Tim Burton is a masterful storyteller, but he is not a writer. He takes other people's screenplays and transposes his unique vision on them, and usually the result is successful; this is most often the case when the screenplay has been based on one of his ideas, like Edward Scissorhands, or when it is about a subject he is passionate about, like Ed Wood. A worst case scenario is Planet Of The Apes, which had a script no one could really have salvaged.

Big Fish is a good script by John August, a father-son story whose whimsy belies its weight. Aside from his two movies about characters named Edward, it is perhaps the best script Burton has had to work with, and he has done it justice. The interesting thing, though, is that you can almost feel him trying to expand his horizons. There are scenes that surely come naturally to him, like the one that takes place in a forest full of writhing, diaoblical trees, but there are also many more moments of quiet, dramatic interaction between characters that have little room for visual flair. Burton puts his stock in these ordinary scenes, something he's never been completely adept at. At the time he made Mars Attacks, producer Larry Franco astutely described Burton's approach to, say, a scene of two people sitting in a living room: "You conjure up in your mind what that is; what your're really going to shoot is a living room the size of a football field, with no ceiling. The walls are eighteen feet high, and there's a red table in the corner with two people in white jumpsuits. That's Tim's version of two people in a living room talking."

An exageration, for sure, but one based in truth; Burton's always been a bit awkward in capturing the dynamics of a simple exchange, when there isn't some oddity for to provide him with a foothold. But that's where this script's strength is, and, in fits and stars, Burton pushes himself and eventually proves himself up to the challenge. There are other directors who could have cut deeper and more truthfully with these scenes, and others who could have made them unbearably mawkish. Burton finds a workable median, and when he falls, he has his cast to catch him; Abert Finney, Ewan McGregor, Jessica Lange and Billy Crudup are the stars here, and a director could hardly ask for a stronger group of actors.

Finney plays Edward Bloom; Lange is his loving wife Sandra, and Crudup his son William. Edward and William have been long estranged when the film begins, but the old man gets cancer and so his son returns home. "How long does he have?" he asks his mother. "We don't talk about that yet," she tells him, and indeed, Bloom is adamant that he will not die in his bed, that it is not the way he is meant to go; he knows this because, when he was a boy, he looked into the glass eye of a witch and saw his own death.

This is a story he's told Will many times, along with dozens of others that stretch the boundaries of the imagination; his favorite is the one about the massive fish that swallowed his wedding ring the day Will was born. Will is a realist with no time for fairie tales, and he's grown frustrated with his father for never telling him the truth. Edward maintains that every story he's ever told about himself is true, even if it's only true from a certain point of view.

These tall tales interject the main narrative, and we see young Edward, played by Ewan McGregor, make his way through life in the most roundabout way possible. His theory is that, since he knows how he will die, he doesn't have to be afraid to take chances. Thus, he jumps at the chance to save his sleepy Alabama town from a terrible giant, chooses to venture into a haunted forest and volunteers as paratrooper in the Korean war, among other astounding feats. He also falls in love with Sandra, played in her youth by Alison Lohman. For three years, Edward slaves for a circus manager (Danny DeVito) just to learn her name.

There are other stories, involving bank robbers and ghost towns and werewolves, and they all are full of Burton's beautiful freaks, the oddballs who are more human than everyone else. I particularly loved Carl the giant, who clearly is a real giant; Burton's affection for anyone who is different is no more evident than when this awkwardly shaped yet handsome man gazes into the camera. The sequence with the Korean Siamese Twin Showgirls is also stunning; one of many unmade scripts that has long been gestating with Burton is an adaptation of the novel Geek Love, a story of sideshow attractions, and there are many scenes in this film that feel like precursors to that one.

Crudup has to play the straight man to all these characters, and dutifully does so, it pays off in the end. Performance wise, this is Finney's picture -- and McGregor's, to an almost equal extant. Both incarnations of Edward as vibrant and wonderful a creation as either actor has ever played before; their casting is inspired, and for Finney, this is a beautiful capper to a great career (not that I don't look forward to seeing him onscreen again, hopefully many more times). Sadly, Lange and Lohman, whose physical resemblance is uncanny, don't have much to do; they each get a few lovely moments to themselves, but this is by and large the boys' show.

Which brings me to the end, where my objectivity has to cease. Up until the last fifteen minutes, I thought the film was good but but not great. Twenty minutes later, the credits were concluding and I was shaking in my seat and trying not to completely break down; the power of the ending snuck up on me and unhinged me. I've long believed that a touch of surreality can applied at just the right moment can have a transcendant effect, and rarely have I ever seen this phenomena occur as beautifully as it does here. Up until this point, the movie was good;

Burton has often professed his love for Fellini, and in this closing sequence, I was reminded of Armacord; that was a film based in memories, and so is this one, and they are both overflowing with love. I was trying to decide how much of that love came from Burton, and how much was from the script; I'm sure a lot of it was there on the page, but I learned after seeing the film that both of Burton's parents died within a year of the film's production, which makes me think that this may just be the most personal story he's ever told. Edward Scissorhands expressed his alienation; if his parents had anything to do with that, then this movie puts those issues to rest.