A good yarn

Rating: Null/10 (1 August 2004)

There are only a few directors who could make a movie like "Big Fish" and make it work. Fortunately, Tim Burton is one of them. With his penchant for the beautifully grotesque and the grotesquely beautiful, Burton is able to fill the screen with captivating images, while at the same time understanding that there must be something solid beneath all the style.
The film's central character is Edward Bloom (Ewan McGregor as the young incarnation, Albert Finney as the elder). An expert storyteller, Edward is forever spinning tall tales with himself and his associates as the central characters. Many people, like his wife Sandra (Alison Lohman-young, Jessica Lange-old), indulge his eccentricity, but it rubs his son Will (Billy Crudup) the wrong way. He's heard all these stories a hundred times; why can't his dad tell it like it is for once? After years of estrangement, Edward's illness provokes Will to come home and make one last bid to understand a man who's deliberately woven a series of exaggerations, dreams, and half-truths around his life.
The movie is best when we enter the world of Edward's stories, a place of magical realism where the rules of reality are are bent, but not beyond all recognition. Colors are brighter, time literally slows to a halt and speeds up alarmingly, and giants, witches, Siamese twins, and other strange sights cross the screen. At the center of all this, McGregor is an ideal protagonist--a cross between the way Edward was and the way he'd always wanted to be. Burton handles all of this with skill and sensitivity. He understands, as Will does not, that the stories present a more complete picture of Edward than mere facts ever could. They reveal his memories, perceptions, dreams, and outlook on life. When Edward courts Sandra by filling fields with flowers and writing her name across the sky, we know that we're not seeing what happened, but what would have happened if the prosaic rules of reality had allowed Edward to express the full extent of his feelings.
So charming is Edward's altered truth that it's a bit jarring when we come back to the real world, where the movie slows (mostly as it's driven by Crudup in the role of the requisite wet blanket). But the ending is excellent, weaving together fantasy and reality in a way that's touching and satisfying.