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Humorless and shambling, Planet of the Apes was one of the more
disappointing films of recent years. This is not to say that it was bad (although, come to
think of it, it was that too), but rather that it squandered an opportunity, and that Tim
Burton’s trademark flair and inventiveness were nowhere to be seen. It was truly a
big, loud blockbuster, in which the special effects department seemed to be running the
show at the expense of anything resembling story, character, dialog, or coherence. This is
true of dozens of other films, of course, but in the case of Planet of the Apes,
Tim Burton was at the helm, and yet the film lacked any of the dark humor and complexity
that raised the likes of Batman
and Beetlejuice
(and to a lesser degree Mars
Attacks! and Sleepy Hollow)
above the level of vacuous multiplex fodder. It was like having Michael Jordan on your
team and then keeping him on the bench as the opposition walked all over you.
With Big Fish, then, Burton appears to be attempting a kind of
career downsizing—a return to his cinematic roots. Nothing blows up in the film, for
example, and the screen is often alive with the whimsical flourishes and candy-colored
grotesquerie with which Burton made his name. Somehow it still fails to engage, though,
but that may have less to do with Burton’s talents as a director, and more to do with
the material he is working with and with the difference between the printed page and the
silver screen.
In the film, Will Bloom (Billy Crudup) returns home to visit his dying
father, Ed (Albert Finney), in large part so that he can try to cut through the tall tales
the old man has told him all his life and finally find out who his dad really was.
Along the way, there are a lot of Bloom Sr.’s outlandish yarns, unreliable flashbacks
in which the part of young Ed Bloom is played by Ewan McGregor (who, it must be said,
bears an uncanny resemblance to a young Finney) and in which reality seems a lot more
elastic than we know it to be. At the heart of the tales is usually some nugget of a true
story (How I Met Your Mother, say, or What I Did During The War), but the details are
tweaked to make room for 15-foot giants and lycanthropic circus owners and magical hidden
towns and glamorous conjoined twins who share one set of legs. Rounding out the cast are
Jessica Lange and Alison Lohman, neither given much to do as the older and younger
versions of Ed’s beloved wife. Helena Bonham Carter brings to three the total number
of British actors attempting Southern accents in the film.
The flashback/story scenes are where Burton is able to reach into his
back of tricks and sprinkle the old magic about, but the problem is that Big Fish
is ultimately divided against itself. The film’s structure (and Danny Elfman’s
syrupy score) indicates that all the most “important” scenes are the ones that
take place in the here-and-now--the scenes in which Crudup tries to get to the truth and
voices at last his lifelong frustration with his father’s storytelling. Burton rushes
through these scenes, though, as if he can’t wait to be done with all the talking so
he can get to his next fanciful set piece. In literature, it is possible to have a work of
two halves like this, in which each element is given equal weight and equal treatment
(think of the novels of John Irving, for example), but film is such a visual medium that
it is incredibly difficult to make two guys talking in a room feel as important as a
skywritten love-note, or a walk through a time-frozen circus ring, or a witch with a glass
eye that can tell the future.
Good actors can help right the balance, of course, and Finney and
Crudup are especially good in their scenes together, but for long stretches of screen
time, the film’s heart is elsewhere. By the time Big Fish reaches its finale,
the deck is so stacked against reality that Crudup’s Will is forced to lean over the
fence to his father’s side and spin a yarn of his own. Crudup is a fine actor—he
has a quickness and a vulnerability that make him well-suited to this kind of
material—but even he has a hard time selling this final act as the satisfying
reconciliation it is billed as, rather than the resigned surrender it more closely
resembles.
“When the legend becomes fact, print the legend, ” says a character in John
Ford’s The
Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. It is a sentiment that Finney’s old Ed Bloom
(and Tim Burton, for that matter) would seem to agree with, although Crudup’s Will
might take issue with it. It is a shame, then, that although Big Fish starts out as
Will’s story, his is eventually swallowed up by his father’s.
- Ben Stephens
