With Burton I usually pass through with some curiosity without being engaged more. He lauds the sticky-sweet qualities of imagination and nostalgia, gives us struggles of light versus dark; I find myself drawn to filmmakers who cultivate the transience and non-attachment that reconcile opposites in their films. He pumps warm emotional tap water, I would rather be taken to springs in the deep forest.
He offers storytelling as retreat to a purer place than the callous world out there, fantasy will often do that. I perceive storytelling as a tool - one of the most important - for untying knots, knots created by our attachment to things making story-sense a certain way only, it's where so much of our troubles begin, so that our whole world becomes a purer place, purer because we can roam with an unfettered mind.
It comes down to the larger view of how we make sense of the world and our place within it, as both viewers surrounded by narratives and narrators of our own. But I happen to share enough common ground about the value of storytelling, the same one that brings me to Raoul Ruiz on the farther end, so I make it a point to visit now and then.
This is his most poignant since Big Fish and driven by a similar story of uncovering emotive truth in the ramblings of an old storyteller's fantasy. It has some of his most exciting fabrics of world since Ed Wood, particularly the beginning in sunny Florida where mysterious nightmare lurks after sundown outside the suburban home of an old man who is anxiously peering through blinds, later the Blackpool funpark by the sea in the end with a mischievous fight against evil right under the noses of an unsuspecting audience.
So it has enough going for it to make me, who was never a fan but am always rooting for anyone who tries to stir the illusory world to awaken the sense of horizon, regret he has wasted precious time and energy being in charge of Hollywood projects that have as much to do with the art of imagining as decorating Walmart for Christmas. It means he has missed the opportunity to go off on his own to delve with quiet and single-minded passion into what interests him above all. Ed Wood best exemplifies this and is what the film was actually about, someone who is free to play and work with the fabrics of illusion.
Watching this I am reminded of Wes Anderson, someone who also became known for his peculiar inflection, the way colors and symmetries hang, but finally realized he was simply wasting it on skits that amuse. These days he's busy exploring ways to make language fluid and spontaneous, untying knots that stand in the way. He's finally giving us marvelous journeys about escaping bounds because he began by escaping his. I was never a fan before, now fully embrace him.
I have Burton grouped with Peter Jackson and Tarantino as filmmakers who at some point gave up on this journey.
