Big Fish (2003)

BIG FISH (2003) / ****

Directed by Tim Burton. Screenplay by John August, based on the novel by Daniel Wallace. Starring Ewan McGregor, Albert Finney, Billy Crudup. Running time: 125 minutes. Rated PG by the MFCB. Reviewed on January 26th, 2004.

By SHANNON PATRICK SULLIVAN

Synopsis: Will Bloom (Crudup) is summoned home to the deathbed of his father Edward (Finney). The two have long been estranged because of Will's frustration with his father's inability to tell stories truthfully -- instead he's famed for spinning wild yarns about cow-devouring giants and conjoined twin Vietnamese singers. Now, Will reflects on Edward's life the way his father (played as a young man by McGregor) told it.

Review: Despite all the modern high-tech wizardry on display in "Big Fish", it still feels like a throwback to the Golden Age of cinema -- I could easily see Jimmy Stewart in the Ewan McGregor role, for instance, or maybe William Powell. That's because this is a film which absolutely exudes charm; from the very first "big fish" story, Burton entices the viewer into his delightfully warped take on reality, as filtered through a father's timeworn tall tales. It's a journey made most willingly. Drawing in equal measures on the humorous and the eerie, the sentimental and the absurd, Burton makes "Big Fish" succeed by making us eager to hear the next story, no matter how much the truth of the telling has been stretched by Edward Bloom (in fact, that's part of the attraction). And, perhaps most crucially, he does so by making the prodigious special effects work in harmony with the stories rather than dominating them. "Big Fish" is a movie which could have gone too far one way or the other -- too sappy, too bizarre, too inane. But instead Burton reaches exactly the right balance, to no small degree because his superb cast (most notably McGregor and Finney) has found exactly the right pitch, too. Tremendous fun to watch and offering an elegiac rumination on the nature of truth in fiction, "Big Fish" is a joy from beginning to end.

Copyright © 2004 Shannon Patrick Sullivan. Archived at The Popcorn Gallery, http://www.physics.mun.ca/~sps/movies.html

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