Do stories make the world, or does the world make stories? In America has it both ways. The setting of Jim Sheridan’s immigrants-in-the-Apple fable is recognizably Manhattan, but the time frame is deliberately fuzzy, and while the actors are coached in gritty realism, the script (co-written by Sheridan with daughters Kirsten and Naomi) puts theatrical dialogue in their mouths that doesn’t always ring true. Still, it wins your acceptance, if only by asking for it: As the Sullivans, still reeling from the death of their only son, Frankie, pull into Times Square, The Lovin’ Spoonful’s "Do You Believe in Magic?" floods the soundtrack. Belief is exactly what’s required, especially in the kind of "old-time movie" the lyrics evoke.

"Acting and giving birth to something -- it's the same thing," the pregnant wife (Samantha Morton) tells her unemployed actor husband (Paddy Considine), begging him to pretend that he's over their son's death, even if he isn't. She isn't asking him for appearances' sake, or for her own convenience, but because she knows that pretending is the only way to make it real. Underneath her instruction is an understanding of how performance -- and, by extension, movies -- can shape reality, even create it. In a country where reinvention is practically required by law, a father who's lost faith in God finds it again -- where else? -- at the movies. If departed souls can't go to heaven (which, in this telling, is an ice-cream parlor), they can at least, like E.T., go home.

Cherry-red camcorder clutched in her hand, In America's Christy (Sarah Bolger) embraces her role as narrator, finally sending the audience "back to reality," but not before asking them to fix "a picture of me in your mind." But when it comes to storytelling gusto, she can't hold a camcorder to Big Fish's Edward Bloom (Albert Finney), whose yarn-spinning skills are matched only by his appetite for new audiences. When he's informed that his listener has already heard the story he's gearing up to tell, the wind goes out of his enormous body, but only for as long as it takes to remember, or invent, another.

Everyone loves a man with a good story, but what happens if you're his son? That's the plight of pinched-looking William Bloom (Billy Crudup), a wire service reporter for whom Edward Bloom is just a pathological liar unable to face the truth. With no trace of his father's Southern accent or easy charm, Will may be a storyteller by trade, but, as his father puts it, his son's stories have "all of the facts, and none of the flavor."

Flavor, of course, is what distinguishes a tall tale. Anyone can invent an ingenious lie, but it takes a special skill to make that lie more appealing than the truth, to seduce the audience out of its natural skepticism. And flavor is exactly what Big Fish lacks. Edward's stories are full of fantastic creatures -- giants, werewolves, witches, not to mention a Maoist ventriloquist -- but when Philippe Rousselot's camera brings them to life, the images have a flat, desaturated quality, like a storybook that hasn't been colored in.

Tim Burton, once the poet laureate of boys who won't grow up, has abruptly decided to mature, at the expense of everything instinctive and free-flowing in his movies. At his best, Burton was morbid, but not grotesque; think of the tenderness with which he treated Bela Lugosi's addiction in Ed Wood, or the sad beauty with which Edward Scissorhands tries to comfort his dying surrogate father, slicing his real hands to pieces in the process. Edward Bloom's fanciful stories cry out for comic exaggeration, but Burton's too busy playing Spielberg to bone up on Southern picaresque.

Unlike his protagonist, Burton has never told stories for storytelling's sake. From Pee Wee Herman forward, his heroes have been men on a mission, seeking out objects as diverse as a headless horseman and a big red bicycle, but fundamentally questing for acceptance: For all their eccentricities, they want to be loved. Apart from his future wife, Sandra (Alison Lohman, then Jessica Lange), Edward Bloom doesn't much seem to care who likes him (which, of course, makes him all the more likable), and his stories, fundamentally, aren't about anything except Edward Bloom. Where In America reaches out to the world, Big Fish creates a hermetically sealed universe, a theme park. Even with the endlessly engaging Ewan McGregor (as young Edward) at their center, the tales feel empty, plastic. They're fables without morals.

Big Fish's path is strewn with gems: Ewan McGregor's perfect pratfall, Loudon Wainwright III's cadaverous grin and 7-foot-6 Matthew McGrory as a sad-eyed giant named Karl. (In a past Burton film, he would've been the hero.) But the way is full of rocks as well, and though the landscape keeps changing, it all seems the same. There's not one image as memorable as In America's Christy singing "Desperado" in a pink cowboy hat, in front of a painted backdrop that suggests promises unfulfilled, hopes half-spoken. Like the hero of John Schlesinger's Billy Liar, In America's characters tell stories to survive, but as Big Fish suggests (and then clumsily spells out), Edward Bloom tells stories for his own advancement, or as a means of escape (though since he's married to the love of his life, you might wonder exactly what it is he needs to escape). Where Billy Liar's heartbreaking final image enshrines the power of storytelling even as it suggests its dangers, Big Fish amounts to a defense of escapism, which might be what you'd expect from the company-man director of Planet of the Apes, but not from the visionary who once enshrined the ramshackle idiosyncrasies of Ed Wood's bargain-basement monster movies.

With Will pressing his dying father to finally tell him the "true versions of things," Big Fish's framing story is a mawkish attempt to inject significance into Edward Bloom's tall tales -- something Bloom himself would never do. Burton's fit of sophomore self-seriousness undermines the movie's ostensible celebration of storytelling: It's no longer enough for stories to entertain; they have to mean something. Big Fish belatedly suggests that Edward Bloom's stories are more than wild fictions, that they spring from the world, and not just his mind. But it never suggests the ways that fantasy can bridge the two, hold a fun-house mirror up to the world and produce a warped reflection that is somehow truer than life. Its contention that stories "end where [they] began" is fashionably cryptic, but ultimately, it suggests solipsism, a storyteller whose only audience is himself. Big Fish chokes on its own tail.