Magical, mythical tour

Tim Burton has always been ensnared by the fabulous, and his films tend to be more or less well-sustained exercises in the suspension of disbelief. From Beetlejuice and Batman, through Mars Attacks!, Ed Wood and on to Sleepy Hollow, the mystical and the real interpenetrate in a way at once unsettling and quirkily humorous. It's as if the dark children's books of Edward Gorey were being animated, so it's no surprise to find that Burton, too, has written and illustrated similar works.

Also present in Burton's oeuvre (and it is an oeuvre, remarkably so, for an idiosyncratic vision projected from mainstream Hollywood) is a continuing preoccupation with fathers and sons, whether real or imagined. Edward Scissorhands is a Frankenstein fils, Ed Wood finds his peculiar pater in Bela Lugosi and Johnny Depp's opiated detective undergoes re-parenting by the Headless Horseman of Sleepy Hollow. Even a film as wacky as Mars Attacks! presents a portrait of aliens as enraging - and curiously engaging - children, shamelessly running amok.

Now, in Big Fish, Burton has reached, perhaps, the apogee of these currents in his work. It is the tale of Edward Bloom, a larger-than-life salesman from small-town Alabama. He is the big fish of the title, but there is another, too: the classic angler's one-that-got-away.

Bloom can't forbear from spinning this yarn and thousands of other tall tales, featuring soothsaying witches, gentle giants, villages of the damned, conjoined twins and bank-robbing poets.

Indeed, so addicted to anecdote is Bloom that he alienates his only son, Will, by upstaging the young man's wedding. Will splits to Paris where he works as a journalist, but, on hearing that his father is dying, he returns to his deathbed, intent on finally untangling the facts about Bloom senior from the fictions that he has been fed. What he discovers is no great surprise: that while his negative view of the old man as an inveterate liar must be rewritten, the stories themselves also require copious editing.

In the past, Burton has created highly artificial productions, hyper-real evocations of the kind of interwar Hollywood movies of small-town American life which must have dominated the TV schedules of his own childhood. His favoured proscenium is often a receding street of immaculate frame houses, their lawns viridian in the noon-day sun, or silvery beneath a full Moon.

In Big Fish, Burton locates this timeless and fabulous realm in the stories that Edward Bloom tells, while depicting a perfectly prosaic world that we flash from and back to. (I say perfectly prosaic, but it is not exactly believable: the level of carefree racial integration he proposes for the Deep South does stretch credulity.) Still, the film's greatest achievement is to angle these apparently parallel universes so that they converge. Its second achievement is to showcase so much heavyweight talent, without letting Big Fish feel like a series of cameos.

Caught in Burton's arboreal tentacles (and yes, there is a writhing wood in this one) are Coen brothers stalwart Steve Buscemi, the beautifully ageing Helena Bonham Carter and the brilliantly buffo Danny DeVito. Robert Guillaume shucks off the hateful morning coat of Benson to play a wise medic, while Billy Crudup does creditable work as the ambivalent son. Jessica Lange is always watchable, but as Bloom Senior's wife she demonstrates that sometimes less is... well, not quite enough. Ewan McGregor I can take or leave in his squeaky-clean incarnation as young Edward Bloom; give me rutting Young Adam or smack-sozzled Renton.

But Big Fish really belongs to Albert Finney, who proves that when it comes to large performances there is no one who can quite match a British Shakespearean with good camera sense. His dying Edward Bloom is simultaneously loveable, risible, admirable and pitiable; the emotions shade his broad face like clouds passing over some thespian prairie. Danny Elfman, who has scored earlier Burton films, accompanies this stormy weather with strings dipped rather too liberally in treacle.

Burton's Planet of the Apes was the hairy turkey of 2001 (the very fact of a remake smacking of poverty of imagination masquerading as reverence). His true path as a director is to play to a particular tendency in the American mythic. Myth raises humans' actions to the level of the divine, while the symbolic drags the gods down to earth. Americans draw on a wellspring of folk religion when it comes to understanding their peculiar destiny - which is denied us decadent Europeans.