*** (out of ****)
Starring Ewan McGregor, Albert Finney, Billy Crudup, Jessica Lange, Alison Lohman, Steve Buscemi, Danny Devito, and Helena Bonham Carter
Directed by Tim Burton & written by John August, from the novel by Daniel Wallace
2003
126 min PG13
“Big Fish” is a rambling, tangential, sometimes saccharine, and not always cohesive movie, but that’s okay, because it’s about a blowhard storyteller who is rambling, tangential, sometimes saccharine, and not always cohesive. His name is Edward Bloom and, after a lifetime of telling one crowd-pleasing tall tale after another, he’s now on his deathbed. Along comes his son, who alone out of everyone Bloom knows is tired of the tall tales and the baloney, and just wants to know who his dad really is.
Of course, Bloom explains himself through the same old tall tales he’s been feeding his son for years. Albert Finney plays the old Bloom, while the young Bloom is played by Ewan McGregor, and the bulk of the movie is spent watching McGregor’s Bloom fall in and out of one crazy predicament after another. Set mostly in a fantastic American South adjacent to the one in “O Brother Where Art Thou?” Bloom chases a giant catfish, meets conjoined twins, tangles with a clairvoyant witch, joins the circus, spots mermaids, flees jumping spiders, sells robotic hands as a travelling salesman, and parks his Dodge Charger on the top of a tree. He also befriends a phlegmatic giant named Carl, who is so instantly sympathetic, and whose sloping brow, huge hands, and low voice are gently milked for laughs. “Big Fish” is the kind of movie in which something as mundane as a werewolf can pop up and no one takes much notice.
Much expense has been lavished on the movie’s effects and visuals, and everything looks superb. The giant is always convincing. The movie’s costumes and art direction have been carefully designed so that we can never quite be certain when Bloom’s formative years were. Up until the 1970s, when everything turns sepia and washed-out, we’re never sure if what we’re seeing is as early as the 1930s or as late as the 1960s. (Perhaps the solidity of the 1970s has something to do with the birth of his son.) Even more fun than “Big Fish’s” look is how all of Bloom’s stories follow tall tale logic. Coincidences abound, things only half make sense, actions always have uncomplicated motivations, and Chekhov’s guns pay off almost instantaneously. The courtship of his future wife comes after years of toiling in the circus and an endless array of grand gestures, including sky-writing, a field of daffodils, and getting beaten to a bloody pulp. Bloom’s courage and determination is partly explained by a youthful meeting with a witch who can predict how everyone she meets will die. Bloom absorbs this information the way a normal man might take news about the weather. From them on, he is invincible because he is “armed with the foreknowledge of my own demise.”
Actors Finney and McGregor are both from the UK, which is good, because if only one of them had a phony Southern accent it might get distracting. I like that they play Bloom differently. McGregor is a jolly, open-faced, gee-whiz grinning idiot; if we were caught living in one of these fantasies his actions would be perfectly logical. But Finney, who is not quite mean or cunning, is more complex, because he is the creator of the fantasies, and his son is right to be wary of him. McGregor is the man he wishes he had been, and not who he really was. A kind of bridge between the two crops up when Bloom’s son finds an aging woman from his father’s past.
Bloom’s son is played by a handsome, soft-spoken actor named Billy Crudup, who starred in “Jesus’ Son” a few years ago. In their way, he and his father love one another, but he is nearing the end of his patience. He has come to see his father’s stories as a way to hide whatever secret life he was living during his long absences as a traveling salesman. He does not seriously suspect that his father was up to no good during those times, but it is their very unknowable-ness that bothers him, and his theory that anyone who makes up stories like that must be miserable with his real life. Some of the movie’s best laughs come from domestic moments among the two of them and their wives.
“Big Fish” is not Tim Burton’s masterpiece, as some of its commercials have blurted out (that movie, the more I think about it, is probably “Ed Wood”). The movie is perhaps a little too overwrought and sappy to be about a man who may have starred in his own stories but always told them as if they were just happening to him, as if you or I would react as he did. In addition to its terrific technical credits and gentle human moments between father and son, the movie’s large cast really gets into the swing of things. Danny Devito pops up as a sleazy circus ringmaster and Coen Brothers regular Steve Buscemi, as if on leave from the “O Brother” universe, is appropriately goofy as a Southern poet. Helena Bonham Carter is both Bloom’s mysterious other woman and the witch from his boyhood. She must be getting older (“A Room with a View” was 18 years ago) but it sure doesn’t show; she plays a character who is supposed to be ten years younger than McGregor but I’ll wager she’s older than he is in real life.
Page two of "Big Fish." Back to home.