Practicalmadness

Tim Burton's new movie is loaded with amazing images, and features some wonderful performances, but itt's too episodic and disjointed to coalesce into anything more than a confection. It's emotional, but it doesn't fully deliver like a full-scale Hollywood weepie ought to, and Burton's imagination -- which at this point could out-Fellini Fellini -- is working overtime to pick up the slack.

The biggest problem is that the script pretty much demands that the audience accept the larger-than-life Edward Bloom (played as a young man by Ewan MacGregor, as an older one by Albert Finney) -- any failure to sell us on Edward, and the movie falls apart. And it fails, because we never see Edward as totally human. The young man of his tall tales is invincible, such that he never has to struggle for anything -- he even wins the love of his life specifically by not fighting for her. The older Edward, meanwhile, is just a dying man on a bed. Nowhere in between do the two meet.

The closest the movie comes to being poignant is in the scene where Billy Crudup's character goes to visit Helena Bonham Carter's, and in true Fellini fashion all the women in Edward's life who aren't his wife and one true love are neatly bought together in one person, played by Carter as only slightly less burnt-out than her Marla Singer in Fight Club.

Edward's fantasy and real lives are kept so separate that we come to think that he never really existed in either, when we desperately want to believe he was able to live in both. That would have made him a big fish -- to be able to live a normal life with such joie de vivre that even the smallest, saddest moments were larger than life.

As it is, the fantasies are an escape from a perfectly delightful reality, and while there's an intimation that Edward was as uncomfortable in the fantasy world as in the real world, mostly what we get is the idea that this guy doesn't like his life so he invented a whole other one. Well, I would like his life -- his wife is gorgeous, his son is successful and married to a wonderful woman and his friends are only slightly less colorful than his stories make them out to be. So what's the problem?

This is enough of a Hollywood movie that it can't handle that kind of ambiguity very well. That there are two different sides to Edward's life is hammered into our heads, and Burton has made the fantasies so attractive that we can't just slide back into the real world and not think of it as less fabulous. We identify reality with Albert Finney as the old man, desperately clinging onto life and old stories, and with Billy Crudup as a young man so level-headed as to not buy into any of the dreams.