Mildly interesting but austere and "dry"

Rating: Null/10 (1 January 2004)

SPOILERS HEREIN Other reviewers have summarized the film quite nicely so I'll just skip the plot and say what did and did not work for me. The movie was decent. There were parts where it lagged and sagged a little, but in general the story kept moving right along from past to present and back again, through the "big fish" scenarios and events, and towards the denouement. The "big fish" flashbacks ranged from mildly interesting to pretty interesting, but never much more than that. In hindsight, the film spent too little time in the least interesting flashbacks (Young Edward Bloom encounters the twins during a war, Young Edward Bloom Falls for his wife, in the Town of Spectre) and too little time in the more interesting flashbacks (the witch's house, trying to catch the "big fish"). Where this film really failed for me is that even though it is brightly colored and vividly filmed, ultimately, the product was very austere and, there's no other way to describe it but DRY. The film, including the fantasy flashbacks had a sort of hyper-reality to it that made me feel as if I was going to develop a headache. (Think: the movie Matchstick Men, but in that case the austereness helped the plot, not worked against it.) I wanted to like it more than I did because I think Ewan McGregor, Jessica Lange, et al. are absolutely great actors. To summarize, the plot, acting, and scenes made the movie interesting, I definitely would not call it a bad film, but the film was stylized in such a way as to produce a startling lack of emotionality. Although it is commonplace now to accuse a director such as Steven Spielberg--in constrast--of producing the "event film" or injecting too much emotion, I couldn't help but wonder how this film might have been under Spielberg's helm.