MOVIE CRITIQUE:
"Big Fish" has its heart in the right place with the fine casting of Albert Finney as the aging raconteur Ed Bloom and the sometimes inspired direction by Tim Burton, who excels at making movies about imaginative stories like this. But this movie ends up being a failure due to a style of filming which yo-yos incessantly back and forth in time leaving those of us in the audience with emotional and visual whiplash.

There are two ways to take this story about a dying man who regales all those around him with gloriously spun tales of his youth. These tales are, after all, so incredible as to cause us to suspend our belief in most of them.

One way would be to sit back and go with the flow in a reasonably enjoyable movie. Every premise can be accepted at face value and the author (Daniel Wallace) of the novel from which this movie is adapted throws just enough present day visual proof into the story as to make the rest of it, by extension, seem to be based on true events. Of course, "based" is the operative word here.

The other way, and the way I ended up adopting, is to look at this movie as a sort of a trial where we, like the cynical son, Will Bloom (Billy Crudup), sit in judgment of the father. Will has already made up his mind that these tales are merely tall tales at best and lies at worst about the earlier life of an emotionally distant man who uses them to hide himself from a son who wants to know what kind of a man his dad really is.

Now he returns home with his new wife and he has to listen to them once more for her benefit. This movie proceeds on the dubious premise that one has to humor those who are near death. We do, of course, to a certain extent, but my experience with dying family members, especially one's parents, is far different from this. Dealing with the impending death of a parent is much more satisfying when the truth is placed on the table. Otherwise there is no closure, and there is nothing worse than a parent dying with things left unsaid that you wished you had said. Or things not heard that you wished they had said.

Ed Bloom maintains to his last breath that everything that he has told his family is the gospel of truth and Will, to his credit, I suppose, finally accepts his dad's version of the stories about his life as being reasonably accurate enough so that he is now able to embellish a story of his own about what his dad's funeral will look like as a farewell gift to his father at the very moment of his death.

Unfortunately, this movie is sliced up like the proverbial salami for a sandwich. Every single scene in the movie taking place between the family members of the present ends up in a story from the past. This would not be a problem were this only to happen once or twice or even three times, but I lost count of the number of times that it happens.

The sad result is that both the present day characters and the characters from the past are presented in such a piecemeal fashion that neither group of personalities gains any emotional traction with the viewers in the audience. There is an emotional disconnect between us and the characters in the movie, which, for a story like this, is deadly.

After all, we have to believe in the characters to believe in the story, and the way this movie is filmed prevents us from making an emotional connection with anyone in this film. I would imagine that this is exactly the opposite effect that would have been desired by both the author of the novel and Tim Burton as the director of this movie.
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MOVIE SYNOPSIS:
International news correspondent Will Bloom (Billy Crudup) returns home to Ashton, Alabama with his French bride, Josephine (Marion Cotillard), in a final effort to reconcile with his dying father, Ed Bloom (Albert Finney). His father had been absent for much of Will's childhood as a traveling salesman and this absence left him with feelings of abandonment for both himself and his beloved mother, Sandra (Jessica Lange).

Ed is a natural salesman and very garrulous around people. He is constantly regaling everyone with tales of his past, tales that seem so far fetched as to appear to Will to be lies. These "tall stories," like those about the proverbial "big fish" that got away, strike Will as a less than oblique attempt to cover up something in his father's life, perhaps a second wife and another family in a distant state.

The one thing that Will knows for certain is that the very pedestrian nature of his father's life for all the years that he has known him would tend to put to bed any stories of a fantastical nature such as the ones that his dad revels in. The simple logic of their ordinary small town life would seem to mitigate against such an extraordinary life that his father has claimed to have lived before settling down in marriage with his adoring wife, Sandra (Jessica Lange).

In addition, he believes that the constant repetition of certain favorite stories about his father's past and the days of his youth hide the truth about who his father really is and where he came from. Will would just like to be able to set the record straight before his dad passes on.

With Will's visit, Ed Bloom now has a new audience in the form of his son's new wife, and Josephine doesn't disappoint him. She appears to love hearing about all of the adventures that her husband's father has had throughout his life. So Will is forced to listen to the very same tall tales that he would have liked to have avoided hearing once again for a more desired truthful heart to heart with his dying father.

One of the most exciting moments in the very young Ed Bloom's (Perry Walston) life occurs when he and a few of his friends venture out to a deserted, decaying mansion in the hopes of having their fortunes told by the resident witch (Helena Bonham Carter). She wears a patch over her glass eye, but when she removes the patch all who look into her eye are able to see how they will die. The kids thrill when the witch comes to the door of the ramshackle manse and shows the children her glass eye and their future form of death.

Some years later, Ed Bloom (Ewan McGregor) is celebrating his graduation from his Ashton, Alabama home town high school when a pall falls over the town in the form of a giant who has moved into a river front cave in the area and starts eating all the livestock belonging to the local farmers. The mayor asks for help, and valiant Ed volunteers to rid the town of the giant. (Why police were unavailable for this task is left unmentioned.)

Ed visits the cave and prepares to sacrifice his life for the good of the community when the giant, Karl (Matthew McGrory), comes out and admits to him that he is lonely as well as being hungry. Ed wisely tells him that he is not too big for the town, but that Ashton is too small for him. They decide to hit the road and Ashton has a parade in their honor as Ed and Karl march out of town together.

While out on a road to seek their fame and fortune, Ed tells Karl that he wants to take a side road because he has heard that there is a mystery there. A famous local poet went down this very same road and has never been heard from since.

After some adventures through a forest designed in a typical Tim Burton style, Ed stumbles into a small, strange town called Spectre (ghost?), a town that seems lost in time. A large number of shoes hang by their tied shoe laces on a rope across the entrance road. The citizens of the town, including that missing poet, Norther Winslow (Steve Buscemi), all joyfully come out to greet Ed.

He is treated like an honored guest, especially by a curious young lady, Jenny (Hailey Anne Nelson), who crawls under the table and steals the shoes off his feet, shoes which are soon hanging from that rope. At an evening dance in the town square she professes an undying crush on him by stating that their 10 year age difference won't be so much in a decade when she will be 18 and he will be 28. In spite of their wishes that he remain, Ed remembers his promise to Karl the Giant and he heads back to the open road.

The two resume their trip and don't stop until they pass a country circus, the favored delight of small town America. Inside the big tent two significant events happen. The first is that Karl proves to be much more of a giant, a REAL giant, than the current circus hire, so the former is fired and Karl is hired.

The second occurs when the show ends and Ed suddenly spies the love of his life on the other side of the tent. He is thunderstruck. Time stops and he pursues her, but then time starts up again at an increased speed and he loses her. The circus manager, Amos Calloway (Danny DeVito), first tells Ed that she is out of his league, and then he offers him the chance to work for the wages of his giving him one hint a month as to her true identity.

Three years pass, and the 36 hints from the cheap Calloway have given Ed precious little to go on. He finally decides to beard Calloway in the den of his trailer for the truth but the shaking trailer disgorges a giant black wolf instead of the circus promoter. The next day, the werewolf has turned back to the circus promoter and Bloom finally learns that his dream girl is named Sandra, and that she is attending a nearby college.

Having learned from Calloway that Sandra (Alison Lohman) loves daffodils, Bloom festoons the college campus outside her sorority dorm room with them and soon wins her heart in spite of the fact that she is already engaged to a fellow former high school classmate of his.

Further exploits follow in the form of a war time parachute drop into a military show in China that results in Bloom bringing two singing Chinese Siamese twins, who share just two legs between them, back to the America to star in the circus. Young Jenny turns into a beautiful young lady (Helen Bonham Carter) who he has to disappoint because he has already met the love of his life. And he later meets his friend, the poet Norther Winslow, while he is in a bank and Winslow comes in to rob it. The two exchange greetings and Bloom helps Winslow escape with the precious little proceeds from the Depression Era bank.

And around all of these stories swims a legendary giant cat fish that lives in the river near Ashton. Every fisherman worth his salt has set his hook for that fish, but it still remains uncaught and free to live its long life swimming along the bottom of the muddy river. Ed Bloom's many life stories remain equally free from being caught in the net of logic or of truth.