A Modern Munchausen

Rating: 9/10 (27 February 2004)

Tim Burton is generally at his best directing quirky, offbeat films such as `Edward Scissorhands' or `Ed Wood', and less entertaining when he moves into the mainstream. His two `Batman' movies, although better than their successors and containing some original touches, were just another manifestation of Hollywood's long love affair (dating back to the original `Superman' in the late seventies, and still continuing) with the comic-book superhero, while his recent `Planet of the Apes' was an example of a redundant remake of an original that never needed to be remade.

`Big Fish', however, is a film of the type at which Burton excels. The central character, Edward Bloom, is a Baron Munchausen type character, much given to telling entertaining tall stories about his past. (It is interesting that several of Burton's films have a central character named Edward). These stories, however, are not always appreciated by his family, especially by his son William. The film opens with a quarrel between the two men at William's wedding when Edward tells a story about how he once caught an enormous fish which had earlier swallowed his wedding ring. After this, the two do not speak to one another for three years and William only returns home when he hears that his father is seriously ill.
William is a rather prosaic, priggish young man. If Edward is a Munchausen figure, William is the spiritual descendant of Dickens's Thomas Gradgrind, a man for whom everything other than hard fact is either nonsense or a lie. He complains that Edward's fictions have always prevented from getting to know his `real' father and wants to be told the pure, unembellished truth about his father's life. Even in the final days of his life, however, Edward persists in telling his old stories, and William tries to make sense of these in an attempt to get at the facts. (It is perhaps ironic that William lives and works in Paris- in American films generally the city of romance and dreams- and even has a view of the Eiffel Tower from his office window).

The film proceeds to tell Edward's life-story as narrated by himself, intercut with scenes set in the present day. The earlier scenes relate a series of bizarre adventures reminiscent of `Alice in Wonderland.' Edward meets a witch whose glass eye can foretell the future, befriends a twelve-foot giant, stumbles across an unreal, eerily perfect village where there are no roads and everyone goes barefoot, works in a circus to win the love of his life, serves in the Korean War when he has an adventure involving a pair of female conjoined twins, and takes part, together with a poet, in an unsuccessful bank robbery. This part of the film is shot in a surreal, dreamlike style with some striking visual images- most notably the shots of the village of Spectre and the scene where Edward woos his future wife standing in a whole field of daffodils (which he has been told are her favourite flower).
All of the parts are well played, but the best acting performances are from the two actors who play Edward. Albert Finney plays the ageing Edward as an entertaining old rogue, and Ewan McGregor plays him as he was in his younger days, or rather as he would have liked to have been in his younger days- smarter, better-looking and more successful than he doubtless was in reality, and possibly younger too. It is notable that Ewan McGregor appears to be around the same age as Alison Lohman who plays Edward's wife Sandra as a young woman, whereas Jessica Lange, who plays the older Sandra, is markedly younger than Finney's character. In some films I would have put this discrepancy down simply to lazy casting, but here I suspect it is a deliberate way of increasing the film's surreal atmosphere.

As the film progresses, there are indications that there may be a core of truth in some of Edward's stories- William discovers that his father did indeed serve in Korea and that Spectre is a real place- but we never find out exactly how much is true and how much is invention. Nor are we meant to. The central theme of the film is the importance of the imagination. The truth about a man cannot be discovered from bare facts of his life alone without taking into account his imaginative inner world. The `real self', if it lies anywhere, lies in this inner world and in the private mythology which we construct for ourselves. The film comes to an emotionally satisfying conclusion as the world of real life and the world of Edward's imagination fuse together, Edward's life comes to a triumphant end and William comes to accept his father for what he is. I would rate this as the best movie yet that I have seen from Tim Burton. 9/10.