New on Screen: Something's Gotta Give | Big Fish

The screenplay behind this study in sit-com blandness is as predictable as today will be yesterday tomorrow. Everybody who got hooked into coming aboard this outing gave it their utmost to convince us that a gorgeous girl like Marin Barry (Amanda Peet) could see herself in a serious physical relationship with the overweight crusty, old crank Harry Langer (Nicholson).

In order to achieve the unachievable, she had to be in some kind of reality between totally thick and misguided but that's the premise behind this attempt to exploit some talent and make a fast buck - possibly a big one with all those Nicholson fans out there just waiting for each new masterpiece he sets his comedic mind to. But after this, I do wish he'd set his agent off in search of something serious and more challenging for his mature abilities.

The other part of making the older man-younger woman situation barely credible is that Nicholson's character is a business entrepreneur whose ventures in running 'the world's second top hip hop label" are so successful that he can work when he wants and take his girlfriend for a weekend tryst at her mother's ocean getaway just because he can. The man has money and idle time, a magnet for any luscious babe, right?

Things go awry when the carefree couple, expecting the house to be empty and about to take some clothes off for a romp between the sheets after a long boring drive, discover that Erika (Diane Keaton), Marin's mother, has not gone back to her city home as promised. Not only is she in residence, but her sister Zoe (Frances McDormand) is with her.

Dinner is strained as the women pounce on the profligate older bachelor unmercifully, in a very over the top sequence. It's one of many false notes played for laughs and message by writer-director Nancy Meyers who tends to write in TV level stereotypes and direct with uneven control over her own plot and cast. There are times, like when the lovers are in a post-coital fog on the bed when the pauses and silent stretches suggest that the lines weren't clicking or were just too difficult to say. Why this wasn't corrected in post-production suggests that there wasn't enough coverage of the scene to allow tightening. Unless, of course, Meyers thinks these situations are part of the Nicholson genius and that such moments play out just fine.

The rest of it is a melodrama with comedic flourishes in which the super-annuated playboy and the inveterate spinster discover that a match between them was made in Hollywood heaven. It surely was. The material is extremely laboured, but the effect occasionally clicks with tthe two ageing stars managing to demonstrate vitality and magnetism, ingredients that no doubt override low filmmaking standards, banal dialogue and situations, and other deficiencies. It's the "Odd Couple" turned even.

Giving due though where it is deserved, Keaton fulfills this role with as much liveliness as she has ever had, probably her best work since 1993 for "Manhattan Murder Mystery." Keanu Reeves plays a handsome doctor who falls for Keaton in a farcical parallel to the other couple in Meyer's construction of how a romantic comedy should unravel. However, I'm still totally unconvinced by this absurdity of an actor - he struggles to be even one dimensional...maybe he should bid for the title role if Hollywood ever considers a remake of Eric Sykes' classic silent movie "The Plank".

Directed by Tim Burton
Written by by John August from the novel by Daniel Wallace
Cinematography by Philippe Rousselot
Edited by Chris Lebenzon and Joel Negron

Starring Ewan McGregor, Albert Finney, Billy Crudup, Jessica Lange, Steve Buscemi, Danny deVito, Loudon Wainwright III

At one point during Big Fish, somebody notes that what we think of as evil often isn't really evil at all it's just lonely, and lacking in social graces. The line resonates not so much because of what's in the film, but because of what we know about the film's maker. If ever a director was known for sympathies with lonely freaks the wallflowers of the world it would be Tim Burton, director of Batman and Edward Scissorhands, writer of The Melancholy Death of Oyster Boy.

Melancholy. Despite his reputation for darkness and impressionistic production design, Burton's universe is most often characterised by sadness and verges on despair. Thinking of the moments from his film career that have stuck with me, I'm drawn to Batman Returns, where he clearly evinces sympathy for the devil, beginning the film with a long sequence tracking the progress of a baby basket set adrift in the sewers of Gotham City. Later, another indelible image has Michelle Pfeiffer prone on the ground, her body broken from a long fall, and a swarm of alley cats flowing inward from the outside of the frame as if drawn to a plate of tuna. And one of my problems with Burton's Batman movies though many would cite this as a peculiar strength of the films was always that, although they allegedly reflected the director's understanding of the darkness underpinning the comic books, Burton never seemed interested in exploring the mindset of the superhero himself in as much detail as that of his adversaries.

Batman was followed by the wonderful Edward Scissorhands essentially a fairy-tale take on horror-movie formula and Batman Returns was followed by Ed Wood. Edward Scissorhands cemented Burton's identification with the ostensibly bad guy and amply demonstrated his impatience with middle-of-the-road ideas about what constituted beauty and ugliness, what was attractive and what was frightening. Ed Wood, meanwhile, took as its subject a different kind of supervillain the director of what are popularly known as some of the worst movies ever made. In Burton's hands, Wood became a lovable incompetent, and Burton paid him the highest tribute imaginable by staging scrupulous and almost spooky re-creations of scenes from Plan 9 From Outer Space, those clumsy images that are flash-burned into the brains of anyone who grew up watching duff old SF movies on late night telly. Among the questions raised by Ed Wood, which included among its flourishes a conversation between Wood and Orson Welles: Assuming its impact on our shared culture is equal to that of its highbrow cousins, is the greatness of a great bad movie necessarily less than that of a great good movie?

Mars Attacks! was a commercial failure, but also one hell of a movie, balancing urges toward a mean-spirited destruction of middle America (Don't run! We are your friends!) by the bullies of the galaxy with awkward groping at a happiness defined by the ascendancy of America's freaks and geeks as heroes who fend off alien invasion. The narrative is a little wobbly, but the film's violent energy is utterly manic and the comic timing spot on a feat I don't think Burton has exactly managed either before or since. He followed that with a couple of fairly unremarkable but bankable Hollywood blockbusters (Planet of the Apes, Sleepy Hollow), and now he allegedly returns to form with Big Fish. Ironically, this very Burtonesque feature was directed from someone else's screenplay, which was adapted from another author's book. But it's one of those films that somehow seems to have even more to do with the peculiar preoccupations of its director than the ones the director conceives himself.

It's no surprise to learn that Steven Spielberg was originally attached to the project. As a matter of fact, some of the opening scenes, featuring a group of kids staring, agape, as one of them decides to knock on the door of a local witch's house, ape Spielberg pretty expertly. But the material really has more in common with Terry Gilliam specifically The Adventures of Baron Munchhausen. Like that film, Big Fish is the story of an old man who habitually spins wild, unlikely stories to the assorted consternation and delight of the people around him. It also has something to say about the relationship between old people and young, those with life experience to fill volumes and those without much but a vague sense of jealousy that their parents are hogging the spotlight.

The father-son stuff is pretty soppy. Son Billy Crudup is impatient with Dad Albert Finney's propensity to dominate conversation. Dad comes down with terminal cancer. Reconciliation looms. Burton himself lost a father about a year before starting work on the film and just recently became a father himself which may help explain his interest in the material, but most of the scenes sketching out this strained parent/child relationship are ordinary and half-hearted. What really attracted him must have been the opportunity to visualise Edward Bloom's stories as a series of fanciful vignettes. There's a gentle giant and a secluded, magical town nestled in the woods along the road less travelled. There are circus performers, a very Burton-esque pair of Siamese twins and a bank robber. There's Danny DeVito. (Naked.)

These scenes are narrated in almost appallingly sprightly and folksy fashion by Ewan McGregor, who plays Edward's younger self. (It's quite something to hear McGregor and DeVito jabbering at each other with Southern accents.) What grates isn't so much McGregor's performance he's pretty good, actually, albeit in a disappointingly Forrest Gumpish role that closely reprises his open-hearted romantic lead in Moulin Rouge!. It's the repetitive, episodic nature of the screenplay that drags the film down as it veers back and forth from perfunctory scenes set in the present day to the breathlessly imagined adventures of Storytelling Dad, explicated in an unrelenting voiceover that saps the impressionistic magic in evidence. It's a shame the film is so busy with dialogue, because the images are so insistently rich and varied (and clearly digitally manipulated) that the combined result is aural and visual clutter.

And the bulk of the film is directed and edited as though Burton was in a terrible rush fearful of boring his audience, or of letting too much time elapse before his next self-consciously whimsical flourish flutters across the screen. I wonder if the poor guy hasn't been damaged by his various encounters with the Big Hollywood Machine, since on the whole this feels awkward, like a film made by someone who thinks he has something to prove or maybe to atone for.

There is a gorgeous scene though, where Edward, driving through a thunderstorm, is forced to pull over and stop his car and then finds that he's completely submerged. And once the reliable Helena Bonham Carter, very good in a crucial storytelling role with Burton so obviously exploiting his talented girlfriend gets a chance to tell her own story (in, yes, another voiceover) the film's divergent elements begin to make emotional sense. And there's a tearjerking magnificence to the final reel that, although it's hard not to see it coming, helps make up for the sloppiness of everything that has come before. With impressive magnanimity, Burton dedicates himself to the film's ultimate defence of the power and rightness of storytelling, of the ways it allows human experience to draw on itself and multiply, and of the essential comforts it can give those in need. You'll laugh, you'll cry, etc. But it's unlikely that you'll be taken by surprise which is what Burton's best films excel at. Accolades and Oscar attention are a near certainty, as Burton gets recognised not just for directing successful strange movies, but for finally joining the Hollywood mainstream. Indeed, Big Fish is the most establishment film he has ever made.