Tim Burton's Big Fish expresses in formal terms the conflict at the center of the film's plot: that between reason and fancy, between reality and fantasy. The story's hero is one Edward Bloom (played by Albert Finney in the present day and by Ewan McGregor as a young man), who never met an embellishment or exaggeration he didn't like. His son, William (Billy Crudup), feels that he has never really known his father for precisely this reason. The two are brought together when the elder Bloom is stricken with cancer and is slowly dying.

Burton initially seems like the wrong director for this project and in many respects, he is. The film's present day scenes are directed in a naturalistic style virtually without precedent in the filmmaker's oeuvre. They are frequently effective and moving, though often intensely nondescript and occasionally even slightly inept. Burton seems ill at ease much of the time during these sections of Big Fish, as though a restrained visual style and nondescript production design were being imposed on him.

Yet this ill-at-ease-ness is ultimately justified as part of a larger formal strategy once Burton is freed to visualize the incredible stories of Edward Bloom. The "Tim Burton Film" of this Tim Burton film is to be found here, in his glorious reenactments of Bloom's tales: the incredible account of his "courtship" and marriage to wife Sandy (played by Alison Lohman as a young woman and, later on, by Jessica Lange); his escapades in China during World War II; his befriending of a giant who is eating the citizens of his hometown of Sterne, Alabama; and on and on. Burton's dramatizing of the moment during which Edward first saw Sandy is among the most beautiful he has ever directed, literally stopping time to expand and heighten that "moment" into a near-eternity of reverie.

By alternating these vividly realized vignettes with the indifferently directed present-day material, Burton is able to relay through his mise-en-scene the rather simple moral of Big Fish: imagination and mystery are frequently more appealing than truth and "reality." Big Fish is the closest thing we have yet to a testament film by this always interesting filmmaker.

                                                                 © FILM JOURNAL 2002