Dmitry Desyaterik. Bittersweet

Tim Barton . Double monster of class "A". The one who masterfully packages his anti-mainstream skepticism into a binder of buffoonery. He behaves independently, but his willfulness surprisingly coincides with Hollywood values. He, the two-one, is forgiven by everything. And the sweetness of “Edward Scissorhands”, and the fervent mockery of “Mars Attacks!”, and the infernal coquetry of “Sleepy Hollow”. Because he knows how to entertain with taste. He is loved as the bilious Barton, strewn with psychedelic sparkles, full of fireworks, and never wrong in choosing actors.

But he did get caught. I took the bait, which is difficult to resist, and fell for the hook of an archetypal plot. Moby Dick has been such an archetype for American culture for a century and a half.

Actually, the parallel with the plot of Melville’s novel is exhausted already in the prologue of “ Big Fish ”: young Ed Bloom (Ewen McGregor) catches an unprecedented river creature and releases it in peace. But an invisible powerful shadow lies over the entire picture, and this is not even “Moby Dick”, but a much bigger fish. And it was as if Barton had been replaced.

No, of course, he is recognizable. The same colorful intricacy, the same character spices: Ed-McGregor in his wanderings, with stories about which he bores his son Will (Billy Crudup), comes across a giant, and a predatory tree, and an enchanted town, and beautiful Siamese twins, and a circus director - werewolf. A big top, sabotage in China, a million daffodils, a beautiful lover who turns into Jessica Lange in old age - in a word, you have all the ingredients for a good fairy tale. But the fairy tale, with all its wonderful laws, has its own logic - the moral is told to us at the end, after all the adventures that lead to the final lesson. In "Big Fish" the moral is read from the beginning. Moreover, it seems that it is first persistently offered, and then openly imposed, without even particularly taking into account the film itself.

Yes, yes, of course, Bloom the old man (Albert Finney) is initially very similar to a seasoned big-lipped catfish, and, so that everyone understands, in the end he himself turns into a fish. The fish is a symbol of Christ, of Christianity in general - that is why in the prologue of Moby Dick Melville insists that the sperm whale is a fish, namely a fish, not a mammal. The result is a parable (among other things) about the futility of human efforts to reach Heaven, about the obviously doomed competition of pride with Providence, written with a grandeur and fury worthy of the chiseled chapters of the Old Testament. Burton, by piling on the attractions and sentiments and peppering the frame with cute pet monsters, also strives to convey a simple and impressive message to the audience. But to create a real parable, you need a depth of thinking that Barton does not have and never had. As for visual richness, here again - where to go? - we have to remember that Terry Gilliam designs such attractions much more inventively. The confetti and carousels of Big Fish, McGregor, Lange and Steve Buscemi are wasted in the bittersweet, painfully familiar swamp of melodrama.

It’s really sad: Barton composes a mediocre ode to those unshakable values ​​that he himself once butchered like a nut.

So: you need to love your parents, and tell your children bedtime stories, and take care of the family hearth, and believe in miracles. Have you forgotten anything? Yes, and go to church, of course.

There are also smart books to read.

A good book is like galoshes - it will take you out of any artistic sludge.