A small flop for 'Big Fish'

By Kat Gresey
Assistant A&E Editor

Columbia TriStar Marketing Group, Inc.

Though Tim Burton's newest movie Big Fish offers some terrific eye candy in the form of colorful characters and surreal images, in the end it is little more than two hours tied together by the very simple, familiar plot of father/son reconciliation.

Set in Alabama, the movie revolves around Edward Bloom (Albert Finney), a larger-than-life individual with such passion for telling tall tales that it seems he is no longer able to separate fact from fiction. His unstoppable desire to share outrageous stories is illustrated best by his belief that he once caught the biggest fish of all time using his wife's gold wedding ring. An unwillingness to cope with the brutal reality that life is often boring eventually causes a rift between Bloom and his son, Will (Billy Crudup), who believes he has reached adulthood having no idea who his father really is.

After becoming a journalist, getting married and moving to France, Will finds little reason to visit home until his mother, Sandra (Jessica Lange), summons him home to visit his dying father and reconcile their differences. In an attempt to finally understand his father, Will begins to ask him for the real stories of his life-it is here that the viewer is brought into the past to see who Edward Bloom really is . or isn't.

Bloom tells the amazing stories of his youth (played by Ewan McGregor), involving everything from meeting a giant, Karl (Matthew McGrory), and a witch (Helena Bonham Carter) whose glass eye can foresee one's death, to encountering a circus owner (Danny DeVito) and conjoined twins (Ada and Arlene Tai). He goes on adventures through a haunted forest, a zany circus and the small, somewhat eerie town of Specter, where shoes are never worn and square dancing and lemonade is all that is needed to keep people entertained.

It is on his circus escapade that Bloom first meets his true love Sandra (Alison Lohman). Though he only captures a glimpse of her and knows nothing about her, Bloom realizes that Sandra is the woman he is destined to marry. He goes to great lengths to find her and eventually winds up winning her heart.

The last scene of the movie is by far the most fast-paced and emotional and does permit a revealing look for both Will and the audience as to how true the events of Edward Bloom's life really were. It ends the story well, but overall, viewers may have expected more from the usually wonderful Burton.

Though there is a magical quality to all of the characters in Burton's work, there is little development of any of them, aside from Bloom. Out of this world characters like the surprisingly humorous Karl and the wily poet/bank robber/Wall Street banker Norther Winslow (Steve Buscemi) deserve more space in the film, not only because they are so unbelievably fascinating, but because they would also break up the monotonous drag of watching Bloom's endless traverses.

Burton, who has strayed from his darker-themed movies, like Batman, Edward Scissorhands and The Nightmare Before Christmas, may have chosen to do this more upbeat film because he himself became a father last October. Though he is able to nail the father-son dynamic skillfully, he is unable to wrap a successful story line around it. The Burtonesque imagery is there, but the end product's plot is only as deep as the lake Bloom stands in to catch his legendary fish.