Burton's colorful 'Fish' flounders
Tim Burton has always preferred to look at the world the way an awkward 11-year-old boy might. After all, the shadows make an excellent place to hide. But suddenly and sadly, Burton is dragging his darkness into Hollywood's light. "Big Fish" is his 10th movie, and its colors are brighter, the characters more ebullient, the truth swirling with more artificial sweeteners than in any of his previous gonzo confections.
The film re-creates the epic fables old Ed Bloom (Albert Finney) tells his son Will (Billy Crudup) and Will's pregnant wife (Marion Cotillard) from his big deathbed. The re-creations have the floating-away quality of certain dreams. Will is a journalist who dismisses his father's fabulizing as bunk. But as far as the movie's concerned, Will's incredulity makes about as strong an anchor as the string tied around a let-go balloon. The helium is carrying that thing into the ether, no matter what.
The film wanders from the present to the evolving American past, where we're regaled with stories of a young Ed (Ewan McGregor), who's absolutely certain he's meant for greater things than his small Alabama town can provide. He's special that way. So he embarks on a journey to discover what that bigger thing is. Apparently, it's love -- the kind you spread, the kind you fall into, the kind a movie makes you choke on until your eyes well up.
Working with expert technicians, including the cinematographer Philippe Rousselot, the costume designer Colleen Atwood, and the ingenious production designer Dennis Gassner, Burton uses clever craftsmanship and visual wit to keep in check the sentimental detours in John August's adaptation of Daniel Wallace's novel -- only to pull the rug out from under us in the final going with a lot of flagrant heart-tugging between dying dad and disappointed son.
Still, the picture's images linger. A just-born Ed pops out of his mother's womb, onto the floor, and slides down the hospital hall; young Ed woos his wife-to-be (lovely Alison Lohman), after pummeling her primary suitor in an ocean of daffodils; Steve Buscemi, as a well-heeled hillbilly, does a jubilant run-dance to keep up with Rousselot's spinning camera during a jamboree; old Ed embraces his wife (Jessica Lange), full soak, in a bathtub.
The framing of these sequences -- and every sequence in the film, for that matter -- is precise and exquisite. But the action in each is so nutty that they're at odds with the tears the movie is trying to jerk. Burton is attempting to break you up with silliness. When he's not pushing elaborate, childish gags (young Ed's World War II stint with a set of Siamese twin sisters springs to mind), he seems out of his element with the real-world melodrama. With its eyes tripping over historical detail and its tongue slogging through synthetic Southern accents, "Big Fish" induces shudders of "Forrest Gump." Oddly, the film feels most alive when it flirts with the living dead, represented here by a run-down manse and the wonderfully well-used Helena Bonham Carter in dual roles. In one, she's a hag who looks like Lillian Gish playing the goth idol Siouxsie Sioux.
Every performance in the movie is just as good and uniquely enjoyable as hers. In the movie's 1970s stretch, McGregor looks like Finney did in the 1960s. And he puts on the same "I did it!" grin that gymnasts do when they finish a routine. He doesn't deserve an Oscar, he deserves a score from the Russian judge. (I give him an 8.)
Crudup could be the best straight man in the movies. He's the one rational voice in Burton's fantasia, strenuously but not stridently objecting to the tallness of these tales. The actor's job here is the hardest to pull off, since practical skepticism in a Tim Burton picture is next to villainy. Yet Crudup suggests complex grown-up feelings that makes the rest of "Big Fish" feel like an earnest collection of magic tricks.
Wesley Morris can be reached at wmorris@globe.com.
Big Fish **1/2
Directed by: Tim Burton
Screenplay by: John August, from the book by Daniel Wallace
Starring: Albert Finney, Ewan McGregor, Billy Crudup, Jessica Lange, Alison Lohman, Marion Cotillard, Steve Buscemi, Helena Bonham Carter
At: Boston Common, Harvard Square
Running time: 110 minutes
Rated: PG-13 (violence, nudity, suggestive language)
