teeth. He carries a heavy-spirited atmosphere with him that's entirely wrong for a man who has made a parallel life for himself out of charmingly quirky yarns.