Three tales about Big Fish - one man's impressions of a very busy, ambitious film.

Rating: 1/10 (18 July 2004)

Edward Bloom (Albert Finney) is a sick old man. His son (Billy Crudup) is frustrated by the fact that he's spent his entire life telling tall tales instead of really talking about himself. So, to tell us about his father as a young man (Ewan McGregor), Crudup only has these stories to tell us.
Obviously an intensely personal film for Burton, who is really here telling us a tale about his own father.
* I could imagine it all before I saw it. Or maybe I felt the exact content of it wasn't relevant - the initial idea said everything there was to say: man tells tall tales instead of talking, son is not impressed. I could imagine these fairy tales from watching the previews. Just tall tales.
* Or maybe its because I just found the character of Burton's father so frustrating. Always claiming he cares so much about people and about life in his stories, yet not caring enough to talk with them like a human being. Stories make nice movies; but would i take them instead of life?
Burton isn't naive to this. Its the conflict at the centre of the film.

But i just couldn't forgive Albert Finney's character. Burton clearly can. That's the problem with too-personal projects. You can't be objective about what you expect the audience to be experiencing while they watch it - because your own experience of it is informed by so much that's offscreen. So of course Burton can forgive Finney, because he's his own father! You love him despite the fact that he's a selfish, frustrating old rat. But he's not my father, or anybody else's - why should we forgive him?
* Its such a busy film, too. Burton really shot for the moon with this one. He tries to tell us a million movies at once: every five minutes a new movie, and frankly I didn't care about any of them. The twenty minute tangents into his fathers' stories had about as much dramatic tension as my own grandfather's stories. They were all just silly stories his father was telling. I thought the gawdy colours were too much for the same reason.
6/10. I find his simpler films like Edward Scissorhands more profound and beautiful: less is indeed more. Maybe I just didn't like Billy Crudup (BO-RING! Think robotic Hayley-Joel in Secondhand Lions). It didn't work for me.