Tall Tale

Noel Vera

"Big Fish," Tim Burton's adaptation of Daniel Wallace's novel, is
wonderful fun. It takes the corny old storyline about estranged son
reconciling with father and gives it on an engaging, if not
completely fresh, permutation. "Once more round the old block," you
might almost hear Wallace saying to some white-whiskered, top-hatted
carriage driver; "and this time take the scenic route."

The film is about Ed Bloom (Albert Finney; as a younger man, Ewan
McGregor) who is dying; he has Sandra, his loving wife (Jessica
Lange; as a young woman, Alison Lohman) beside him, and arriving from
Paris is his embittered journalist son Will (Billy Crudup) with his
French wife, Josephine (Marion Cotillard). Will has a double agenda
in coming to visit: all of Bloom junior's life, Bloom senior has told
his and his son's story as a series of tall tales; now, just when
it's about his last chance to do so, Will wants to learn the truth--
"Just the facts, ma'am," in true journalism style.

Bloom senior's story understandably stretches credulity: as he put
it, he's a special man meant for bigger things. So he makes
acquaintance with a giant, heads for the big city, stops by a perfect
little town (appropriately named Specter) that appears and disappears
like swamp fog, joins the circus, at one point, parachutes behind
enemy lines during the Korean war to talk to a beautiful pair of
Siamese twins.

It's the chance to visualize the tales that probably attracted
Burton's interest; Spielberg was at one point attached to the project
and you can imagine what the results might have been: a series of
entertaining and visually inventive but basically conventional life-
affirming suburban fantasies (Spielberg passed to do the more adult--
relatively speaking--"Catch Me if You Can"). Burton's version has a
unique eeriness to it; when Ed Bloom walks into Spectre, you see a
line stretched high above the town's one main street, sagging with a
collection of shoes and boots (whose are they?); later, Ed sits down
at a table and a child scuttles underneath--what is she doing there?
You can never know for sure in a Burton film.

Burton's fantasy sequences, thanks to cinematographer Philippe
Rousselot ("Diva," "Hope and Glory," "Henry and June") have a fairy-
tale delicacy. They've often been compared to Fellini, though
Fellini's fantasy are often purely grotesque, while Burton's have a
childlike flavor with fangs hidden somewhere in the details (it's the
notion that children have their grisly, amoral side that give the
images their sting). Some have a distinct biblical slant: when Ed
faces off with the giant, he tosses a rock at him (David versus
Goliath); when Ed peers at a naked woman bathing in a river, a
serpent swims towards her (Eve in the garden of Eden); later, the
serpent turns into a stick (a reverse of what Moses did before the
Pharaoh); much later Ed works for years under voluntary servitude to
win the hand of Sandra (which recalls Jacob working for years to win
his wife). Other images and characters--the town of Spectre, the
lycanthropic ringmaster, the Korean Siamese twins--come from more pop
sources. Burton avoids using blatantly CGI effects, relying mostly on
atmospheric camerawork and simple floor effects (or effects done in
front of the camera) to realize his images; his relative chastity,
digitally speaking (compared to most filmmakers working nowadays), is
downright refreshing.

But fantasies are only half the charm; what gives the picture
emotional pull are the actors and their characters--and here we have
to remember that in Burton's best work it is the human animal's
reactions and relationships with all the special effects that give
his movies their special appeal (Beetlejuice's diabolical powers are
an extension of his chaotic will; Batman and Catwoman's masks are an
expression of their fear of intimacy; Ed Wood's unflappability is his
only weapon against impossible odds). Scattered throughout the film
are delightful little performances and cameos that reflect those
kinds of relationships: Danny DeVito's matter-of-fact lycanthropathic
ringmaster; Steve Buscemi's grinning poet-cum-bank robber; George
McArthur's easygoing giant; Helena Bonham Carter's lonely Jenny, who
lives in a tiny house with an alarming tendency to fall over. Walking
down Spectre's tiny main street, Ed looks to one side and sees a man
standing before a storefront: it's Billy Redden, the banjo player
from John Boorman's "Deliverance," making his one and only appearance
since that 1972 film in that brief shot. He doesn't do much of
anything, merely stands there, but his mere presence is one of the
film's best effects--presumably Burton liked his character so much he
decided to let him live there, suggesting the town is a haven for
such wayward personalities.

Of course the core relationship of the film belongs to Albert
Finney's Ed and Billy Crudup's Will Bloom. Father is a charming old
rogue; son an earnest stick-in-the-mud. What makes the relationship
believable is that Finney doesn't shy away from suggesting there's
something of the selfish, self-absorbed blowhard in his charmer,
while behind Crudup's intensely humorless truth-seeking is a core
feeling of angry betrayal: he used to be his father's biggest
believer; now that he's grown up enough to know better, he feels that
he was his father's biggest dupe. Complementing the two men are
Marion Cotillard's emotional groundedness as Josephine (she knows
Will's father is a tall-tale teller, but doesn't much care), and
Jessica Lange's Sandra, who shares her husband's insanity, but in a
quieter way (after all, she shares a bed with him--and the occasional
bath). Ewan McGregor and Alison Lohman as the younger versions of Ed
and Sandra Bloom round off the cast, with McGregor sketching for us
what Ed's get-up-and-go spirit must have been like years ago--his
expansive sense of the possibilities out there in the larger America
around them, his willingness to realize those possibilities, without
letting anything as inconvenient as mere facts get in his way.

(First posted on Businessworld, April 16, 2004)

(Comments? Email me at noelbotevera@...)