BIG FISH Dir: Tim Burton. Starring: Ewan McGregor, Albert Finney, Billy Crudup, Jessica Lange, Danny DeVito. Tim Burton’s career seems to have come off the rails in recent years. Sleepy Hollow, whilst enjoyable, was saddled with a dog of a script, and the less said about Planet of The Apes, the better. Coming out of Big Fish, I felt a little confused. I wanted to like this movie - and there is something to like - but this is not the Tim Burton we know and love. Is it a shameless bid for an Oscar, or just the sentimental maundering of an old man? God, can somebody bring back the auteur behind Batman, please? Bob feels that he never really got to know his father. When he wasn’t on the road as a salesman, he was entertaining family and friends alike with his wild stories, but Bob wants the real stories. Now - wouldn’t you know it - his father is dying, and there’s just enough time for some wild stories, and perhaps a reconciliation before he shuffles off the coil. So in some respects, there are two movies in Big Fish. Number one, the retelling of Bob’s dad’s wild stories, with Ewan Macgregor in the lead, and two: a very American father/son relationship story, with hopeless overacting from Albert Finney and Billy Crudup, both jammed into roles about as appealing as a mustard enema. Needless to say, my loyalties are pretty clear. The fantastic elements of the
	story, whilst terribly disjointed and desperately using the other narrative as a linking device, are pretty good. This is the wild imagination that we’re used to - that we demand from Burton. He is just so good at myth-making, from fifties America, right up into the seventies and beyond. Whatever his canvass, when motivated Burton really does succeed in making a unique, unreachable worlds, and in isolation, these parts of the movie are great. Unfortunately, it asks to be taken into a broader context, and that’s when things start going downhill. Without all the fairytale accoutrements, Burton’s sentimentality comes across as hopelessly mawkish. The real life story, is predictable and very, very lazy. This kind of arc might work in a novel, where you’ve got a bit more flexibility, but onscreen it’s deathly; we’ve seen it way too many times before. Crudup is terrible, and Finney only marginally better. Ewan Macgregor… well, I like him, but he is Ewan Macgregor, and that can be hard to get past, particularly with a southern accent ripped straight out of his comedic turn in Down With Love. But all this said, a weak script has never hampered Burton so much before. Obviously this project was personal to him, and I can empathise that. As someone who spends most of their time jumping in and out of various narratives, I understand the desire to reconcile them with reality. Exploring those connections can strike a very deep chord, and it’s yielded some fantastic results in the past. Cinema, however, is just not the medium to do it. No movie could be long enough to give these stories the attention they need to capture us. Instead, we end up with the Burton sampler: all different kinds of emotive wackiness, including the orange cream in the centre that nobody wants. I’m looking forward to Burton’s next - I always do - but I’m starting to get a little desperate now. Big Fish is conspicuously less than the sum of its parts, and the longer I spend away from it, the less I like it. C+ Patrick Garson. Comments?
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