Story of the story of the year!!

Rating: 10/10 (30 January 2004)

Did I ever tell you about the time I went out and watched the Best Picture of 2003? Tim Burton, obviously very aware of the old saying, `The older I get, the faster I was,' has fashioned a masterpiece about his own craft, piecing together an intricate story of stories and oddly managing to remain true to his distinctive style while at the same time creating a film different from anything he's ever done before. The extension of the title is only learned through internal dialogue in the film itself (something about a big fish in a small pond), and it has a variety of meanings throughout the story (depending on to whom it is referring at any given time).

As I watch the primaries for the presidential election coming up in 2004, it's strange how much the race of the Democrats seems to reflect Big Fish on its road to the Oscars. All I'll say is that Howard Dean was in a comfortable front-running position until Iowa, where he was rendered a disappointing third place. Big Fish, similarly (at least in my own opinion), sort of plays the part of John Kerry  somewhere in the distance until he became noticed, and was suddenly catapulted to first place. Howard Dean for me was The Return of the King, the final Lord of the Rings installment that I was sure would win the Best Picture Oscar until I saw Big Fish. Now, however, Big Fish is not even on the list of nominees, which gives me the urge to roll up my sleeves and scream. The really sad part is knowing that Big Fish can't win, so it'll be interesting to me to see how Big Fish (Kerry) does in November. Surely he has a better chance of winning than his cinematic counterpart does.
Anyway
Every once in a while I see a movie and I read through some other reviews, on the IMDb and otherwise, and it is absolutely amazing to me how many people are able to completely miss the boat on so many truly great films. Roger Ebert completely missed the point of this film even more than he missed the point of Memento, which is incredible to me. One of the most disturbing things that I read was by one reviewer on the IMDb who mentioned that it was stupid to have had Jessica Lange and Albert Finney play a married couple. This reviewer was particularly bothered by the fully clothed bathtub scene in which Lange crawls into the tub with her husband and cuddles up to him.
I find it really sad that today's audiences are put off of a movie as great as Big Fish for something as trivial and stupid as that. Are people really that shallow these days? It's the same as a complaint about Kim Basinger playing Eminem's mother in 8 Mile. People said she was just too beautiful to play someone so poor and trashy, to which Roger Ebert cleverly responded that, given how many ugly people are filthy rich today, there can really be no complaint about beautiful people with no money.
Big Fish is a perfect example of the old adage, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts, although I think it would be more appropriate to say that the whole is completely different from the sum of its parts. Take any individual scene at random, almost any SHOT at random, and it is clearly the work of Tim Burton, yet the film as a whole is completely different from anything he's ever done before. Movies require a certain suspension of disbelief, regardless of their director, story, genre, etc., but in Big Fish that suspension is displaced by the identity of the storyteller. Most of the film is told through the stories of the aging Edward Bloom, whose stories we learn very early on are heavily exaggerated if not totally fictional. Tim Burton uses that almost as an excuse to craft this adventurous tale involving giants and midgets and jumping spiders and leaning houses and gigantic fishes and wedding rings and Siamese twins that look more like a two-headed woman and a magical town called Spectre that might be (is) Heaven where the streets are paved with luscious grass and everyone walks around barefoot and loves it all so much that no one ever leaves.

It doesn't matter whether or not you believe that a young Ed Bloom really parachuted accidentally onto a stage being watched by hundreds of armed Vietnamese soldiers and then escaped because his endless charm overcame the two-headed performer and got her/them to help him. It doesn't matter if you believe that young Ed Bloom worked for years without pay at a freaky circus in order to learn the identity of a woman he saw only a single time across a crowded circus ring and then went on to marry her. It doesn't matter if you believe in werewolves, in magic, in fish that eat wedding rings, and it certainly doesn't matter if you believe that someone who looks like Jessica Lange could ever love and be happily married to a man who looks like Albert Finney. Big Fish is the character study of Edward Bloom and his son, Will, who didn't speak for years after Will's wedding when he heard his father's story about the day he was born for the last time that he could stand.

(spoilers) Think about the character change in this movie. Will has been bored to tears by that story for his entire life, growing increasingly disgusted at how little his own part is in the story of the day he was born, and it is not until he is in his 30s that he learns the value of the storytelling of his father. The most moving scene is not the scene where Will tells his dying father the story of how he `goes,' it's the final scene of Edward's funeral. There's no dialogue, but we see who has shown up. The giant from Edward's stories in there, as is Amos Calloway, the eccentric circus ringleader. The two-headed woman from Vietnam is there, except we learn here that in real life she is two women, identical but certainly separate. Citizens from the town of Spectre are there, as is Jenny, Edward's almost love affair and supposedly the wicked witch that terrified Ed as a child (I'm still working on the chronology of that one).
What we learn in the funeral scene, even though we can't hear anyone talking, is that Ed's stories were not all fictional. They were certainly exaggerated, which is revealed all along the way and not the least example of which is the fact that the two-headed woman is two completely separate twins. Edward Bloom is a man who aggrandized the past through his remarkable storytelling skills, and Tim Burton delivered this to us with his remarkable filmmaking skills.
Writers will tell you that they write about what they know about, and Tim Burton has made a movie about what he knows about  telling stories. Burton realizes the importance of the role of storytelling in our lives, and has made a film about that importance and the effect it can have on us. Stories told verbally perpetuate lives, cultures, families, and loves. Edward Bloom was a master storyteller, and you can see his influence on the vast number of people that he knew and were fortunate enough to know him in the closing shot of the film. We see of the people that we met throughout the film, older but clearly happier as they stand around, telling each other stories in memory of their friend.
I say bravo, Mr Burton. Bravo.