Saturday, January 10, 2004
(10:39 PM) | Adam Kotsko:
The Time Has Come: Movie Reviews
Last night I saw Big Fish. I had wanted to see it since I first saw the preview several months ago, and the aggressive marketing did nothing to dissuade me. The review in the New Yorker from last week (not available online) was negative, but seemingly the best they can ever do is ambivalence.
I assume you all know the premise, but in traditional movie review fashion, I will tell you: a father spends his entire life developing an elaborate mythology about his life, which he vividly and repeatedly tells to everyone who will listen. His son, who believes all his father's stories at first, becomes disillusioned when the father seems to use the son's graduation party as an opportunity to tell the same old story yet again. The son acts as narrator, and so the viewer knows from the beginning that the ambivalent son will go through a transformation during the course of the story. The movie is the process of the son's coming to terms with his father's past, and all the outlandish stories are portrayed with vivid special effects and over-the-top symbolism.
First, I'll address some points brought up in the New Yorker review. The reviewer is correct in saying that Tim Burton does occasionally hit the viewer over the head with symbolism. I think he's also correct in saying that the son-as-narrator is excessively literal and obvious with his commentary, but then that's just because the son is a fairly boring character. Perhaps as a form of rebellion against his father, the son develops a literal-mindedness that he just can't let go of -- when he learns the "true" story behind his father's oft-repeated mythological account of the day of the son's birth, the prosaic son seems to prefer the bland, factual story. He also displays a certain ressentiment toward his father's popularity and charm -- he assumes there must be something dark, even evil, beneath his father's exterior if the father insists on the subterfuge of his personal mythology. It reminds me of one of Bonhoeffer's letters from prison, where he says that the petty modern man thinks that you can't know someone until you see him at his most vulgar and vulnerable -- the real man is the man's hidden shame and weakness.
Tim Burton rejects the son's initial view, even if the son himself only comes halfway, getting to see his father in a moment of weakness while simultaneously coming to terms with the mythology. One might even say (in keeping with a recent theme of one of my esteemed co-bloggers) that the final message of the movie is a joyous Nietzschean embrace of the life-affirming untruth. While this message is perhaps excessively clear for those who were brought up on literary modernism, the actual meat of the movie fulfills modernist expectations perfectly -- symbolism is left unexplicated, the shape of a mind remains more important than narrative consistency, stories are left half-finished or are only indicated rather than told. The stories follow the logic of a dream much more than of "real life," and in that sense, the father has been wearing his "true self" on his sleeve, albeit in a necessarily indirect form. Thus, although the movie leaves little interpretive work to be done on the macro level, the industrious critic can find much to puzzle over on lower levels.
In conclusion: Believe the Hype.
Special Extra Bonus Review:
Tonight I watched Hedwig and the Angry Inch, a touching tale of an East German transsexual who finds hope in the queer rock stars of the 1980s, escapes from East Berlin with an American sugar daddy mere months before the wall falls, and starts his own rock band. The framing device of the movie is a copyright dispute, but the best segments are the full-length songs from Hedwig and his band, the Angry Inch. Of particular note is their song "The Origin of Love," a creative and hilarious musical retelling of Aristophanes' speech from Plato's Symposium. Several scenes are enhanced by some really great animation and artwork, as well.
