Both the recently released Jobs, about Apple's co-founder and domineering personality, and Tim Burton's Big Fish look at the life of exceptional men. While the biopic purports to be a straight-forward recounting of the rise, and the fall, and subsequent resurrection, of one of the 'visionaries' of our time, Burton's tall-tell interweaves fact and fiction, pushing us to unravel the difference between the two and what our feelings about the proper place of each tells us about ourselves and the world around us. Perhaps because Jobs has a higher bar of reality to surmount before we can deem it satisfactory, the direct approach actually imbues us with less a sense of the world than Burton's novel adaptation. While Big Fish asks us to think about ourselves, Jobs requests that we praise the another's ability.
How can a fictive account strike us as more truly resonant? Surely this is largely an assignment of the observer. Nevertheless, there seems to be more good and true in Burton's work - this is not to suggest that it is a triumph. Surprisingly, Kutcher excels in the role of Jobs, but he is left little to excel towards. The film felt like an Apple vanity project through-and-through. Big Fish nestles into a world where both myth and reality are interwoven. In doing so it creates a world that we can feel, that lives and breathes. Rather than demand our fealty, it excites our wonder. Such is an accomplishment too often overlooked.
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