Champagne wishes but catfish dreams

Rating: 4/10 (4 January 2004)

A flat mug of beer that should have been a bubbly flute of champagne
I was very frustrated and disappointed by Big Fish . clearly a lot of time, money and talent went into the production of the movie, but for me it never really came together.
At its center, "Big Fish" is a movie about storytelling. Yet, I think that its fundamental flaw is that its stories are poorly told. The older Ed Bloom is clearly meant to be a delightful raconteur, who charms his wife, his daughter-in-law, friends and acquaintances with his "tall tales." Yet, it's hard not to agree instead when his son accuses him of being an embarrassment after Dad takes the floor at his son's wedding to tell (obviously for the 100th times) his elaborate and version of the story of his son's birth. As played by Albert Finney, Ed Bloom does seem more like the drunken uncle from whom you try to wrest the microphone, than the Aesop (or Garrison Keillor, if you prefer) of his day.
But it's not just Bloom who can't tell a story, sad to say Tim Burton seems to suffer from the same deficiencies as his protagonist. In Burton's hands Bloom's stories seem always to be more about the production design than they are about any human emotion or contact. As always, the LOOK of Burton's film is impressive, but in most of the stories, we have nothing but the design to which to react. The actual people involved are either too flat, or too deliberately odd, for the viewer to relate to. As the younger Bloom, Ewan McGregor stands around with a charming little grin on his face, but with no real connection to the action around him --- he plays Bloom like a genial optimistic idiot. So things like Spectre, Bloom's war service, even his courtship of Sandra all come across as incidents, rather than important emotional points in Bloom's life. We are therefore left feeling much as Will does ---- that Bloom's stories are just so much blarney, being spread by a man who's determined to keep his emotional life hidden.
SPOILERS AHEAD
Because the storytelling is oddly flat, it is difficult for the viewer to participate in the catharsis that Will is supposed to experience at the end of the film. When Will helps his father "finish his story"/finish his life in the last few scenes, obviously we are meant to believe that Will, having learned that there was more fact to his father's stories than one would expect, had somehow emotionally connected to his father after all. But frankly, I don't see how. In most of the stories we are told, Bloom's only "emotional" quality seems to be tenacity --- he's going to marry Sandra, he's going to get home from the war, he's going to fix up Spectre. Emotionally, he seems as indifferent to those he meets along the way -- Norther, Amos, Karl and especially Jenny -- as he seems to be to Will. (Blooms connection to his wife does seem to be the one exception). Certainly, although Bloom is portrayed as a decent fellow, but there is nothing in Bloom's stories, at least as they are told here, that gives us any reason to believe that Will is wrong to find his father distant and unapproachable. Indeed, Bloom seems always to have been a rather self-involved, lucky hack indifferent to those around him and adept at using cheap sentimentalism to get his way with people. Sadly, even when his son is trying to make some sort of deathbed connection, Bloom falls back on the same sort of hucksterism to avoid any real emotion and to coerce Will into participating in a last tall-tale finale.
The sad thing is that I think Bloom's stories were SUPPOSED to draw us in and show us Bloom's emotional depths but fail to do so because they were told wrong. The last couple of Albert Finney's scenes are actually quite good and would have worked wonderfully if they followed a better film. If Bloom's stories were better told ---- i.e., if we were able to feel an emotional connection to his life --- then Will's conversion would be both credible and satisfying and the film would, I think, be a charm.

Miscellaneous asides:
Jessica Lange is wonderful, as always. What a shame she's sort of wasted in this.
With VERY few exceptions, people who aren't from the South just SHOULDN'T attempt southern accents. As usual they are awful and all over the place here.
Nothing is helped by the fact that the "big fish" is crappy CGI and looks fake.