In his early films, director Tim Burton helped drag sick humor and glam nihilism into the mainstream. But his latest effort, adapted from Daniel Wallace’s novel, is an ode to white picket fences, hot apple pie, and old-fashioned storytelling. As in Sleepy Hollow, his drastic revision of Ichabod Crane’s adventures, the story unfolds against a historical backdrop; Big Fish is about the modern age sweeping away traditional storytelling. Yet Burton’s jaundiced sensibility slips through, coloring the film’s earnest facade and central character, a traveling salesman and rambunctious storyteller named Edward Bloom.
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Bloom claims that he once saw his own death foretold by looking into a witch’s magic eye, that he worked for a circus whose ringmaster was a werewolf, and that he confronted and befriended a terrifying giant. The tall tales are taken from Wallace’s episodic book, but screenwriter John August has strung them together with a present-day narrative: now elderly and terminally ill, Bloom (a hammy Albert Finney) gets a visit from his estranged son, Will (Billy Crudup), who wants the truth from his father after years of outlandish stories. The tales appear as flashbacks, with Ewan McGregor playing the young Bloom.
To Will, the old man’s stories are lies, and he’s slow to grasp that their emotional texture is true even if the facts don’t stick. In his 1936 essay “The Storyteller,” Walter Benjamin argued that print journalism was killing off traditional storytelling. Stories like Bloom’s, passed along over generations, spoke of “the most extraordinary things, marvelous things,” but the listener was still free to interpret them as he chose. As storytelling fades and “the news of the globe” takes over, “no event any longer comes to us without already being shot through with explanation.”
Directed by Tim Burton
Written by John August
With Ewan McGregor, Albert Finney, Billy Crudup, Jessica Lange, Helena Bonham Carter, Alison Lohman, Danny DeVito, and Robert Guillaume.
