Big Fish

Synopsis: A son (Billy Crudup) returns to the bedside his dying father (Albert Finney) to try to reconcile the imaginary and the real in the stories the father tells about his own past who spent much of his life on the road having adventures but largely keeping the truth of them from his wife (Jessica Lange) and child.

A Tim Burton film gives me expectations of something hugely imaginative and generally fantastic so I was willing to forgive him the recent Planet Of The Apes as a minor aberration Yet it seems at that point, he broke off a nine year engagement with his long-standing muse, actress Lisa Marie, and started a relationship with Helena Bonham-Carter. Is the new muse not up to scratch perhaps?

Big Fish feels like Burton has tried to put something deeply personal into it but the result is strangely indulgent and sentimental. The clearest evidence of this for me is the miscasting of Bonham-Carter as both a young temptress and an ancient witch. She falls somewhere between the two without being either,

The film tries to marry two halves ripped out of different films. One half is a typically Burtonesque visually extravagant biography of a man (Ewan McGregor) living in his own fantasy. The other half is the grimly unsatisfying story of the miscast (yet another instance) Billy Crudup at the bedside of Albert Finney, playing the same man, now dying in old age.

Burton does manage to reconcile these halves reasonably successfully in the closing minutes. But there is too much in the beginning and middle that doesn’t work. At the end of the day, you really have to question whether the father wasn’t just a narcissistic old bore. Big Fish mainly shines when it is telling other character’s stories: the sadly misshapen giant Karl (played by 2.3m Matthew McGrory), the far-too-happy townsfolk of Spectre where no-one wears shoes, the frustrated poet who’s spent years on just three lines (Steve Buscemi).

The film does have some poignant moments of emotional truth but overall, it's a little disappointing, particularly for Burton fans.

 

 

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