Tripe

Rating: 4/10 (13 April 2009)

A bunch of talented people get together and make a putrid film and they title it Big Fish. Everything about the script is ghastly and it is put on the screen with great skill and professionalism. Full of thudding metaphors and, heaven help us, symbols, that might seem profound to high-schoolers but are simply cloying if one is over the age of consent. Very poor casting of Finney (who looks pretty well-fed for a man dying of cancer) and McGregor who tries way too hard to be charming. To say nothing of the extreme inauthenticity of both as southerners. Over-designed and under-written it ends with an image straight out of Kinkade. Emblematic of the film's aesthetic is the transformation of Jenny's house from a ruin into something out of a Pottery Barn catalog. The movie mistakes prettiness for something more. And its 'exploration' of the relationship of an estranged father and son is simply laughable. Kitsch masquerading as art. Ugh.