How much I enjoy a Tim Burton movie depends on how much it reminds me of black licorice. I go into one of his films hoping to find something dark and twisted and chewy and sweet-but-not-too-sweet. This is a goal more often imagined (to be fair, imagined by me rather than the esteemed director) than achieved, so I'm usually quite pleased if the film hits three of the four marks. Batman Returns, which I didn't like much at first because I wanted a Batman movie rather than a Tim Burton movie, meets three of the four criteria: dark, twisted, chewy, but not even a bit sweet. Beetlejuice is another three-out-of four job: dark, twisted, just sweet enough, but ultimately not chewy; it dissolves before you've had the chance to mull it over. I even enjoy some of those films where Burton bats (so to speak) .500: the first Batman, and Sleepy Hollow. Sleepy Hollow, I should allow, was definitely aiming for all four, but for me it was only dark and twisted. The magic versus technology idea seemed a bit thickly applied, and any romance involving Christina Ricci has no chance of striking me as sweet. In both good and bad ways I find her nearly as disturbing as Christopher Walken before he decided to extend his career by making fun of being Christopher Walken.

Anyway, anyway, the ads have been touting Burton's latest, Big Fish, as his masterpiece. I'm not entirely willing to go that far. Wait and see which film I might prefer; you'll be perplexed and incensed! However, I will readily concede that, had I seen Big Fish before the calendar flipped, I probably would have rated it ahead of both Mystic River and (heresy impending) Return of the King as the year's best, with no disrespect intended to either film. At the very least, Big Fish succeeds in satisfying all four braids of the licorice test.

Sweet-but-not-too-sweet:
People will disagree with me here, claiming that Big Fish is not only too sweet but positively cloying. I'll admit that I'm surprised I don't share this point of view. After all, the film hinges on an unapologetically pie-eyed, dopey-grinned love story. Edward Bloom (Ewan MacGregor), a wily, charming spinner of tall tales in search of his destiny in early '40s Alabama, falls in love with Sandra Templeton (Alison Lohman) after seeing her once in a crowd at the circus. He spends some indefinite but protracted amount of time slaving away in the unpaid employ of the circus for tidbits of information supplied by the show's cheerfully ruthless ringmaster, inevitably embodied by Danny DeVito. When he finally finds her, she's already engaged. But fear not, oh sturdy dreamers devoted to the idea of true love, all he has to do is cover the entire Auburn University quad in her beloved daffodils and accept a blood-spilling, bone-cracking beating from her fiancé to win her heart. Awww! I mean, hrrrrkbleargh.

No, wait, I really do mean awww, curse me, because the story doesn't end there. Ed ages into Albert Finney, and Sandra grows up to be Jessica Lange. We don't often get to see more mature people be in love on camera, because being in love is more than just meeting cute and promising to live happily ever after as the credits roll. Being in love is also (I'm guessing here) holding on to that rare glamour even after you've put up with a hell of a lot from each other. This twinkling sturdiness Finney and Lange convey beautifully in a relatively limited time, a needed sharpness to even out the sugar.

Chewy:
Is that you? (Sorry, couldn't resist.) The film offers another antidote to the potential sweetness quagmire, which is this: most of the story is narrated by Ed, and Ed is full of crap. He's so obviously full of crap that if you don't want to believe all that schmaltzy nonsense about him and Sandra when they were young, you don't have to, and you don't even have to feel like a shrivelled, embittered loveless coot for thinking so. How much of Ed's account of his past really happened, and how much of it is functional but disingenuous yarn-spinning? This might play as the cheesy question of every Philosophy 101 student: what is reality? In this case, though, it's tied to characters that draw us in to needing to know. Ed's son Will (Billy Crudup) has come home to visit his dying father, to shovel through the fecund stink and see what's underneath.

The question is a familiar one for Burton; he's explored it before in Ed Wood. What kept that movie from being chewy is that he tilted the film pretty heavily in favor of fantasy. Crudup has the thankless task of anchoring the reality side of the question, but he holds up capably (with some help, to be discussed below). He's petulant and suspicious, as sons with blowhard fathers who weren't around a lot might be expected to be, but he's also caring and genuinely interested in the truth. It's easy to throw in with Ed's blarney, but it's not a no-brainer. It also helps that there are winks, and then there are winks, in his flashbacks so that viewers are given an opportunity to sort out what's real and what's not instead of simply being tossed into an un-negotiable muddle.

Twisted:
Burton's movies often founder when they're required to stick to a plot, even the most original and surprising of which need to maintain a forward momentum for which Burton doesn't seem to have much patience. Fortunately the episodic structure of Big Fish gives him room for the kind of inspired adolescent digressions that he can't help but provide. On his first foray into the big world, Ed is side-tracked into the forgotten town of Spectre. There's a mess of shoes someone's done slung over the power lines, and he meets the poet laureate of his hometown, thought vanished in Paris, played by Steve Buscemi. Buscemi's character has been working on a great poem for twelve years, and has produced exactly three lines. I'm tempted to sue for using my life story without permission, but I'm actually too skinny to be Steve Buscemi. There's also the conjoined twin lounge act that helps Ed survive World War II behind enemy lines, and a werewolf thrown in just for fun. Werewolves are, to borrow from Mayor Quimby, like au gratin potatoes. They seldom (if ever) work as a main course, but they do constitute a "quality side."

Dark:
Intriguingly enough, the quality Burton seems to produce effortlessly in other films is dangerously close to missing here. The conflict between father and son emerges forcefully in the film's opening minutes, only to be rapidly (if not completely) diminished. It is true that Ed's particular exuberance for life depends on having learned how he is going to die by seeing it reflected in the cloudy eye of a witch he meets as a boy. But the film's too jolly, by and large, to allow this morbidity much room.

Ultimately, Jennifer Hill (realized with aching understatement by Helena Bonham Carter) provides the shadow of relief here. Ed meets Jenny in Spectre when she's only a child and he's an impressive young lad of eighteen. Will happens upon her name in his father's old papers and tracks her down, convinced she's the Other Woman who drew his father onto the road and away from his family so often. Jenny is the life Ed might have had, though not in the sense Will supposes, and she feels what might have been keenly, if not exactly bitterly. She provides a bracing reminder that, even in the most generous and gentle of lives, you can't make everybody happy.

What's the one Burton film I might rate above this one? Edward Scissorhands, another fairy tale that has the advantages of being gloomier (more attractive to amateur melancholics like myself) and featuring Winona Ryder (more attractive to the seventeen-year-old I was when I first saw the film). Like Edward Scissorhands, Big Fish is a fairy tale. Unlike the earlier film, it has aspirations toward a more mature magical realism, holding out the possibility that fairy tales and biographies intersect after all. I still prefer the more adolescent and tragic vision, but Big Fish is the kind of film I hope to grow into someday.