BIG FISH ***1/2
DIRECTED BY Tim Burton
STARRING Ewan McGregor, Albert Finney, Billy Crudup, Jessica Lange
US 2003 124 mins.
WELCOME TO THE JUNGLE ***1/2
DIRECTED BY Peter Berg
STARRING The Rock, Seann William Scott, Christopher Walken
US 2003 104 mins.
Dreamers get a good deal in the movies. No surprise, I guess, that a basically escapist art should promote escape over real life, though you sometimes wish that once – just once – the sensible would win out over the fantastic, the struggling writer give it up to become an accountant, the young girl settle down with a nice steady boy instead of Mr. Right.
Actually, it does happen – but usually in sombre dramas (see e.g. Scorsese’s Age of Innocence), hardly ever in multiplex entertainments like Big Fish. Some expected more from this movie, given that it comes from the twisted sensibility of Tim Burton, director of Edward Scissorhands and Beetlejuice; but it keeps only Burton’s aversion to passing judgment – a penchant for taking people as he finds them, whether it’s a freaky boy with scissors for hands or the world’s worst filmmaker (in Ed Wood) – jettisoning most of his baroque cartoony visuals.
There’s a real generosity of spirit in Big Fish, refusing to moralise about its characters: a circus-owner moonlights (so to speak) as a werewolf, but can still be a good person; a poet ends up wheeling and dealing on Wall Street, and that’s all right too. It’s a healthy attitude in a film about the conflict between life and dreams, pitting a Munchausen-like father – a spinner of tall tales – against his down-to-earth, estranged son, resentful of what he sees as Dad’s neglect. Edward Bloom (played by Ewan McGregor as a young man, Albert Finney in his twilight years) is a free spirit, a big fish who finds the small pond of family “confining”; his son Will (Billy Crudup) lives in Paris, wanting nothing to do with this self-centred liar. “I didn’t see anything of myself in my father”.
It’s a sentiment Burton may well have felt with his own father – albeit in reverse, for the fabulistic filmmaker must feel more at home with Bloom Sr than Jr. The film was indeed a personal project: “My father had recently died,” he told Empire magazine. “I wasn’t really close to him but it was heavy, and it makes you start thinking and going back in time”. Maybe that’s why Big Fish is visually subdued by Burton standards, and also why it’s more of an epic: this is an odyssey with echoes of The Odyssey, as Bloom meets a Cyclops-like giant (only gentler) and a town full of Southern-fried Lotus Eaters, among other adventures – at least in his own version of events, which is all we see. There’s a strange, primeval emphasis on purification through pain: our hero takes a beating and pointedly walks barefoot through the forest’s thorny paths, as well as seeing his own death in the first of many morbid undertones.
The problem is we keep cutting back from this fairytale stuff – which is whimsical but often delightful – to the modern-day segments, with the son coming back from Paris to be by his dying father’s bedside. Will the doubting-Thomas finally accept his dreamer Dad, and share his tall tales in a final act of bonding? Obviously the answer is yes, and the film becomes predictably heartwarming, yet another ode to the power of fantasy over reality. “It doesn’t always make sense, and most of it never even happened,” we’re told before the opening credits have even rolled; “but that’s what kind of story this is”. Thanks for the warning, guys.
Still, it’s one thing to be told about the magic of tall tales, quite another to see it in action. Take, for example, The Rock. Is it really plausible that a wrestling star and ‘person of colour’ – Polynesian and African-American blood, among others – would become an action hero? That he’d star in anything as memorably daft as Welcome to the Jungle (or The Rundown, to give it its original title)? That he – or his character – would roam the Amazon jungle in search of a golden gewgaw, and fight an entire tribe of manic kung-fu pygmies? Clearly, the answer is no.
Most implausible of all is that The Rock (real name Dwayne Douglas Johnson) is actually a charismatic presence with a sense of humour. He’s being anointed as the Next Big Thing, action-wise, and the film even has a cameo by Arnold Schwarzenegger (as, presumably, himself) popping in to say “Have fun” – passing on the torch, you might say – yet The Rock seems a lot more alive than Arnie ever managed. During the course of the film he not only shows off the moves that made him “The People’s Champion” on World Wrestling Entertainment, but also notes down a recipe for porcini mushrooms, talks baby-talk while under the influence of some strange Amazonian drug, worries about his penis, falls down a mountain and does a Casablanca, putting aside the profit motive to help the ragtag Resistance led by luscious Rosario Dawson (from 25th Hour).
In short, the film is tremendous fun, though some (not me) may complain that there’s too much comedy and not enough action. The obvious model is Indiana Jones, but the style is more flamboyant than we’re used to – director Peter Berg cuts from close-ups of eyes behind dark glasses to surveillance-camera footage and orange-filtered jungle shots – and there’s also Christopher Walken, at his most unblinking and hilarious as the villain. Walken wanders through the film like a man listening to his own private music, and has a great way of cocking his head while The Rock talks, as if unable to believe he’s quite real (he also has a scene where he tries to explain the concept of the Tooth Fairy to a gang of henchmen). “I paid you!” storms our hero after Walken goes back on a deal. “Mm-hm,” nods Walken, smiling pleasantly. “Fortunately, I had my fingers crossed the whole time.”
It seems a shame to spoil Welcome to the Jungle with anything as serious as subtext – but there is one thing that stands out: The Rock hates guns, being a kinder gentler breed of action hero. “Never met an American who didn’t like guns!” exclaims a bystander – which may or may not be significant, but still (with his ethnic-minority roots) cements the star’s status as an outsider. Could it also be a veiled comment on how the world sees America, maybe a dig at the Bush government’s unshrinking militarism? Could real life be gaining a toehold on fantasy? Stranger things have happened.
FESTIVALS 2004
January and February are busy months on the festival circuit – part of the four-month cycle spacing the big fests out at regular intervals. Cannes in May is the next stop, still the biggest of the lot – but Sundance (which finished three weeks ago) is probably the most important in the US, and Berlin (which ends tonight) seems to be in the midst of a renaissance, with its strongest lineup in many years.
Sundance (held in Park City, Utah) has always specialised in American independents, though the talk this year was all about the narrowing gap between Hollywood and ‘Indiewood’ (especially with most indies distributed by subsidiaries of the big studios). Among the ‘buzz’ titles was Open Water, touted as a deep-sea Blair Witch Project, with a scuba-diving married couple stranded in the middle of the ocean (the sharks are real, since the production couldn’t afford special effects); it comes out in the US this summer.
Also picked up by distributors was Napoleon Dynamite, a quirky comedy with an 80s setting that sounds like a nerd version of Donnie Darko – just as Primer, winner of the Grand Jury Prize, sounds like a riff on Pi, the Sundance sensation from 1998. Once again there’s weird science, as a couple of small-time inventors come up with a kind of Time machine. Should I be spoiling it? Why not? It’ll be months – if not years – before this odd, low-budget movie comes to Cyprus.
Even less likely to appear here are the various acclaimed documentaries at Sundance – which makes sense, since most are of purely American interest. Two films stand out, however: in Metallica: Some Kind of Monster, the eponymous heavy-metal legends – now nearing middle age – struggle with their demons (and nearly self-destruct) in a warts-and-all portrait. Meanwhile, in Super Size Me, director Morgan Spurlock eats nothing but McDonald’s food for a month – and films the alarming results.
Another Sundance hit was Maria Full of Grace, a Spanish-language drama of a young Colombian girl’s travails – which is also in Competition at Berlin, up against a formidable lineup.
Among the well-known directors premiering their new work in the German capital is Korean filmmaker Kim Ki-Duk, whose previous film Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter … and Spring played in the World Horizons Festival in Nicosia and Limassol last December; his latest, Samaritan Girls, is a more controversial tale of two teenage girls turning to prostitution to finance a trip to Europe. Others in Competition include octogenarian Eric Rohmer’s Triple Agent, British director Ken Loach with the obviously Glaswegian Ae Fond Kiss and fellow Brit John Boorman with Country of my Skull (which has been poorly received), set in South Africa.
Is that all? Not by a long shot. Even as TV cameras focus on Hollywood stars gliding up the red carpet, there are hundreds of films to choose from here. At time of writing, the hottest draws were perhaps French director Cédric Kahn’s Simenon-like thriller Red Lights and Richard Linklater’s sequel to his lovely Before Sunrise from 1995, aptly called Before Sunset.
It could well snag a prize tonight – but no prizes for guessing which Berlin art-film we’re most likely to see here in Cyprus. Theodoros Angelopoulos – Greece’s only world-class director – has a new film out, the first part of a Trilogy, called The Weeping Meadow (To Livadi pou Dakrizi): it’s 170 minutes long, and described as “a story of exile, separation and wandering, chronicling the collapse of ideologies and the trials of History”. Hold on to your hats…
