Big Fish

Tim Burton keeps the son’s investigation as a spine yet never rules on which account is true, so the resolution is a handover rather than a discovery: the son takes over the telling. The tall tales are staged at full scale with no ironic frame, which makes the gap in register between them and the hospital scenes deliberate and hard, and jarring if you want a family drama that holds one key. Two actors carry the father at two ages and the cutting is constant, leaving you to hold the young man and the dying man together as one person. Screenwriter John August has said that in early drafts the son told this last story not to his father but to the father’s friends at the funeral, and that producers pushed him to move it to the bedside. August also notes the film is far more a romance than Daniel Wallace’s novel, which had neither circus nor war. Spectre, designed by Dennis Gassner, was built on Jackson Lake Island in Alabama and left standing after the shoot. A good fit if you want that final story delivered at the bedside, with the son forced to invent in his father’s own idiom. Not a fit if you need the hospital and the tall tales to share one level of reality.