Tim Burton's Big Fish is one of the few movies that is about the choice of genre, in this case, romance versus realism. (Sidenote: The greatest movie to tackle the subject head on is Martin Scorsese's The Last Temptation of Christ (1988).) Edward Bloom (Albert Finney) is a small-town Alabama salesman who has raised his son on a personal collection of tall tales, featuring a witch with a doom-revealing eye, a giant, a circus, a wolfman, a lawn of daffodils, a poet-bank robber-tycoon, Siamese twins, a mysterious town where no one wears shoes, and a big fish. His son Will (Billy Crudup) is a serious-minded reporter (i.e., a professional truth teller) who has moved to Paris to get away from his father because his storytelling always seemed to divert any attention that he himself might have got. When Will hears that Edward is dying he returns home and wants to hear from his father the truth about the old man's life, the reality that Will thinks the stories cover up.
The movie, adapted from Daniel Wallace's book, and originally set to be directed by Steven Spielberg, has almost nothing but problems--inconsistencies, gaps, failures of taste--and yet I imagine it will be a big crowd-pleaser, in part because of its failure to develop the central theme of the salesman's spiel versus the reporter's facts. For the theme to have any tension, realism should have some advantages. If, for instance, the father were a financial failure, a charmer but unsuccessful, then we might be in a position to understand Will's resistance to his romantic adventure tales. But the movie is clearly on the father's side, because its main selling point, after all, is Tim Burton's recreation of those stories. By comparison to Edward, Will seems like a prig who becomes human only when he in his turn tells his father a whopper to ease the dying man over the border.
Similarly, the movie is not at all a work of realism, but rather a double romance: how the young Edward (Ewan McGregor), seen in the flashback stories, wins his wife, and how the grown Will gets in sync with his patrimony. (It shares the latter trope, one of the fundamental forms of romance, with the ancient Aeneid, the medieval Parzival, Shakespeare's Henry IV and Hamlet, and The Godfather movies. This form of romance contrasts fascinatingly with the New Comedy of Terence, one of the main sources of romantic comedy, in which fathers inevitably give way to their sons. Comedy, thus, stands in opposition not only to tragedy but to patriarchal romance as well.)
The general problem with Big Fish is that we're meant to adore Edward's stories and so the movie fawns over them, and since they make up the majority of the movie's two-hour-plus running time, this means the movie fawns over itself. Without a greater tension between the romantic and realistic approaches, it's almost unavoidable: Burton ends up making a tribute to his own storytelling style. Which I have loved, especially in Pee-wee's Big Adventure (1985) and Beetlejuice (1988), but also in the Catwoman parts of Batman Returns (1992), the spidery incongruities in The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993), and some of the more wacky-tacky moments in Mars Attacks! (1996; the alien's insincerity alarmingly cuts through all the liberal optimism about outer space, glorified by Spielberg in Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977).) Burton's comic range is a lot wider and more individual than his emotional range, which has been limited to childhood hurts, the boy who's different, who's left out. Big Fish has some of Burton's signature weirdness but it foregrounds the emotional material that he doesn't have an equivalent talent for. (The Spielberg of E.T.--The Extra-Terrestrial (1982) is, in fact, better at bringing out these emotions in fantasy stories.)
Article comments
1 - Eric Olsen
Excellent penetration into the goop within as always - thanks Alan!
2 - Ken J
Great, another "ain't I a smarty-pants" style review. You know the kind, where the reviewer fawns over himself.
3 - karinbadt
very much enjoyed this review. Am a professor in Paris, and was about to use this film in a class, because so many people have recommended it, but found it absolutely vapid. It doesn't have the emotional payoff of Edward Scissorhands, and this reviewer carefully shows why the story itself doesn't work, with no real characters creating tension and depth. The softness of the story, the sappyness of the character construction, is not made up for by the cleverness of the imaginative clips.
4 - Alan Dale
Thanks for the comment, these many years later. They're always appreciated.