Big Fish

Always possessed of a more obviously childlike sensibility than almost any other director working in Hollywood – Beetlejuice, Edward Scissorhands and his take on Roald Dahl in James and the Giant Peach would prove the point - Tim Burton’s output has always been a twisted delight, like the grimmer tales of the brothers Grimm. Even his mass-multiplex offerings – Mars Attacks!, for instance - have something of the mischief you’d associate with a giant kid let loose on a film set, and his latest offering, Big Fish, has a similar anarchic playfulness at its heart.
Arguably a little schmaltzy, but genuinely sweet and touching enough to make its cornier moments forgivable, Big Fish is Burton’s unhurried, stately account of an old man (Albert Finney)’s deathbed reconciliation with his estranged 30-year-old son (Billy Crudup), over which the old man spins a sequence of lengthy yarns about his younger self (played by Ewan McGregor), which then unfold in dreamlike flashback. His stories veer from the true to the utterly preposterous, with witches, giants, bank robberies and werewolves featuring prominently, all set in a downright spooky, swamp-scented Alabama smalltown, with an appropriately gothic atmosphere (murderous-looking spindly skeletal trees and the like) keeping matters more than menacing enough for the kid audience, without sending them away screaming.
All Burton’s trademark weirdness is in evidence, and the deathbed scenes are unusually affecting (Burton’s father died recently, and he has described the film as something of a catharsis). His girlfriend, Helena Bonham-Carter, pops up in a gigantic departure from type as a wrinkly one-eyed witch, with Jessica Lange and Alison Lohman also on board.
Impossible to dislike, and heaven-sent for those who crave escapism and visual Wizard of Oz-derived fantasy above all else in cinema, Big Fish is already racking up award nominations and Wonderful Life comparisons. It may ramble a little, and those of you with a terminal aversion to feelgood schmaltz might be better steered towards the Sylvia Plath biopic, but if you’ve any sense of magic whatsoever, there’s no arguing with this.

124 mins. Cert 12pg. Opens January 30