Tim Burton goes fishing.
Big Fish is the best American movie of the year?an absurdist romp that both critiques the allure of myths and explains why they are as necessary as water. The newest feature from director Tim Burton has earned well-deserved raves for its blend of new-school special effects and old-school craftsmanship.
But I hope Big Fish will also be appreciated as a personal film?not "personal" in the p.r.-driven, second-feature-in-the-New-York-Times-Magazine sense, i.e., "This is an uncommercial movie I always wanted to direct, and I hope you buy a ticket." I mean truly personal: the filmic equivalent of a deathbed confession by a man whose career isn't half over yet. (Like many films I love, Big Fish is more fun if you know nothing about it going in; read on at your own peril.)
Adapted by John August from the novella by Daniel Wallace, Big Fish is both a picaresque narrative and a story about storytelling; in that sense, it bears superficial comparison to both The Princess Bride and Forrest Gump. Set in Alabama throughout the 20th century, the film is built around Edward Bloom (Albert Finney), an ex-salesman, family patriarch and hopeless yarn-spinner (read: liar). The movie begins with Bloom's favorite story, about the time he caught and then released a mammoth, legendary fish. August and Burton's clever opening sequence tracks the fish as it glides through deep water, then skips through a tall-tale summary of Edward's character and the upbringing of Edward's son, who comes of age hearing his old man retell the fish story ad nauseum, growing increasingly bored and resentful of his father's self-centered showmanship, then writing him off as an unreachable narcissist and cutting off contact with him. The sequence's inexorable forward path through a dreamlike landscape (including shots of the fish swimming through dark water and a newborn baby rocketing out of his mother's womb and whooshing across a hospital hallway floor like a well-tossed bowling ball) links Big Fish to Burton's other movies, most of which begin with a forward-moving tracking shot or montage revealing a 3-D storybook universe.
The present-day William, who has grown up to be a somewhat surly Paris-based author with a very pregnant wife, Josephine (Marion Cotillard), is cajoled into visiting his now-dying dad and making one last attempt at reconciliation. The bedridden old man is the same blowhard he always was and seems incapable of normal conversation, choosing instead to retell absurd tales of his adventures as a young man. (The young Edward is played by Ewan MacGregor, whose humble heroism and self-effacing charisma recall Tom Hanks, James Stewart and other emotionally transparent leading men. His amazing performance deserves awards but probably won't get any; effortless excellence is rarely acknowledged.)
Each time old Edward launches into bard mode, Burton jumps into his head (our heads) and visualizes his lies in a series of simple, symbolically supercharged images, each of which is held (by editors Chris Lebenzon and Joel Negron) long enough to imprint itself on your imagination, but briefly enough to inspire regret that it wasn't onscreen longer. We learn of Edward's childhood encounter with his town's resident witch (Helena Bonham Carter, who also plays a second role I won't reveal here); she has a glass eye that reveals the deaths of all who look into it.
We watch as Edward grows to manhood, tames a fearsome, sheep-and-dog-eating giant (real life giant Matthew McGrory), takes a road less traveled and discovers an idyllic town in the woods so placid and embracing that those who discover it (including a Robert Frost-like poet played by Steve Buscemi, of all people) can't bear to leave. But Edward feels he must leave. Rejoining the giant, he chances upon a storybook circus, where he becomes smitten with a mysterious dream girl named Sandy (Alison Lohman). Edward strikes a (literally) fabulous bargain with the sleazy circus ringmaster (Burton veteran Danny DeVito): In exchange for one scrap of new information about Sandy each week (her favorite flower: a daffodil) he sticks around performing hazardous duties, including sticking his head in a lion's mouth and being shot from a cannon (an image that echoes the explosive birth in the film's first act). Sandy agrees to marry Edward only after he has repeatedly declared his undying love and courted her with obsessive zeal, hiring a skywriter to declare his affections and arranging a field of daffodils on the ground below her dorm room window. (The present-day Sandy is played by Jessica Lange.)
At first, the movie's alternating flashback structure (present, past, present, past) annoyed me. The fantasy sequences are inherently attuned to Burton's directorial strengths, and Burton attacks it so confidently that he deploys images that might anchor other people's movies (young Edward as a comic book super-soldier, parachuting into a communist Chinese military show fronted by a terrible, Mandarin-speaking ventriloquist; young William frolicking in a womb-shaped swimming pool while his mom looks on through a window, her reflected face superimposed over the glass). I dreaded an onslaught of Framing Device Syndrome: the faint sense of disappointment, familiar to even the most ardent defenders of Steven Spielberg and Robert Zemeckis, that ensues when an otherwise expert drama splinters the quicksilver glory of a remembered past and drags us back to present-tense therapy.
Surprise: Big Fish is that rare flashback drama wherein the present and the past reinforce, deepen and sometimes contradict each other, creating a tension that's pleasurable, challenging and quite defensible. The story's true center isn't Edward's invented adventures, but the present-day attempt by William, a soon-to-be-father, to acknowledge his dad's strengths (imagination, tenacity, cocky optimism) and his flaws (verbosity, thickheadedness, a wandering eye). If one chooses to understand Big Fish through the father rather than the son, the film reveals itself as a committed artist's critique of his own life and work. The title refers not just to the Big Fish itself (which has a second identity as a beautiful, unattainable water nymph) but also to the pursuit of greatness (artistic or otherwise) and to Edward's status as an extraordinary individual inhabiting an ordinary world (big fish, small pond).
Many bits of dialogue reveal Edward as a man who preferred the company of his own imagination to anyone else's, including his own family's, and who was always on the road. This description applies equally to the traveling salesman and the professional artist, both of whom, rightly or wrongly, equate stability and domesticity with a loss of freedom. When William calls Edward on his flaws, and Edward admits them without apologizing, a second, stealth narrative encloses the first: Big Fish envisions a reckless artist dad and his more conservative son taking stock of their relationship and honestly addressing what worked, what didn't and whether such distinctions even matter. The finale is a valentine to anyone who's ever had a creative thought: Burton visualizes the artist's dream that his creations have lives of their own, and admits that all artistic creations are drawn from life.
I hope viewers and critics won't be so distracted by the film's splendid visuals and knockabout humor that they shortchange it as a technical tour de force, a big-budget lark or a picaresque narrative with keen sight gags. It's a poem of a movie that hangs together on a rhetorical level. Throughout, Burton's work is mature, efficient, unified. In its own lyrical, silly way, Big Fish analyzes the motives, triumphs and flaws of creative people more astutely than any film of recent times. As the picture unreeled, there were moments where I wanted to address the screen as if it were a close friend sitting across from me in a coffee shop, disclosing all the dreams, pleasures and regrets he'd kept to himself until now. The phrase that kept popping into my head was, "You probably shouldn't be telling me this." But when Big Fish ended, I was in awe of Burton's candor. I felt two overwhelming feelings: gratitude at having been entertained and moved, and a renewed determination to be honest.