Destiny in the witch's eye

Rating: Null/10 (13 December 2011)

With Burton, it has always been a propensity for telling stories that drives his films. He surrounds this with a kind of wondrous imagination derived in a slick manner from old horror movies, a commercial imagination if you ask me, but which often dazzles attention away from the real design of the thing, which is a story at the center. He is the most successful when he can align these, visual outer layers and storytelling mechanisms, when he can devise ways to point at some kind of maker folding the elaborate origamis that we experience decorating the surface.
So, Beetlejuice, with the nightmare world nested in the attic; Ed Wood even better, a subtler kind of magic, with the visionary maker marshaling movie characters into a fiction that does not matter how cheap as long as it creates real bonds that enrich lives, the real magic hiding in the shared passion for adventure. And this, perhaps the most direct of all.
So again at the center we have a storyteller weaving fanciful episodes involving kind giants, dark woods, the circus, a wartime adventure. It is all shaped around a singleminded devotion to discover and hold onto the love of a lifetime, love as destiny, this is the precious knowledge he is trying to impart from his deathbed. Of course we are seeing the whole through the eyes of the son, a journalist, a cold pragmatist, himself a storyteller from facts, at first outright disbelieving but gradually coming to unfold the wondrous origamis for some truth of their maker in the pattern.
The son himself is coming into a life that is mirrored from the one narrated from, newly married, awaiting his first child.
The idea is that there is truth at the heart of fiction, always has. We fold the real world into a more elaborate version of the mind, the truth being this; the hard facts alone would not do, it is the adventure of discovering for ourselves that has the power to impart some essence or wisdom. It needs to be our journey in these shoes. From our end, we have to learn to not merely think, but to embody, to situate the world at the heart.
It is an essay on how to engage fiction, the film itself, in order to be enriched with a love that is true, the essay nested as our effort to apprehend the tall tales. We make the discovery with the son.
Eventually it was all true, or so it goes in the film, this is a major blunder on Burton's part trying to directly address our inner child, when the point is to cultivate an openness of seeing that would allow us to abstract what matters. So the giant was as we imagined him to be, the circus owner, the twin singers except no longer conjoined. Seeing truly, this part collapses. No doubt, he trusted us to have invested enough emotion by then to not pay any mind.
Overall it is not a bad film to absorb, even if the way Burton has made it we'd rather spend time inside the fantasy; real life is bleak, but also badly integrated with the other segments, each segment badly integrated with the rest. As a result, it feels longer than it is. It feels syncopated, always starting again from where we'd left it.
Still, if you feel you have sufficiently absorbed this, made your own, freely traveled back and forth, got to know that the person is not telling the stories but the other way round, you are ready for bigger, more challenging adventures at the hands of more eloquent makers, more talented folders of visual origamis; start with the great Raoul Ruiz who recently passed away, and move backwards to Wojiech Has where the blueprint of fiction is metaphysical, Welles as an inspiration for both.