Moderately interesting and entertaining

Rating: 7/10 (28 January 2004)

The story deals with a father-son relationship. In the son's early years -- say at bedtime -- the son was enthralled by his father's stories about his previous adventures.
But as he hears these same stories repeated (eventually _ad nauseum_), he views them as "shtick" -- his father's routine to be performed at any social gathering that permits it -- and he becomes resentful of his father's reliance on them. His being forced into the posture of a passive, appreciative audience prevents him from ever really knowing his father or having an adult-adult relationship with him. The stories form an impenetrable facade and shield. In reaction, the son becomes estranged from his father until his mother calls him and says his father is dying. The son returns home with his new wife, hoping to re-establish an honest, intimate relationship with his father before his father dies. His wife is pregnant and he urgently wants to accomplish this -- to form a satisfying relationship -- before he himself becomes a father.
The movie very satisfactorily develops that.
What happens next is that son gradually finds some pieces of evidence that his father may have had some adventures that formed building blocks for his father's schtick.
Burton and his movie dramatize the father's fanciful stories and that forms the backbone and length (205 minutes!) of the film.
Somehow, by finding that the stories were not _entirely_ fanciful, that there may have been some reality building blocks in them, the son reconciles himself to his father and accepts him for what he is. And at the end, at the funeral, we see a visual evidence that his father's fanciful tales had some basis in reality.
What's given us are marvelous, fanciful representations of the tall tales. And the son's brief searches for realities behind the stories also are given fanciful, fairy tale twists. What we are not given (at least not given to me) is a satisfying sense of what helps the son suddenly give up his desire for intimacy with his father and click into accepting his father's stories and his father.
IF we view the whole thing as it probably should be -- as a fairy tale composed of a collection of fairy tales -- then it makes a moderately entertaining evening. The cast was great. But it could have been more.