This ‘Big Fish’ is quite a catch

To some of us, metaphor is more comfortable than the naked truth. We’d much rather express emotion in terms of myth, say, than the mundane details of real life. To that extent, Tim Burton is no different than anyone else.

Of course, a guy whose worldview could cause him to direct such movies as “Frankenweenie,” “Edward Scissorhands,” “Ed Wood” and “Sleepy Hollow” isn’t someone you’re likely to bump into more than once a lifetime. Even so, Freud could have based his entire career drawing parallels between what Burton puts on the screen and what those images must say about his own emotional hang-ups.

Into this mix comes “Big Fish,” a film that is as close to being a regular movie as Burton is likely to direct. Which is saying something, considering that the film features a giant, a werewolf, conjoined twins who share a single torso and a catfish as big as a St. Bernard. Starring Ewan McGregor and Albert Finney as, respectively, the young and old Edward Bloom, “Big Fish” is all about Edward’s penchant for telling tales that he prefers over drab reality. Strangely enough, though it’s probably not all that unexpected, the only person who doesn’t like the stories is Edward’s son William.

“Big Fish,” then, is a story of resolution — of father with his past, of father with son and of son with his own sense of self-righteousness. To those of us who have ever hungered to know our real fathers, and then been fortunate enough to have gotten the opportunity to do so before it was too late, “Big Fish” is a masterpiece. To anyone else, it may be just another strange Tim Burton story. But this much is also true: Somewhere, Sigmund Freud is smiling.