Big Fish | Review

Tall tales prove to be a good catch, but film’s potential audaciousness is substituted for sentimental, PG- charm.

Its one Christmas gift this season which is worth unwrapping, however, you might end up with the feeling that one gets when receiving a pair of wool socks,–everyone likes a nice pair of warm fittings for the feet but would most likely prefer a gift certificate instead.

Though it appears to be a complimentary rewiring of Daniel Wallace’s novel, Big Fish, A Story of Mythic Proportions, what this little family film oddity represents is that Burton’s not totally out of the slump yet–as this film meagerly satisfies our palettes and does not fulfill our cravings for something truly Burtonesque.

On appearance the ingredients are there, the idea of tall tales allows for some purely bizarre somewhat magical moments, but then there is the rest of the film in between that doesn’t work as well. The fantasy world bits such as a giant fish gobbling up a gold ring, a town in the middle of nowhere and a circus freak bigger than life itself certainly is out of the ordinary and will stir up some laughs, but these episodes ultimately fail to make a connection with the other parts of the film’s narratives.

With a sort of Coen bros. ingenuity which brings a mix of cleverly originally surreal ideas itched into a comedy that stretches beyond the limits of most film director’s imagination, Big Fish gives the viewer a smidgen of the Burton’s whiz leaving the most of our attention on a film protagonist who is too much of a fable himself.

In tone the film matches that of a common bedtime story or precisely reminds of the type of anecdote which the young boy writer from Stand by Me would animate to life (the two films actually bare a similarity with one another for the time period and some dreaded bloodsucking leeches). The narrative is split into two, with flashbacks bringing us the wholesome fantasy world in the fifties and a Ulysses type of journey which make all the contemporary moments of a father and son arduous relationship pale in comparison. Young Edward Bloom (Ewan McGregor – Down with Love) is over embellished in the charm department, but potentially gives the film some of its appeal whereas the old Bloom (Albert Finney – Traffic) is slightly over-dramatic with his deathbed bit and as ineffective in his father role as is the case with actor Billy Crudup (Waking the dead) whose role is fairly slanted towards a pouting grown up adult who didn’t get the attention he deserved. While the father greets any case of reliving his past his son is to busy out to prove him wrong and show his father as a pathological liar. As a whole, the film is initially about one man’s out-of-this-world journey which has been retold one too many times; of course, there is also a strong sense of life and death and how the too ultimately decide the journey of one’s fate.

Unlike the Coen bros. films, the characters in this film don’t have a magnetizing quality about them. DeVito (Death to Smoochy), Buscemi (Fargo), Lange (Hush)

, Lohman (Matchstick Men) are minor in detail, but the unimpressive portrayals come mostly from Helena Bonham Carter (Novocaine)

and Billy Crudup who don’t seem to know how to fit in their roles, I was expecting a lot more out of Bonham’s character and her story especially with the false eyeball predictions. McGregor’s bit is half spark-plug and half plain as vanilla, his assuredly Moulin Rouge face and good nature make his character unappealing, but the traveling salesman in him and his romantic endeavors makes the viewer interested in his denouement.

While this is comparatively a better film than the epic disaster of the unfortunate Planet of the Apes it is awkwardly put together. There are still plenty of signature items, an Elfman score and plenty of cool visual effects; however it seems as if the point was to bring a bunch of nutty stories together without bothering to explore the exaggeration of the tales. It kind of gets confusing in the end when the film takes on this confused position about the tall tales and the half truths showing that his father was a liar, but only sort of, making it kind of okay?

Big Fish comes across like a film that tried to hard to impress in the wrong areas and didn’t quite know how to handle all the ideas in one solid upswing, instead, giving the type of ending that Hollywood likes during Oscar season. It’s a satisfying film, a nice divertissement but has one too many holes.

Rating 3 stars