a review by Jeffrey Overstreet
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Director – Tim Burton
Writer – John August, based on the novel by Daniel Wallace
Director of photography – Philippe Rousselot
Editor – Chris Lebenzon
Music – Danny Elfman
Production designer – Dennis Gassner
Producers – Richard D. Zanuck, Bruce Cohen and Dan Jinks
Columbia Pictures. 110 minutes. Rated PG-13.
STARRING: Ewan McGregor (Edward Bloom as Young Adult), Albert Finney (Edward Bloom as Older Adult), Billy Crudup (Will Bloom), Jessica Lange (Sandra Bloom as Older Adult), Helena Bonham Carter (Jenny and Witch), Alison Lohman (Young Sandra Bloom), Robert Guillaume (Dr. Bennett as Older Adult), Steve Buscemi (Norther Winslow), Danny DeVito (Amos Calloway) and Marion Cotillard (Josephine).
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Tim Burton is the man responsible for one of cinema’s most enchanting fairy tales: Edward Scissorhands. This fantastic fable about a strange, broken, “invented” boy speaks to the alienated child in all of us. Edward is drawn into a small town where he becomes as a sort of subtle savior, serving as a good listener, a good friend, a protector, and an artist. But alas, like most great artists, he is misunderstood. Worse, people want to use him and take advantage of him. He resists the sexual temptation of the local seductress. He refuses to help rowdy kids break into a locked house. And, in trying to protect a naïve teenage girl (Winona Ryder), he clashes with a brash and arrogant bully (Anthony Michael Hall). By the end of the film, everyone is angry with him for one reason or another. The admiring neighbors have become an angry mob. He is driven out of town, running back up to his home “on high,” a sad but caring guardian angel.
Burton loves stories like this. He’s concerned above all with eccentrics and misunderstood heroes.
But with his new film, Big Fish, Burton makes a crucial mistake. Edward Bloom… yes, another Edward… is no Edward Scissorhands. Bloom is obsessed with himself, not other people. He takes what happens to him and turns those episodes into fanciful tall tales. Oh, there is nothing wrong with the stories themselves. The problem is in the way he tells them.
Edward cares only about his stories. He spends more time talking about how he won his wife’s heart than he does loving his wife. At his son’s wedding, he steals the spotlight and starts talking about his own romantic adventures. Even now, on his deathbed, rather than connecting with his son in any honest way, he drifts off into fantasy after fantasy.
This much becomes clear early in the movie. The audience is led to believe that Bloom is somewhat lost in this labyrinth of stories he has concocted. His son Will (Billy Crudup of Almost Famous) is a journalist, another sort of storyteller. But Will is concerned with the truth. He wants to know more about the details of his father’s past. So, when Edward nears his death, Will makes one last attempt to get past the metaphors and fantasies, to learn where his father really comes from. But it is too important to Edward that he dazzle with a good yarn. He seems unable to connect with his son’s personal plea.
This viewer assumed that the story would conclude with the father and son coming to some kind of compromise. The father would finally give up his self-centered storytelling and notice his son. Will would acknowledge the power of story, but he would also gain a window into his father’s heart.
No. Doesn’t happen. Instead, we are led to believe that Edward is the hero. Edward has divorced himself from sensitivity and humility, and has insisted on his stories so firmly that his wife and son become smiling, cheering fans.
We are supposed to applaud this self-centered behavior?
Many critics are praising Tim Burton for having made a film about faith, about how mythmaking enriches our lives. Myths do enrich our lives. They give us metaphors that help us see our own lives more clearly, so we can return to our routine wiser and stronger. But sometimes, the myths can become addicting. Some people become compulsive moviegoers, compulsive video game players, compulsive audiences for our own home videos. Some are so dazzled by the visions brought on by drugs, they become slaves to the narcotic.
The imagination is a powerful gift from God, but like any good thing, it can develop an attraction similar to that of the Ring that corrupted Gollum, Bilbo, and eventually Frodo. It can become an easy escape that eventually distracts us from the role we were designed to play in this world. It indulges our pride by offering the illusion that we are the center of everything.
One of the clearest examples of Bloom’s self-centeredness is the distasteful arrogance that characterizes his stories. Burton treats us to dazzling, gorgeously filmed half-dream sequences where we can stroll through Edward’s imagination. We see Bloom succeeding in basketball, while the irritable and oafish Bon Price (David Denman of The Replacement Heroes) sits on the bench. Time and time again, Bloom makes himself the hero in a small town, humiliating Bon Price. Finally, when the frustrated bully has become engaged to the town’s most beautiful woman (the radiant Alison Lohman of Matchstick Men), Bloom marches in and steals her right out from under him. Granted, Bon Price wasn’t an ideal husband. But I will be surprised if audiences do not sympathize with him to some extent. After all, Bloom is stealing every opportunity the big lout has to make something of his life. While the film was painting Bloom as a charmed hero who gets whatever he wants, I wanted Bon Price to rise up and fight for what he had been given.
Even more off-putting is the fact that everyone who listens to Bloom’s stories seems to be caught up in their spell, and they end up standing around affirming these egotistical tales. Bloom’s wife Sandra, an enchantingly beautiful young woman in the flashbacks, grows up into a radiant woman (the dazzling Jessica Lange) who does nothing but stand around and smile adoringly at her delusional husband. Bloom’s whole philosophy of being a “big fish in a small pond” who needs to find a bigger pond… well, it appeals to the selfish ambition in us all. We want to be gods. We want to be worshipped. We want to be the hero of our own stories.
This lesson is trumpeted even more brashly near the conclusion, when Edward’s last hope of being saved from egoism-his conscientious son-caves in and joins the fan club. “A man tells a story so many times, he becomes the story,” Edward tells his son. “It lives on after him. That way he becomes immortal.”
No. That makes him notorious. And in this case, it makes him hard-hearted and annoying. Gaining immortality by glorifying ourselves through stories… that is not even close to the meaning of life. The Greatest Story Ever Told proves that. It’s about someone who made themselves as a servant, humble, rejecting the glory and power he could have used. It was his humility and grace that made him the subject of other people’s stories.
Having said all of this, it would be unfair to conclude a review of Big Fish without acknowledging its virtues. Burton conjures enchanting big screen visions here. Some sights-a mermaid swimming past a submerged car, that same car later lodged in the high branches of a tree-are breathtaking to behold.
The cast is also effective. Ewan McGregor (Moulin Rouge) may not be very compelling as the young Bloom-he just grins and goofs at every turn. But Alison Lohman (White Oleander) is luminous in her brief scenes as the young Sandra Bloom. She’s the mirror image of a young Jessica Lange. Steve Buscemi (Fargo) is suave and strange as always, playing Norther Winslow, a neighborly nice guy-turned bank robber. And Helena Bonham-Carter (Fight Club) is spooky and sexy playing mysterious dual roles.
Albert Finney (Erin Brockovich, Miller’s Crossing) is especially impressive as the aging storyteller. He seems to understand, even if the storyteller does not, that all of this artifice is keeping him from any sustaining sort of life. He himself confesses that he is always thirsty, but the film never gives him the water of life… even though his doting wife clearly cares for him. (The film’s best scene shows her willing to climb on top of him in the bathtub fully clothed, just to express her spirited love for him. It’s a fantastic moment.)
Near the end, we can see the panic in Edward’s eyes as he begins at last to focus on reality. But then his son coaxes him back into fantasyland, so he can die with a smile on his face. Sad. There is real truth, real meaning, real joy to be had in “the real world,” and most stories point us toward it. Edward passes, lost in his own inventions.
Perhaps that is the film’s biggest problem. Its actors cause us to care about these people, and yet we can sense, as the curtain falls, that they have fallen short of the answer. They have chosen fantasy over reality, without discerning the important relationship between the two, without seeing how the one reflects, reveals, and enriches the other.
It is that way with several Burton films, including Ed Wood (yet another Edward story). Burton seems to have decided there is no true “higher reality.” So, instead, he acknowledges all of the warped illusions we construct for ourselves, and tries to pay tribute to each character’s bizarre alternate reality. He celebrates the empty imaginings of the lost, because he assumes there is no real liberation, there is no glory awaiting us, except that which we invent for ourselves.
