Big Fish - ** 1/2
Now Playing: (2003, Tim Burton) [seen in theatre]
This is really almost a *** film, but in the end I wasn't quite able to give myself over completely to it. One of its chief virtues is its ambiguous treatment of Ed Bloom's (played as an old man by Albert Finney and in flashback by Ewan McGregor) stories- I was afraid that the film would spin off into magical-realism by telling us that all his tall tales were 100% true, but luckily the film has a more interesting agenda. That being the idea that an fantastic, embellished story that contains elements of truth can survive longer than one that's factually sound but doesn't engage the imagination. While I suppose that makes sense, I didn't find that Burton really looked into the opposing viewpoint, as presented in the film by Billy Crudup as Bloom's more grounded son. I think that in the end it would've made for a more interesting film if the complicated dynamic between father and son was given real weight instead of simply being the film's setup (which is not to say that Crudup doesn't try, imbuing his at-first-glance thankless role with a real dignity and goodness where a lesser actor might have left him as a stick-in-the-mud). Burton's visual sense is still on-target here, with highlights being the sudden color contrast from an overgrown forest to the bright Utopian town of Spectre, the startling hardscrabble shooting style in the bank robbery scene, and that great shot of McGregor staring into the camera as his car hangs in the branches of a tree behind him. In addition to Crudup's rock-solid turn, I also liked Finney's comfortable presence as the yarn-spinning dad (though McGregor is a tad too twinkly in the flashbacks for my taste), and the resemblance between Alison Lohman and Jessica Lange (as Bloom's wife at varying ages) is too uncanny to ignore. Even if this is a country mile superior to Marky Mark and the Monkey Bunch, I guess I just wanted to like it more...