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Big Fish

In an article titled, "With Father-Son Movies, a Zanuck Knows All About That" (New York Times, December 23, 2003, p.B1), the fifth paragraph starts off, "This year (along with Dan Jinks and his partner Bruce Cohen), Mr. Zanuck produced Tim Burton's Big Fish, a magical realist fable now in theaters . . . " As fine a film as this is (although this writer thinks that the films, Like Water for Chocolate, Moulin Rouge, Pleasantville and What Dreams May Come have magical realist elements more smoothly integrated into the texture of the film), what is most important about Big Fish is the labeling of it as "magical realism" in, none other than the New York Times. This is the only paper that this writer has seen that label associated with this film. This is crucial because it means that this term for the film not only has "respectability" as a bona fine means of expression, film and otherwise, but -- since it is so similar to other films of this type which, by an agent I know, says that Hollywood refers to as "visually stylized" -- it means that said term is indeed challenged and such films so labled previously as "visually stylized" must be reconsidered with an eye toward the New York Times assessment of the magic realist mode of expression for Big Fish.

This question is hardly arbitrary. Why such films as those mentoned and including other recently well known films -- Oh, Brother Where Art Thou, Chocolate, Emile, American Beauty to name a few -- get labled with "visually stylized", which, while sounding interesting, is to this writer difficult to understand. Why would this label be used instead of "magic realism", a very specific term that has been around for quite some time?

There are many films out there that imaginatively employ and use structural techniques in the art of storytelling to engage the viewer. The difference between such films and magic realist expression involves how the story or details are focused so that the the commonplace becomes unusual or the unusual becomes normal, or the reader becomes as a child once again, seeing the common place as if for the first time -- and we see the story, event, object as unusal/strange/wonderful as it truly is, as it was the first time we saw it. "Visually stylized" seems to this writer to imply that we are looking at simply unique visual treatments of a film. Magic realism is layered, complex and has its roots in art and literature. Why this label should be lost when transferred to film seems odd. Was the short story An Occurance At Owl Creek Bridge a "visually stylized" short story by Ambrose Bierce befoe it was adapted for an episode of The Twilight Zone in October, l962? Whether he knew it or not, Mr. Bierce appears to this writer to have written a story that looks like it was magic realist first and if that's the case, why should it lose that label and become "visually stylized" instead? It's a bit like saying that the story The Time Machne, by H.G. Wells, which is well acknowedleged as a work of Science Fiction, becomes "Reality Reinterpreted" when it becomes a film; but that did not happen. It stayed with it's label from book to film, as was the case for The Ring which didn't lose its Fantasy label when it became a film.

 

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