Burton back to his best.

Rating: 9/10 (28 November 2003)

Astonishingly original.
Messr's Wallace and August have provided Burton with a script full of warmth and just quirky enough for Burton to cut loose on. Assured direction, aided by fantastic production design from Dennis Gassner and some beautiful cinematography bring out the best of this story and its characters. At some points some characters are deliberately fantastical, the gloss serving to draw smiles ever more willingly from the enraptured audience.
That is not to say that the film is without its mischief. To my mind, one of Burtons's greatest and most defining traits is his ability to quite sharply and deliberately sidestep the proscribed path and follow it at a tangent. He was denied this opportunity by the conformist powers that be for Planet of the Apes, and the film suffered for it. This film contains some of the most delightful examples of said mischief yet, in particular the achingly funny resolution to Ewan Macgregor's confrontation with two martial arts masters in a tent. Tops the Raiders of the Lost Ark "shoot the swordsman" scene for sheer sight gag delight, and is especially biting in this age of wire-fu and CG super-brawls.
So people will insist on throwing hyperbole and comparisons upon this film. The hyperbole will largely be down to the relative lack of pre-release exposure for the film, and the comparisons to other films of fantasy and life stories can largely be ignored. This film is as original as any major studio release since Adaptation, and people's wish to pidgeonhole it or stand it up against films which are a mile away tonally, in content or execution might eventually be its downfall, which is a crushing shame, as it deserves so much more than that.
Burton's assurance on this film has resulted in his best of recent times, evoking memories of The Nightmare before Christmas and Edward Scissorhands, but ultimately Big Fish is far warmer than these, or indeed anything he has ever approached before. Let us hope that with Charlie and the Chocolate Factory he will continue to pick up where he left off in the early nineties.