Big Fish

The movie Big Fish was like a well told joke whose punch line I just didn’t get. Though I was mildly entertained and knew that there was some real interest there, I just couldn’t get into the movie and I came out with the sense of being left out of the fun. This is not to give the impression that this is a bad film or that Tim Burton has done a poor job in creating it. In truth Big Fish is a beautifully filmed and well acted movie. I just did not see the point of it.

Big Fish tells the story of Will Bloom, played by Billy Crudup who has come home to see his estranged father because his father is dying. He tries to connect with his father, who has spent his life telling him fascinatingly over the top tales of his younger life. These ‘Big Fish’ tales are at the heart of the story as Billy tries to come to terms with a father that he feels he barely knows on the eve of his father’s death and his own impending fatherhood.

Now I believe that this is supposed to be a human story about a man and his father and their ability to communicate. It is also about the division between truth and fiction, and where one would rather dwell. The question is as to what conclusion one would draw if one embraces the fiction rather than the fact of life. Ewan McGregor does a great job as the young Ed Bloom and Albert Brooks is convincing as the old curmudgeon he becomes. The supporting cast of giants and circus folks are fanciful enough, but the ‘real’ characters of Ed’s son, daughter in law, and wife are banal. Perhaps that is the point, the characters of real life cannot measure up to those of the imagination. Billy Crudup seems lost in this movie, as he is supposed to. He is trying to understand his father through a net of tales and myths that serve to seriously obscure the man, both his strengths and his weaknesses.

Brooks relates the key points of his life in colorful detail, leaving home becomes a scary adventure with a giant and a trip to a town that does not exist. Finding his wife becomes a tale of hard work, circus people, and huge fields of flower. Even the day his son was born becomes the day of the battle with the big fish. Of course these confound his son, he finds that as a traveling salesman his father was simply not around for his birth and that all of the tales that his father has told over the years impinge upon the very real events of his son’s life.

Burton excels in creating a world apart from our own, just out of reach and just out of the ordinary. Usually in his films the emersion is complete and you are swept away into a magical story with absorbing characters like Jack the Pumpkin King or Edward Scissorhands. Perhaps Burton is growing out of his childlike fantasy world. In Big Fish Burton continually pulls the audience back and forth between the storybook tales spun by Albert Brooks to anyone willing to listen and the everyday life he and his family live. This lends the film a disjoined air and never allows one to get comfortable in either the fabled world or the much less colorful real one.

Overall I felt dissatisfied with this film. Every time I could settle into the pacing of a fanciful story it would jerk back to the supposed real world of sickness and unhappiness. Once I was readjusting to the newer world I was thrust back again among carnival people and fields of flowers. But how do you separate truth and fiction? Is it acceptable to come to an understanding and acceptance of a pathological liar just because he is dying? True the fiction is more colorful and more fun than reality but does that make it acceptable? The ending just confounded me in the division between reality and fiction, but I suppose it shows that he and his son came to an agreeable way of thinking and that the constant lying and telling of tales from father to son was going to continue for another generation.