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Verdict: Tim Burton at his fantastical best, plus some of the best actors around, makes this fish story well worth swallowing.

By ELEANOR RINGEL GILLESPIE
Cox News Service

Fabulous fabulist Tim Burton has made one of the best movies of his career - right up there with "Ed Wood" and "The Nightmare Before Christmas" - and definitely more richly textured than both.

"Big Fish" is a whopper of a movie about the importance of whoppers in our lives. It's about how tall tales and fish stories do more than enchant, amaze and amuse. They remind us that the mere facts are not always the truth of something. As John Ford said, when the legend becomes truth, print the legend.

In Burton's picture, fish gotta swim and Ed Bloom's gotta lie. Or enhance. That's how Will Bloom (Billy Crudup) sees his father (Albert Finney), a boisterous traveling salesman who prefers to tell his son that the day Will was born, ol' dad was catching the biggest catfish in Alabama instead of selling novelty products in Wichita. Now an Associated Press reporter in Paris, Will returns to Alabama because Ed is dying of cancer and his mother, Sandra (Jessica Lange), needs him. He hopes that, with time running out, his father will at last be straight with him.

Will wants facts. Ed gives him fancies. A phantasmagoria of fantastic tales connected by gossamer threads. Stories of witches, giants, werewolves and Auburn University. Of a phantom town called Spectre, where the streets are paved with grass and no one ever leaves. Of a witch's (Helena Bonham Carter) glass eye that shows you how you will die.

Danny DeVito shows up as a circus ringmaster with a secret. Steve Buscemi is a poet who's been working on the same poem for 12 years (he's three lines in). Alison Lohman, so very good in "Matchstick Men," is lovely and appropriately fairy tale-ish as the young Sandra. (She looks like Lange, too.)

For that matter, Ewan McGregor, who plays Ed in his youth, not only looks like Finney but shares the older actor's insistent charisma and larger-than-life presence. There's a taste of Finney's "Tom Jones" swagger in McGregor's cocky belief in himself and his ability to remain unrattled, no matter what astonishment comes his way.

Like Ed, Burton is a whimsical romantic. There are echoes of "The Princess Bride," "The Circus of Dr. Lao" (aka "The Seven Faces of Dr. Lao"), a benign episode of "The Twilight Zone" - and even "Forrest Gump" in that it's a picaresque journey set in the South (but without that film's smugness).

Burton remains, first and foremost, a visual director. Some of his visions are magical - a college campus transformed into an endless field of daffodils. Some are bizarre - McGregor scrubbing down an impassive circus fat man, is like something out of Diane Arbus. Some are merely funny, like the juxtaposition of a giant with a flock of Shriners in their teeny-tiny cars.

But wrapped inside all the fantastical vignettes is a poignant father-son story. In the end, Will tells the best story of all.

For all the strange and wondrous things Burton shows us, "Big Fish" is still an actor's movie. In an ineffable expression of love beyond time, life or death, Lange gently climbs into a tub with the ailing Finney. Crudup brings subtlety and wariness to a difficult role, while McGregor shines with exuberance and flashes a grin worthy of that other tall-tale connoisseur, Davy Crockett.

Finally, there's Finney, who last week was nominated for a Golden Globe as best supporting actor (the film was nominated as well). If there's any grace and generosity left in Hollywood, he may finally win an Oscar for his sublime performance. Mostly confined to bed throughout the film, Finney pulls us to him with a flawless combination of theatrical skill and movie-star radiance.

"A man tells a story so many times, he becomes the story," Ed tells Will. "It lives on after him. That way he becomes immortal." Finney has told us so many different stories and told them so well, it would be nice to see him get some mortal recognition, like a long overdue Oscar.