Edward Bloom bemoans the telling of “straight truths.” A tale of cold, hard facts won’t be “complicated,” he observes, “but it won’t be interesting either.” Bloom has spent most of his life spinning yarns about past experiences too outlandish to be real yet too entertaining to be dismissed.
His tall tales are his legacy for the future, and they endear the old codger to seemingly everyone he meets-save his own son, a practical and resentful young man who has heard and reheard his father’s stories since birth and has grown up to believe none of them.
The two Blooms choose to live in different worlds-the son in reality, the father in fantasy. The decision of which choice is more valid, if either, is at the heart of “Big Fish,” a charming if uneven new film from director Tim Burton.
Billy Crudup plays the estranged son, who reluctantly visits his father’s deathbed in hopes of learning the truths behind the old man’s myths. But Bloom Sr. (played with gleeful bragadaccio by the great Albert Finney) contends his stories are as true as they need to be and, instead of offering his son a chance at a heart-to-heart, he simply and proudly retells whoppers from his past.
Flashbacks show Bloom as an open-faced, earnest young man (an open-faced, earnest Ewan McGregor) whose life since birth has been one skewed misadventure after another.
Bloom recalls himself as “the biggest thing” his small Alabama town had ever seen, and indeed his unbelievable expolits are the stuff of local legend. He tells of a witch with a fortune-telling glass eye, a conjoined sister act of Chinese chanteuses, a heavenly town called Spectre, where the streets are paved with fresh-cut grass, a gentle giant named Karl and an uncatchable catfish the size of a Buick.
Tim Burton’s flair for fantastic visuals is put to great use as Bloom’s tales become increasingly quirky and hard to swallow. Bloom’s story world is colorful, whimsical, michievous and the director’s bright palette and broad style gamely reflect the playful spirit of the material. Burton’s ample bag of tricks opens to reveal a mastery of special effects (showcased nowhere more effectively than when Bloom first spots Sandra, the love of his life, in a crowded circus tent and time literally stops for him to give her a closer look) as well as a gentler comic touch than the famously dark-spirited auteur has shown in the past.
Yet Burton’s emphasis on the technical wire-walking of the flashbacks leaves the un-frilled poignancy of the father-son reunion in the lurch. With focus on Bloom’s stories and not on Bloom himself, “Big Fish” is more a finely-tuned audio/visual spectacle than a character-driven drama. Each new tale contains the same shaggy marriage of predestination and happenstance, but there seems to be no build to the telling. The stories are enthralling in the moment, but they feel ultimately purposeless without a unifying vision tying them together and progressing them toward a climax.
The greatest flaws of the fantasy episodes are lack of urgency and an inability to get the audience any deeper into Bloom’s head. Bloom forsees as a youngster that he is not destined to die until a ripe old age, and this makes many of his actions seem less like heroism and more like an invincible man challenging fate by stretching the limitations of his indestructibility.
The emotional stakes are low as well. Flashbacks show that Sandra truly loves Edward and vice versa, but the audience never sees why past only the shimmering surface of things. Romance in this film’s world consists of love at first sight, an instantaneous proposal, and a courtship of sky-writing and impossible amounts of daffodils.
One could argue that the point of “Big Fish” is that Bloom is the sum of his fabulism, that he could not exist as he does without his stories and an audience with which to share them. All life stories depend on interpretation and perhaps embellishment to give them meaning. We are defined as much by the fiction of our lives as by the facts, and anything can be perfectly true if you choose to believe in it.
These morals hold true if Bloom is an ambiguous romanticist whose way of thinking is merely accepted by his son instead of having to be proven or disproven. Instead, the film gives us certainties in an ending full of teary nobility and easy answers. By telling us how to think instead of leaving us with a question, “Big Fish” seems to miss its own point-that the power of belief is stronger than any well-proven fact.
Still, Burton’s artistry behind the camera makes the film gorgeous to behold from start to finish, even if it is missing the depth of emotion and intellect to make it an outstanding film. In the face of global confusion, public disaffection and mounting political impotence, “Big Fish” is a simple and sweet flight of fancy that seeks to show just how necessary irony-free escapism is in this dull, deeply cynical world of ours.