beautiful looking film fails to move

Rating: 5/10 (30 January 2013)

Tim Burton's "Big Fish", like it's main character is extravagant, earnest, and likable. Unfortunately also like it's main character it is distant, narcissistic, and delusional. Big Fish has the wrong main character. The one emotionally resonant part of the film is unfortunately sidelined by acres of entertaining glitz. The story concerns the son of the main character {Edward Bloom, played by Albert Finny and Ewan Mcgregor} realizing how little he knows about his father who is slowly dying. That would be the emotionally resonant part of the movie. Unfortunately that is reduced to about 10% of the movies running time, the other 90% concerns the life of Edward which (like the movie) is pretty much 90% made up, hence the frustration of his son. Ideal there would have been a 50-50 balance between the real and the very unreal, though since that is not so it is often jarring when the story briefly switches gears to catch up with real life only to shift right back again. It's frustrating and unsatisfying. My thought is that Burton sees himself as Bloom, who refuses to conform to reality, in a sort of response to critics who have said that his films feel fake. I have always disagreed ( Edward Scisorhands and Sweeny Todd are masterpieces of time and place, anything but fake) though ironically this film feels at times kind of artificial. Not always though, and for the most part it's entertaining and thoughtful. With fine performances by everyone, all though Finny is sometimes garble voiced, and Marion Cotillard and Jessica Lange's characters are underwritten they do their best. Of course the film has a normally gorgeous Burton look to it, and he does a fine job of at least visually underlining the difference in feeling of reality and fantasy. Though by the time it's over your brain might be whizzing your heart will likely remain curiously untouched. At least I thought so. The ending however is pretty fantastic and would probably have had a profound emotional impact if Burton had decided to forgo some of the admittedly trite fantasy in favor of a a more full portrait of the relationship between the father and his sons. There is a heartrendingly real story in lurking Big Fish so it's a shame that Burton ditches it (until the end) for an amusingly fake one.