Big Fish

The film director Tim Burton has returned to the weird fairyland of the American suburbs with Big Fish.

(Edited highlights of the panel's review taken from the teletext subtitles that are generated live for Newsnight Review.)

KIRSTY WARK:
Kwame, were you enchanted?

KWAME KWEI-ARMAH:
I was. I won't say that I didn't have my reservations. I wasn't sure about the son character, the Billy Crudup character. I wasn't sure about that construct. He was simply there to just say, "Dad, tell me some stories," and I didn't really dig that. But I just loved the Bloom character. I loved the way that Tim Burton just visually told this story. I kind of went off him after Planet of the Apes, but that's another story. But I am right back on it. I was enchanted. I wasn't the only grown man in the audience who was crying, the day that I saw it.

KIRSTY WARK:
Elaine, no matter whether a film is magic realism, social realism, whatever it is, in order to make it work, you have to believe that there is a relationship between the characters and to feel some involvement in it. Did you feel that?

ELAINE SHOWALTER:
Absolutely not. I was dry-eyed! I thought that they were all coming from some kind of totally different place. The accents are bizarre. All of these actors, British actors, Canadian actors, whatever, trying to do the Southern accent. I thought it was grotesque. I thought it was the worst performance that each of these actors has ever given.

KIRSTY WARK:
Talking about Ewan McGregor, who has turned in very good performances, including Young Adam last year. It seems like he was in Moulin Rouge. He was not engaged in this film. He was, as it were, a jobbing actor; I thought that was a real shame.

ELAINE SHOWALTER:
I couldn't think what there was to connect to. It seemed to me it was alternately repellently sentimental and needlessly violent. It felt like there had been this pitch, like the one you see on the trailers in the movies where they are all sitting around and Carrie Fisher is pitching. Whatever comes up, it's wonderful, and they just had to go with it.

PAUL MORLEY:
I wish Ewan McGregor had done a Sean Connery and just stuck to his accent rather than this strange deviation. I am a huge Tim Burton fan and I think this is my least favourite Tim Burton. Therefore, I think it will appeal to people who don't get Tim Burton. It's been sort of wound down. The intensity and the moodiness and deliriousness of his films usually, it's been like there have been commercial short cuts to give him the film. But at times I felt like he had made a children's film, for children who are being given something they don't really want, it was like something you might see at an old school matinee.

KIRSTY WARK:
Wasn't there a feeling that there was going to be some darkness. You thought it was going to become quite dark?

PAUL MORLEY:
It's lightly delightful and slightly sinister and therefore it's very, very light Tim Burton. It's always hovering on opening up in full bloom of what Burton can give you. Maybe it's because he is a father or he is getting older, maybe soon he will wear red and green. It may be he is settling down and maybe this will be a mainstream hit, but isn't it interesting that he has to take out about 95% of the strangeness to actually have a hit.

KIRSTY WARK:
But weren't there some wonderful moments Elaine - referring back to Edward Scissorhands? He makes reference to Edward Scissorhands, because one of Ed Bloom's inventions is this metal hand, which Tim Burton changed from the original story.

ELAINE SHOWALTER:
There was some leftover footage from Edward Scissorhands. There are some very jarring things. One of the moments that really threw me was he gets the 10,000 daffodils for his lady love. At one point, McGregor takes a big sniff of them. They are just about the only flower that doesn't have a fragrance at all! I mean there's no point in going into Boots and buying daffodil soap or anything like this. I thought, "who is making this, who is thinking about this?"

PAUL MORLEY:
It's funny you should mention Moulin Rouge because Ewan McGregor was playing that role, there were moments when McGregor was just on the verge of singing a song, which would have given us a twist!

ELAINE SHOWALTER:
It would have helped.

KWAME KWEI-ARMAH:
It's not Burton's usual dark kind of voyage, but I found I got a sense of what stories are here to do. To slightly elevate you.

PAUL MORLEY:
Don't you feel in the end, do we really need someone to tell us how fantastic stories are? Why doesn't he just get on as he usually does and tell us a great story?

KWAME KWEI-ARMAH:
I thought it was a nice way of doing it, saying, "Here is a person with an ordinary life, and they have made it less ordinary by engaging in fantasy." And that enchanted me.

PAUL MORLEY:
How many times can we hear Albert Finney "Did I ever tell you about the time a crocodile hit me over the head with a dustbin lid?"