Which makes the scenes between the older Edward (Albert Finney, confined to several death beds) and his son Will (Billy Crudup) -- a journalist seeking just the facts from a father prone to spectacular fictions -- almost revelatory. For the first time, Burton seems comfortable walking around the real world; he doesn't frame the ordinary between quotation marks or populate suburbia with grotesqueries and freaks. Burton, who once used as much distancing irony in his movies as celluloid, seems no longer afraid of ordinary emotion or of dealing with people who might actually walk and breathe and die amongst us. Edward and his wife, Sandra (Jessica Lange, sadly not given much to do), and Will and his wife, Josephine (Marion Cotillard), are just ordinary people living unspectacular lives. For Will, that is and has always been enough. For Edward, who may be the closest thing to a Burton stand-in in any of his films, that's damned near unacceptable. "I tell stories," Edward says. "You tell amusing lies," Will rebukes.
For as long as Will can recall, Edward has spoken of nothing but witches with fortune-telling glass eyes and bank-robbing poets and conjoined Korean sisters and a small town named Spectre, hidden away from the rest of the world by spider webs and a thicket of man-eating trees. Many of his tall tales are like bad jokes; after a while it becomes clear he's told these stories not to impress his son but to keep himself interested in his own life. He has become nothing but a cantankerous old man, bedridden and weak and living off tepid cans of Ensure; it's as though Tom Jones, a role Finney inhabited 40 years ago, has finally been trapped in Alabama and tamed by age, though none of the light has dimmed in Finney's eyes.
Josephine is enamored of Edward's stories; she has never heard them and finds them charming and harmless, and she becomes a little girl at the foot of a great storyteller. Or maybe she, like the audience, wants to believe them -- especially the one about how young Edward romanced Sandra (Matchstick Men's Alison Lohman) by turning a university's quad into a field of blinding yellow daffodils overnight and enduring a beating at the fists of the man to whom Sandra had been engaged. There's romance in Edward's stories, more than in real life; every sentence is a Technicolor escapade.
For Will, who defines his relationship with Edward as one of "strangers who know each other very well," the tattered myths are no longer enough. Like all sons who see their fathers first as larger-than-life heroes only to watch them shrink into fragile old men, Will can no longer be entertained by fairy tales. He needs advice, seeks conversation, demands honesty; he's a soon-to-be-father with no role model, save for the liar lying in bed. Will believes the truth will eradicate the distance between them, so much so he's almost delighted to find a hint that his father once had an affair with a woman in Spectre named Jenny, played by Helena Bonham Carter; at least, at last, something tangible about his old man. But even then, there's a truth and the truth, and rarely do they ever quite meet.
Burton, punctuating a man's life with outlandish and beautiful detours, is saying that life is the joy you remember, not the truths you can recite. And sometimes, death can provide a very happy ending.
