Burton makes a good film... The end must be near!

Rating: 10/10 (18 January 2004)

As you no doubt would guess from my summary, I am not a Tim Burton fan. To tell the truth, the only reason I went in to see this movie was because I had a free pass that was about to expire and then this one used a great song (Peter Gabriel's "Solisbury Hill") in its commercials (I agree, that is the absolute dumbest reason to see a movie that there is; but it's the truth!), so I went to watch it. I cringe whenever I hear that Tim Burton is working on a film--especially since he managed to take a masterwork of American literature in Washington Irving's "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" and turn it into an atrocious assault on the filmgoing public named "Sleepy Hollow" that hardly even resembled the work on which it was based. I hate everything of his I have seen except "Batman," which I like just for pure fun. However, I have always enjoyed his use of color and lighting and so I have been hoping for a long time that he would work from a great script once so that perhaps he would make a good film.
He finally has done both with "Big Fish." This film is an exercise in mythmaking--something that filmmakers should be interested in doing and yet somehow are not. While it isn't the grand, ancient, epic mythmaking that Tolkien did with his "Lord of the Rings" novels and then Peter Jackson later did with the film adaptations, it is the same basic concept--creating a piece of folklore. It's obvious in its themes and story, yes, but that's part of the point: folklore and myths are always obvious. The characters are flat, but they really don't matter as much as they do in more modern forms of storytelling. (As Mozart says in "Amadeus," mythical characters are "so elevated they sound as if they [crap] marble," and most people "would rather listen to your hairdresser than Hercules.") So, the obviousness and character flatness is intentional and is part of creating the world in which this film resides, which is not strictly the real one.
There isn't much to the characters, which then of course renders the actors incapable of putting in impressive performances. As I've said, it's not about characters. This is not an actor's movie (hence it will be ignored by the Oscars--if you read this after them, you'll be able to see if I'm any good at prognisticating such things), but I do want to point out the thoroughly enjoyable performance of Ewan McGregor He seemed to be thoroughly enjoying himself the entire time and played up the cheese in the story to the hilt in a wonderfully entertaining way.
Burton creates a beautiful, colorful, obviously not-quite-real world for this film that works perfectly for the storyline and keeps the film in this other world in which it does exist.
Overall, it's a fun movie. You can start attaching significance to it if you want and searching it for symbols and mythical archetypes, but I personally just enjoyed it. It's nice-looking, light-hearted, and funny. From what I have seen (which is most of the Oscar contenders), this is the second-best movie of 2003, a worthy film, and the picture that proves Tim Burton CAN make a good movie if he's got subject matter with which to work.