Tim burton

Tim Burton’s “Big Fish,” adapted by John August from Daniel Wallace’s book “Big Fish: A Novel of Mythic Proportions,” is a drearily affirming bit of whimsy about how life wouldn’t be worth living without tall tales, or even short, fat ones. You’d think that Burton, whose movies can be so invigoratingly nasty (“Beetlejuice”) or so hypnotically moody (“Sleepy Hollow”), would be able to pull off a gentle, mainstream crowd-pleaser without making it dull or preachy. But “Big Fish” is both.

Burton is a complicated director, more so than a finished product like “Big Fish” might lead you to believe: While I shy away from the chilly mean-spiritedness of “Mars Attacks!” I also think that Burton hasn’t gotten enough credit for the emotional richness (in addition to the more obvious visual kind) of pictures like “Batman” and the charming but also unexpectedly moving short “Frankenweenie.” I had high hopes for “Big Fish,” figuring that Burton would at least give me something fabulous to look at.

And while “Big Fish” is colorful (it was shot by Philippe Rousselot), it still manages to feel flat and listless. The score sounds unusually phoned-in and treacly for a Tim Burton movie, and as I watched the movie I wondered, “Where’s Danny Elfman when you need him?” — only to realize that the music was Elfman’s. And even though “Big Fish” features a number of Burtonian touches — like a neighborhood witch who, if you dare to look, can show you the moment of your death reflected in her glass eyeball — its zany inventiveness feels strained. It’s like a movie made by a Tim Burton impostor.

But there sure are lots of stories in “Big Fish,” and just about every one of them revolves around the cantankerously lovable Edward Bloom (Albert Finney, who gives some layers of depth to his character by being pleadingly sympathetic and yet not wholly likable). Edward is an inveterate weaver of tall tales, which annoys his son, Will (Billy Crudup), to no end. Will feels that he’s never gotten to know his father as a person: Edward has gone through life protecting himself from the drabness of reality with a shield of stories, nearly none of which Will believes. But now Edward has fallen ill, and Will — who has run off to a new life in Paris with his French wife (Marion Cotillard) — grudgingly returns home to take care of him. And, of course, the movie gives him the further mission of finding the grains of truth, spiritual or otherwise, in his father’s lulus.

Edward’s lifetime of stories unfolds before us, with Ewan McGregor — who has a good deal of cartoonish appeal here, although not much weight — playing the young Edward. We see him becoming a hero in his small Alabama town, first by becoming a star athlete, then by rescuing dogs from burning houses, and later by “saving” the town’s citizens from a not-so-frightening giant (played by Matthew McGrory). Realizing that he, like his new giant friend, is too big for this small town, he leaves home and discovers a Brigadoon-like village in which everyone seems happy all the time and no one ever wears shoes. Later, he joins a circus run by a shrimpy ringmaster (Danny DeVito). Later still, he falls in love at first sight with a sweet, radiant college girl named Sandra (Alison Lohman, who grows up to be Jessica Lange — a bit of genius casting). After that, he helps a poet-turned-bank robber (played by the always-wonderful Steve Buscemi, who is perhaps the most weirdly appealing performer in the whole movie) on the path to honest riches.

These are, of course, very broad stories, with very broad visuals to go with them: Edward shows up at Sandra’s doorstep with, quite literally, 10,000 daffodils (he has learned it’s her favorite flower). Stationed in the army in Korea, Edward cobbles a way to get home to the United States and to his beloved, taking with him a pair of bombshell Korean lounge singers who happen to be conjoined twins. (Played by Ada Tai and Arlene Tai, they’re one of the movie’s wittiest, and loveliest, images.) Everything here is supposed to be dreamy and unreal and bigger than life, because these are mythical tales, fabrications whose truth is ingrained in their spirit. Will, who has resisted his father’s fanciful ways of looking at the past, needs to give himself over to the meaning at the core of these stories before he can be redeemed.

But you just may have lost patience with everyone by the time that happens. Will can’t bring himself to act like a grown-up, even when his father is gravely ill: He comes off as simpering and self-involved almost right up to the end. Then again, by the jillionth time Edward launches into his characteristic story-tellin’ drawl (“Did ah evah tell you about the time ah used a pancake to fend off a man-eatin’ alligatah?” — OK, that one’s not in the movie, but it may as well be), you start wondering how many more tiresome tales this old windbag has in him.

I’m sure that’s not the effect Burton intends — he’s most certainly hoping to warm our hearts with this giant Sterno can of a movie. But there’s something garishly overcooked about “Big Fish.” It’s nicely made, well shot, and reasonably well acted, yet it’s enough to filet the life force right out of you. We need stories in order to dream, and to live. But that doesn’t mean we have to buy every crappy one that comes down the pike.

But I found myself trying so hard to like “Alice in Wonderland” that the process of watching it exhausted me. Burton, working from a screenplay by Linda Woolverton, isn’t even attempting a faithful adaptation of Lewis Carroll, and that’s probably a wise move. Carroll’s “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland” — coupled with its sequel, “Through the Looking-Glass” — is a marvel of dream-logic storytelling, a perfect articulation of the way our minds reinvent the rules of life during sleep: Carroll — or the Rev. Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, if you prefer — understood how a conversation with a rabbit in a waistcoat can be a matter of life and death while you’re dreaming it and seem like a silly, dismissible trifle once you’re up and awake. Carroll’s books have a beautiful structure, but a movie needs more narrative drive, and Burton and Woolverton seem to know that. They’ve framed their story as a sort-of sequel, in which Alice (played by the ethereal-looking Mia Wasikowska) is now grown-up enough to be betrothed, and she needs to make a good match owing to her family’s constrained financial situation. The problem is, she doesn’t much like the husband who’s been chosen for her. And so, when the prospective groom puts her on the spot by asking publicly for her hand in marriage, she slips away from the gawking crowd and escapes — from him and from the responsibilities of adulthood — by tumbling into a rabbit hole.

In Burton’s vision, that world isn’t “Wonderland,” but “Underland,” a mildly witty play on words that makes sense in the context of his reimagining of the story (though, apparently, when you’re making a movie for the Walt Disney Co., it would be messing too much with tradition to call it “Alice in Underland”). In that world, Alice meets the cast of characters so familiar from Carroll’s book, although they generally serve different purposes here. Johnny Depp’s Mad Hatter is a sensitive, wild-eyed, gap-toothed scatterbrain who hasn’t been the same since the benevolent yet frightening-looking White Queen (Anne Hathaway) was dethroned by her power-mad and very big-headed (literally and figuratively) sister, the Red Queen (Helena Bonham Carter). The Red Queen rules her kingdom with a tiny iron fist: Her chief henchman is Stayne, Knave of Hearts (Crispin Glover, borrowing a page from Laurence Olivier’s film version of Richard III, a spindly, black-clad figure with a charred, corrupted soul). The Red Queen takes pleasure in cutting off people’s heads, willy-nilly; she likes to rest her feet on the backs of fat, ottoman-shaped pigs. In short, she’s not a very nice person at all.

Alice, who is alternately too big or too small depending on what she’s most recently had to eat or drink, moves through this strange world — one in which giant, jewel-toned toadstools sport furry spots and, curiouser and curiouser, hookah-puffing caterpillars sound just like Alan Rickman — with a mixture of trepidation and sure-footedness. She’s been transported to Underland for a reason, and although she doesn’t yet know what that is, we of course can see it coming a mile away.

Foreseeing the ending of a story isn’t necessarily a problem; particularly in fairy tales, getting there is supposed to be most of the fun. But the problem with Burton’s “Alice in Wonderland” is that it’s all production design and no storytelling. There’s no compelling thread to follow here. Burton doesn’t build a universe in which we have any real reason to fear some characters and to feel protective of others. There’s nothing at stake in this Wonderland/Underland: When the action gets droopy, Burton cuts back to the Red Queen’s castle, where we get to watch her toddling about and spewing her highly amusing self-important twaddle. (Her silliest riffs are spun from the fact that she herself knows her head is enormous, and so what of it?) The Red Queen, as Carter plays her — her head has been enlarged and glued, via CGI, onto a twig-size body — is the most entertaining character here, and her makeup alone is both fascinating and repellent: Her lips have been painted into a tiny heart-shaped pout; her eyelids are coated with a magnificent color I can describe only as old-lady Maybelline blue.

But this tiny prima donna isn’t enough to carry a movie, and so Burton has to come up with activities to occupy the other characters. Depp, in particular, gets lost in the shuffle. The Mad Hatter, as Burton has reimagined him here, with a matted puff of red hair and perpetually dilated crazy-ass eyes, is something of a lost soul, the very type of character that Depp is generally so wonderful at playing. But it’s hard to see anything genuinely moving behind his tics and mannerisms. Even though Burton and Depp have done some wonderful work together — in movies like “Edward Scissorhands” and “Sleepy Hollow” — it’s gotten to the point where I prefer to see Depp in performances where he’s not hidden under “Look at me!” makeup. There’s a point at which perpetual collaboration between a filmmaker and an actor becomes a liability, and Depp and Burton may have reached it, at least for now.

“Alice in Wonderland” does offer its share of slender pleasures: Wasikowska plays Alice as bright and unassuming, and watching her is never a chore, even when the story devolves into a “Girls can do cool stuff, too!” empowerment tale. And the sequence in which she takes her first swig from that little bottle marked “Drink me!” — followed by her nibbling on that adorable “Eat me!” petit four — is ingeniously designed and staged, taking place in a warped-perspective room that appears to be all corners. Alice’s costuming here is particularly clever: She’s dressed in a billowy, translucent blue gown that she can both shrink out of and grow into. I also loved looking at, and listening to, the Cheshire Cat (voiced by Stephen Fry), a creature whose iridescent teal-blue stripes have been carefully coordinated with his enormous, glowing eyes.

But as lavish-looking as this “Alice in Wonderland” is, it still feels cobbled together, albeit painstakingly. It’s not at all shallow to care about the look of a film. Visual seduction is part of the reason we go to the movies. But maybe Burton is working too hard at being visually impressive: In the end, “Alice in Wonderland” comes off as manufactured instead of dreamy. Burton delivers all the wonder money can buy; what’s missing is the wonder it can’t.