All the facts, none of the flavour

Rating: 8/10 (29 August 2015)

The framing device of a father's tall tales is the perfect vessel for Tim Burton's Big Fish, which narrates the young life of Edward Bloom through a series of vivid vignettes segmented by the more mundane reality, where an elderly Bloom is at his last days. Albert Finney plays the ageing storyteller and is the best of the cast; his wheezing insistence in getting his yarns across is affectionate enough that you have to question Will's (Billy Crudup) distance at times. There's no such problems for the pregnant Joséphine, played tenderly by Marion Cotillard. She approaches Bloom with no such inhibitions and therefore their scenes are warm and satisfyingly sweet. The uncanny likeness of Ewan McGregor to a young Finney isn't the only similarity; there's enough nuance in the dying father's performance that shows hints of the amiable and adventurous young man that McGregor lights up the screen with.
In many ways Burton is allowed to run free with the flashbacks to Bloom's past because of the assumption of an unreliable narrator. The stories, like an elder's rambling, occasionally drift unto unfocused territory which lingers on the absurd, like the revelation of Danny Devito's character of a ringmaster to be a werewolf. You can erase that part and still have the respect between him and Bloom which eventually leads him to the young Sandra. Most of the time it works well, allowing Burton to deliver settings and characters that venture easily into fantasy and fairytale. The visuals shine most strongly in these segments. Take the wondrous and heavenly town of Spectre, perfectly symmetrical in its lines of buildings and picturesque with its highly saturated green lawns. It becomes even more beautiful at night, framed by a cluster of lights and that strange string of stolen shoes hanging overhead. Or maybe the endless sea of bright yellow daffodils that Bloom woos Sandra with.
It never gets too serious like a good bedtime story. The scale and terror of the Korean War is minimised to a small set where Siamese twins perform for the wartime troops while Bloom parachutes in to steal plans. It's bizarrely charming even through the broken Cantonese; instead of a gritty action sequence, McGregor pauses the scene for a second to take out his night-vision goggles, pulls the light string and a series of looney-tunes like sound effects serves his escape instead. You can't help but laugh. When Bloom struggles through a murky forest covered in spiders, the score turns ominous until he suddenly realises this isn't how he dies and he escapes casually. That later becomes the push for the penultimate scene where the father-son relationship is finally reconciled and Will takes on the mantle of the storyteller, finishing his father's life story. Elfman and Lebenzon work closely together here; the tender voice-over narrates the escape from the hospital, the score spirited and encouraging and urging them onwards. The fantasy sequence is warmly coloured and brisk while reality is colder, bluer and more intimate, as the close-ups dictate.
The most solemn and revealing scene however is the final one, the funeral of Bloom where the entire cast of characters from those tall tales end up being, well, not so tall after all (in Karl's case, quite literally). Burton lets us quietly contemplate in that instance, which perhaps makes that final voice-over grating when there's plenty of meaning and subtext in the children's gossip and that final shot of the enormous catfish. There's certainly little bits here and there in Big Fish that could be trimmed; Burton is at times guilty of using the storytelling device to showcase fantastic visuals but not actually show us anything new about our characters. Bonham Carter certainly doesn't need to play a double role, and Buscemi's character is peculiarly uneven (for once I would have preferred Depp, even with his marriage to Burton). But overall, Big Fish is a great and nostalgic viewing. The set design and cinematography perfectly capture the time period, the colours wistful and vivid and the architecture whimsy. Foregoing veracity is the right choice for this magical tale, because Big Fish becomes grandiose in its own little sphere, yet modest and intimate. Bloom is dying yet ironically more alive than any other character, living vicariously through the stories of the past. And we can easily join in.