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T to them Barton . Double monster "A". Anyone who masterfully packs his anti -Mainstream skepticism in the bungonades. He behaves independently, but his self -will surprisingly coincides with Hollywood values. Everyone is forgiven to him, the biased. Both the emotion of the Edward Hands-Hands, and the perky mockery “Mars attacks!”, And the infernal coquetry of “Sleepy Polshchina”. For he knows how to entertain with taste. He is loved as a barton of bile, strewn with psychedelic sparkles, puffing fireworks, never mistaken in the choice of actors.

But he got caught. He pecked at the bait, against which it was difficult to resist, fell on the hook of an archetypal plot. Such an archetype for American culture has been Moby Dick for a century and a half.

Actually, the parallel with the plot of Roman Melville is exhausted already in the prolon " Large fish ": the young Ed Bloom (Ivan McGregor) catches an unprecedented river creature and lets it go with the world. But an invisible powerful shadow lies in the whole picture, and this is not even a “moby Dick”, but the fish is much large. Yes, and Barton seemed to be replaced.

No, of course, he is recognizable. The same colorful intricate, the same character spices: Ed-Makgregor in his wanderings, tales about which he is bored with the son of Will (Billy Kradap), both a giant, a predatory tree, an enchanted town, and beauty-Siamese twins, and the director of the circus-werewolf. Shapito, sabotage in China, a million daffodils, a beautiful lover who turns into Jessica Lange by old age - in a word, the whole set for a good fairy tale is available. But in a fairy tale, with all its wonderful laws, there is its own logic - morality is told to us at the end, after all the adventures leading to the final lesson. In "large fish" morality is read initially. Moreover, it seems to be at first persistently offered, and then openly imposed, not particularly reckoning with the film itself.

Yes, yes, of course, Bloom-Starik (Albert Finnie) is initially very similar to the obscenity of the lungy catfish, and so that everyone has already understood everything, in the end, it turns into fish. Fish is a symbol of Christ, Christianity in general - precisely because in the gam "Moby Dika" Melville insists that the sperm whale is a fish, it is a fish, not a mammal. The result is a parable (among other things) about the inquires of human efforts to achieve heaven, about the obviously doomed competition of pride with a providence, written with greatness and rage worthy of the minted chapters of the Old Testament. Barton, piling attractions and sentiments, flashing the frame with cute manual monsters, also seeks to inform the audience a simple and impressive message. But in order to create a real parable, the depth of thinking that Barton does not have and never had. As for visual wealth, then again - and where to go? - We have to recall Terry Gilam that such attractions constructs such attractions not more inventive. Confetti and carousels of "large fish", McGregor, Lange and Steve Buscami are wasted - in bitterly sweet, to pain in the lackeys familiar, the swamp of melodrama.

Indeed, it is sad: Barton compels the mediocre ode to those unshakable values, which he himself at one time cut under a nut.

So: you need to love your parents, and tell the children fables for the night, and protect the family hearth, and believe in miracles. Have you forgotten anything? Yes, well, go to church, of course.