E-Mail This Article to a Friend It’s a wonderful lie Big Fish wags some catchy tales BY PETER KEOUGH
	Big Fish Directed by Tim Burton. Written by John August based on the novel by Daniel Wallace. With Ewan McGregor, Albert Finney, Billy Crudup, Jessica Lange, Helena Bonham Carter, Alison Lohman, Marion Cotillard, Robert Guillaume, Matthew McGrory, Danny DeVito, Steve Buscemi, Ada Tai, and Arlene Tai. A Columbia Pictures release (120 minutes). At the Entertainment, Flagship, Opera House, Providence Place 16, Showcase, and Tri-Boro cinemas.

A good story can stave off death, as Sheherazade proved. The tales in Big Fish can’t hold a candle to hers, and the thematic undercurrent of sons reconciling with fathers is a lot less subversive than the Arabian Nights’ subtle blows against the patriarchal empire. But director Tim Burton has a way of undermining sentiment with ghoulish glee, and his baroque visual imagination fills in the gaps in the material’s inventiveness. Some have already labeled this ambitious but flawed fable Field of Streams, but unlike Phil Alden Robinson’s schmaltzy Kevin Costner vehicle, Burton’s film doesn’t try to lard mortality over with platitudes. Instead, it looks death in the eye and vindicates the creative impulse that is its adversary.

Things don’t look so promising at first. Sixtysomething Alabaman Edward Bloom (Albert Finney) croons out in bourbon-cured voiceover the unpromising tale of the big fish that got away, an eight-foot-long whiskered beast lurking in the local creek (the start of the water motif that almost sinks the film). It’s a story repeated on various occasions and with different variations throughout the life of Bloom’s long-suffering son Will (a nondescript Billy Crudup), who is no fan of dad’s cornball yarn spinning or his egomania. So Will flees to the straight talk of journalism (he should see Shattered Glass) and a new life in Paris with his French wife, Josephine (Marion Cotillard).

Who can blame him? Sandra, his mom (a matronly Jessica Lange), does, sort of, when dad suffers a stroke three years later. So Will and his wife return home, where they are subjected to Edward’s unreeling, once again, the story of his life, even as the reality of it runs out. "Sometimes you can’t separate the man from the myth," laments Will — and those, of course, are the times that are most worthwhile.

Finney makes a wonderful self-pitying grampus whose Southern charm and meandering wit quickly win Josephine over to his side. In winning over the viewer, he’s abetted by Burton, whose realizations of Bloom’s tall tales bifurcate and entwine like the narratives themselves. His creepy production design and uncanny imagery darkens the soft edges of the film’s magical realism.

Like David Copperfield or Tristram Shandy, Bloom begins his tale with his birth, an outlandish event that Burton makes reminiscent of the horror film It’s Alive! But death, always close at hand here, at once follows. Bloom next tells a tale about a local witch (Helena Bonham Carter in one of three roles) whose glass eye holds the details of the gazer’s demise. On a dare, the pre-teen Bloom snatches the eye (with the witch’s sly cooperation) and learns his fate (we don’t). Edward feels liberated — knowing exactly when and how he’ll die, he also knows how and when he won’t. So until that last moment, he knows that he’ll survive everything else, and that until then he can do whatever he dares or dreams of.

At least in his imagination. Edward’s nominal goals are nothing special — love, success, adulation — but his true ambition is to elevate the ordinary into myth. Ewan McGregor, who plays the younger adult Edward, endows him with the bantam-like strut and indomitable pluck of a latter-day Harold Lloyd. Like Burton and the viewer, this Edward seems more enthralled by the side roads and digressions along the way than by the actual payoffs.

As glowing and gorgeous as his true love, the young Sandra (Alison Lohman), is — and time does stand still when he lays eyes on her — she’s a bit of a cliché. Not so the small town of Spectre that Edward moseys into on one of his early journeys. It’s an unpleasantly idyllic home of unchanging simple pleasures. Wreathing it are countless shoes hanging from a telephone wire, and when Edward is invited to remain forever in this post-Beetlejuice resting place, he says, without too much regret, that he isn’t planning on settling anywhere real soon.

Certainly not with his wife — but the possibility of infidelity is a dark area Burton doesn’t look into very deeply. Other shadows, though, get a closer look. As the scenario outlined in the witch’s eye nears, Edward’s fabulizing gets more desperate, and his son grows closer. The end of the tale might bring a tear, but more important, it will bring a chill.