User Comments: Date: 8 February 2004
Summary: A prize catch!
"Big Fish" is the latest opus from Tim Burton and the third film he's made
about a guy named Ed who manages to touch the lives of many by, well, not
actually doing much at all. In the case of Ed Wood, our hero made dreadful
movies. With Edward Scissorhands, he carved lovely sculptures and gave a
mean haircut. "Big Fish"'s protagonist, Edward Bloom (Albert Finney),
well... his trick is telling a good story. In fact, that's more or less
all
he ever does. He has a neverending stock of tall tales that recount his
incredibly bizarre life experiences and he's happy to tell them to anyone
who'll listen.
The film's own story though, this begins after Bloom is diagnosed with
terminal cancer. Upon hearing the news, his son William (Billy Crudup),
estranged for years, flies home to see his Dad one last time and to
finally
try and know the real man behind the self-penned mythology. He feels
cheated
that he's been bombarded all his life with these ludicrously
overimaginative
accounts of events that "don't make sense and mostly never happened at
all"
and now demands the truth. Especially about all the time during William's
childhood when his father was away from home so long. To put it in his own
words - "There were a lot of things my Dad talked about and never did, as
well as a lot of things he did which he never talked about. I need to
reconcile the two". Thus William assembles the life story of his father
through a series of expertly woven flashbacks and anecdotes which make up
the bulk of the movie.
To tell you anything else would run the risk of putting a damper on things
and if you've ever had the slightest interest in watching movies, you
really
owe it to yourself to stop reading this and see "Big Fish" NOW. It's an
unclassifiable film that hops across genres with ease and oozes magic from
every last frame. It's 100% pure heart from start to finish, served as
warm
as you can get. It's sweet yet never sickly, peppered liberally with
quirky
humour and lush visuals, then topped with the most beautiful, deeply
moving
'surprise ending' you can imagine. If you're anything like me, you'll be
sat
there bawling your eyes out and trying to conceal this from the other
cinema
patrons through a series of awkward stretches, fake nose scratchings and
well placed coughs.
Burton's visual style is as vastly imaginative as ever. On top of the
staple
gothic trademarks, he effortlessly switches styles to match the time
periods
of the story, creating a veritable kaleidoscope of technicolour Americana.
It becomes almost like a celebration of cinema itself, seeing him play so
gleefully with the methods of the masters then mixing them up with his own
obsessions. Even ignoring how utterly original, sharp and heartfelt the
screenplay is, it's nigh on impossible not to get completely spellbound by
the imagery alone here. There's so much going on in every inch of every
shot, I imagine you could watch it repeatedly for years and still miss a
trick or two.
The casting, bizarre as it may seem at first, is actually inspired and
Burton wrenches the very best out of everyone involved. The "old pro's"
Albert Finney and Jessica Lange (who plays Bloom's wife) are nothing short
of captivating, but even the younger players turn in career best
performances. Ewan MacGregor far excels his usual "Lookatme! I'm hammier
than Harrison Ford!" act and, for two hours, morphs completely into the
young Edward Bloom. Danny DeVito (seemingly disguised here as Ron
Jeremy!?)
only pops up for a cameo yet still manages to shine brighter than he has
done for at least the last decade, as circus master Amos
Calloway.
But to take the film apart into it's individual pieces seems almost to
degrade it. Everything here works so perfectly as a whole, you just get
totally lost in what's happening on the screen. Tim Burton has finally
delivered the masterpiece the world has been waiting for from him. If
there
has to be one flaw, let it be that when you leave the cinema, it's
genuinely
hard to return to dull ol' reality again. Of course, this is probably all
the more reason to award this a spotless 10 out of 10 - it's movies like
this which make the real world that little bit brighter with their
sparkle.
I think I've seen enough of them to proclaim, with as much right as the
next
guy, that this is not just one of the best films I've ever seen - it is
truly one of the best ever made.
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