Life can be Miraculous, yes friends, and even...(are you ready for it? Wait...Wait...)...

...Magical!

So screams the subtext of BIG FISH, Burton's whimsical cinematic version of the acclaimed novel by Daniel Wallace. Populated with more loveable oddballs, misunderstood outcasts, and charming freaks than any film of the year, Burton's iconoclastic weirdness caramelizes with a sugary sweetness, ultimately resulting in an oddball mythology of Peter Pan-ic proportions. It's a movie that clearly wants to twinkle in your eye.

It's too bad that the whimsy feels so forced, so labored, so (dare I say it) dull. The light airiness BIG FISH calls out for never materializes, held earthbound by a plodding screenplay and the weightiness of its subplots. It reaches for the sky, but never touches it -- it ends up being a film about magic that holds little magic of its own. Despite some charming moments and its earnest desire to please, the most remarkable thing about BIG FISH may be its unremarkability.

Many critics, of course, have already hailed BIG FISH as Tim Burton's most personal film. I'm at a loss as to how that diagnosis came about, considering the singular visions that have populated the director's career previously. The ultimate fish-out-of-water tale Edward Scissorhands explores the theme of absent fathers in more stark contrast than this new effort does, and if we're searching for Burton himself, there's more direct parallels to the outsider career of Ed Wood. The only possibly explanation for the word "personal" in relation to BIG FISH is its abject tenderness -- it is, above all things, a sweet, sweet story. It is about kindly people inhabiting an unkind world where (surprise!) they encounter other sweet people. There are mundanities in the world, yes (like ungrateful sons), but one should not bog down in the details. The important thing, the film seems to say, is the power of fantasy in our lives. BIG FISH is "personal" only in the way it shows how Burton might like the world to be...and not, perhaps, as it actually is.

Sorry to bog down in the details...back to the fantasy. BIG FISH is, for the most part, the tale of Edward Bloom, played in later years by the great Albert Finney (Erin Brockovich) and in his idealized youth by Ewan McGregor (Moulin Rouge). Bloom isn't the titular fish of the title -- that creature belongs to one of the tall tales Bloom has told to his family time and again -- but he is a big fish in many ways. BLoom has always been the center-ring attraction of his life, colorful and fanciful to the point of implausibility. His son Will (Billy Crudup) has reluctantly returned to Bloom's side in the final days of his life, and a long-overdue reconciliation is clearly on the table. Will has had enough of his father's strange, myopic tales; he prefers to live the cemented reality of modern life, as has no time for stories of giants, dwarves, and forgotten fairy towns.

The film tells two stories, then: the journey of the young Ed Bloom, who takes an Odyssian journey through life to find himself, and young Will Bloom, who finds himself only by revisiting the father. 2003 has seen two other films explore similar father/son dynamics, one better (Denys Arcand's The Barbarian Invasions) and one worse (Ang Lee's Hulk). In BIG FISH, however, there's not time to explore relationships in depth; room must be made to show Ed's wild, youthful adventures, which include buying a Brigadoon-like town, robbing a bank, confronting a giant, winning a war, working for a circus, marrying his sweetheart, and catching the titular character. It's almost two films worth of material crammed into one.

There's a fractured chasm that seems to run down the middle of Burton's vision, one that he is at a loss to jump -- one about a dying man's family in the Real World, and another about a mythic series of extraordinary tales that dabble in magic realism. Neither really infuses the other with added resonance, and truly the two storylines onlye come together in the finale, when Burton effectively jettisons one for the other.

Adding to Burton's problems are his actors. Not that they're bad, no...just mis-opportuned. All of the weaker performances of BIG FISH happen, unfortunately, in the more fantastical storyline. Ewan McGregor has a winning smile and charming demeanor, but little else to do as the fantastical universe of young Ed's life swirls around him; young Ed Bloom is a tabula rasa that is writ upon by life, not the other way round. Surrounded by actors of limited ability or charm (Alison Lohman, Danny DeVito), McGregor has little to play off of and even less to work with. (Only in the final reels, opposite Burton's muse-of-the-moment Helena Bonham Carter, does the younger Bloom find solid footing.)

Complicating matters further is the excellent acting being done in the real-world family drama, which has the unintentional effect of making the film more earthbound than it is. As young Will, Billy Crudup superbly navigates the subtle emotional changes and moral conundrums that face anyone with a dying parent. And, of course, there's Albert Finney. What a talent this man is. Finney's work with Jessica Lange, who plays his adoring wife Sandra, is the most relaxed and accomplished of the entire film. A short, hilarious scene in the bathtub exemplifies the joy an audience receives when two old pros work together this seamlessly.

The most depressing thing about BIG FISH, perhaps, is that it's not a total loss. There's an important message about keeping imagination alive that needs to be heard. It's also a gorgeous production; Burton's art designers remain the most inventive in the business. If only BIG FISH practiced more ably what it preached about freedom to dream, it might have been the alterna-classic it aspired to be. As it is, for Burton, it's merely the one that got away.

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