Don't let this 'Big Fish' get away!

By Jack Garner
Gannett News Service

BIG FISH (PG-13) Four Stars (Excellent) Tim Burton's irrepressible tribute to the tall tale and expresses quirky gratitude for the wonders of an overactive imagination. Albert Finney and Ewan McGregor co-star, respectively, as old and young Ed Bloom — a guy whose every tale comes from a fevered imagination. Or does it? Columbia Pictures, 110 minutes.

It is, as its narrator states, "a Southern story full of lies and fabrications, but all the truer for their inclusion."

The Big Fish of the title — and the teller of tall tales — is Ed Bloom, played as a young man by Ewan McGregor and as an old man by Albert Finney. He has spent his entire life spinning seemingly impossible yarns about giant friends, conjoined twin singers, a witch with an eye patch, bedeviled communities and so much more.

And he concludes that he's a big fish. As his wife (Jessica Lange) says, "The biggest fish in the river gets that way by never being caught." Bloom's stories provide oddball entertainment for most listeners, but a ton of frustration for his son, Will (Billy Crudup). He simply wants to know his real father. "Big Fish" is Will's odyssey through his father's extravagance and fantasy in pursuit of the real Ed Bloom.

You probably won't be surprised to learn that "Big Fish" comes from director Tim Burton ("Edward Scissorhands," "Ed Wood," "Batman," "Planet of the Apes," and "Mars Attacks!"). Now Tim's wacky party includes a guy who thinks he's a big fish.

Burton paying homage to an overactive imagination is little more than self-analysis.

But for filmgoers, it's amusing and clever — and even a bit romantic. Just as Preston Sturges' 1940s classic "Sullivan's Travels" has stood as a definitive ode to the value of humor, "Big Fish" may survive as a quintessential statement on imagination.

The film is revealed in flashbacks as Will sits at the bedside of his ailing father, hoping to finally get beneath the clever, shiny veneer of Pop's imagination. But Ed is unflappable. He spins tale after tale of his adventures in the Spanish moss-covered environs of his youth. We learn how he came to leave his hometown, his college days, and how he met and won the woman of his dreams. But each seemingly conventional step is embroidered with amazing incidents and characters. He drives his car underwater and sees a mermaid. He befriends an 8-foot-tall giant. He runs off to join the circus. No imagination has ever been as fevered as Ed Bloom's.

But is it all just imagination?

The performances are generally fine (though McGregor's Southern accent is sometimes more exaggerated than Bloom's tales). But "Big Fish's" true star is Burton and his own fevered imagination. Don't let this "Big Fish" be the one that got away.

Rated PG-13, with adult references, nudity, innuendo.