Big Fish
by Tim Burton
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Actor: Albert Finney, Billy Crudup, Ewan McGregor, Helena Bonham Carter, Jessica LangeDirector: Tim Burton
Brand: MCGREGOR,EWAN
Producer: Arne Schmidt
Producer: Bruce Cohen
Producer: Dan Jinks
Producer: Katterli Frauenfelder
Producer: Richard D. Zanuck
Writer: Daniel Wallace
Writer: John August
DVD: Region Code 99
Audio: English (Unknown), Dolby Digital 5.1; English (Subtitled); French (Subtitled); English (Original Language), Dolby Digital 5.1; French (Original Language), Dolby Digital 2.0 Surround; French (Dubbed), Dolby Digital 2.0 Surround
Format: Anamorphic, Closed-captioned, Color, Dolby, DTS Surround Sound, Dubbed, DVD, NTSC, Subtitled, Widescreen
Picture Format: Anamorphic Widescreen, 1.85:1
Running Time: 125 minutes
Published: 2004-04-01
DVD Release Date: 2004-04-27
Audience Rating: PG-13 (Parental Guidance Suggested)
Studio: Sony Pictures Home Entertainment
DVD Reviews of Big Fish
DVD Review: The Uncatchable Big Fish In Us All...
Summary: 5 Stars
1-liner: Confused son (William), bitter at father who has told him a "fabricated big fish" version of his life, finds resolution in discovering the truth of his father--which is not that far away from his tall tales.
William's father is a small town hero who leaves his home to enter the real world: the cities and financial the schemes underlying professional capitalism. While in many respects, his father does not become the global hero that small town boy set out to become, he does become a successful man--a reputable salesman and a loving, responsible father.
Yet, William's father is Walter Mitty-ish, living a real life and a fake life, one more incredible, greater than the man. The stories his father tells him are outrageous, but as an innocent and trusting child, Will had believed them all. The movie starts with story-told flash-back scenes of the "lies" his father told him, intermixed with shots of a gathering for a wedding aniversary, where his father, who is now old, tells his lies and tall tales to the gathered. The incredible stories are loved and accepted by all--except for Will.
Will refuses to talk to his father, and they have not talked for three years, until he is notified that his father's cancer has reached a dire stage. He returns to his father and attempts to wring truth from him--to reach the other 90% of his father, the sunken iceberg secrets his father hid in his deep, dark, brooding sea of a mind. His father, however, is angered and outraged that his son believes him to be not the man associated with the stories.
As he helps his mother clean out the abandoned swimming pool, now moldy and opaque, the semblence of a big fish stirring beneath the rod he uses to fish out the debris, Will realizes that he must try to catch the fish--to discover the truth of his father. He sets out to sort through his father's old documents, the deeds and invoices and papers of his life.
Will finds that bits and pieces of his father's tales are based on truth, although the final version involves some amazing fabrications. He tracks down Spectre, a small town his father had bought to save it from the ravenous financial monsters of capitalism gone awry. A belief that has always infuriated him is that his father, a salesman, was away most of the time and had an adulterous affair elsewhere. In the outskirts of Spectre, he finds the ten year old girl his father describes in one of his tale, but she is now aged and something of a witch character. She tells him the truth: she is a girl hopelessly stuck with an unrequitted love affair--his father had always been true to his wife, his love.
This discovery brings Will to a revelation that allows him to atone his anger at his father's lies to him. As he lies by his father's deathbed, his father's doctor comes along and tells him the real version of his birth. There was no big fish involved, and the doctor admits that he likes his father's version better. It's more interesting, less mundane than real life, dreary reality. Will, however, likes the doctor's version, the truth, better. But, he has already come to accept his father for who he is, a man whose life is seen to be something of a envious legend to others, purely because he refuses to let the truth of things boggle him down, defying reality's stronghold against his fate for fantastics. Moreover, he realizes his father had been a good man, is a good man--despite his stretching of the truth in his tales.
As his father recovers from the stroke that sends him to the hospital, Will gives his father his last triumph. Will tells him the story of the river, of how they escape the dire truth of reality, the finality of the antiseptic hospital emergency room, driving wildly to get away from the holds of the world, to arrive at the river, where everyone--all the familiar characters in his tales--is happy and waiting for his arrival. Will fabricates the tale so that he manages to carry his father all the way into the river, and then drops his father in its depth... and his father becomes a fish. A big fish. And, he swims away.
"The biggest fish in the river gets that way by never being caught. (Advice from Old Witch)" The pure truth of his father's life shall be left unknown, as in death, his father flounders away, a free fish, the biggest fish, uncaught forever. William finds resolution in knowing that his father was a good man, despite his inability to tell his life the way it really happened, despite his inability to accept the mundane facts of life as is.
Like What Dreams May Come, this movie is filled with bathos scenes--many of the camera shots are also reminiscent of Dreams. There are no spoilers above, although the plot is aptly summarized. Moreover, the man's death is foreshadowed--the fact that his father stumbles upon Spectre (wherein the place distinctly reeks of being the carefree afterlife), arriving "early," then promising that he will return when it is his time. The glory of this film lies in the emotions it stirs within us. The beauty of it is portrayed via brilliantly posed scenes, the clever mixing of characters from the tales with real life, and the precise usage of comic relief in the midst of what would have been a bit dry if utterly serious.
Will's completion of his father's story marks an elegant ending, where he carries on the task of his father, a man capable of living without being overburdened by life, a man who knows how to embigger the life of others through his tales of sheer magnificence--whisking his father away from the desperate finality of reality, the hospital room and his frail stroke-beaten health, to the fate his father saw in the glass eye of the witch's--death as the biggest fish in the water, uncaught.
{QM Multiverse: the time-seperated but simultaneous observation made by Will and his father renders the state of his death. Prior to Will's observation that his father is to die as a big fish, perhaps a different version of his death exists in the superposition of states. However, after Will states his observation, and his father's agreeing to it--the aged memories blurred, accepting of new content in place of the real--reality is set. Thus, his father's tall tales are real, though in a different reality, the one existing in his memories. They are real to him because he observed them, but when his reality mixes with that of others, others can observe in his place and he can revoke his observation for that of someone else's, thus make someone else's observation the "real reality."}
Description of Big Fish
Throughout his life Edward Bloom (Ewan McGregor) has always been a man of big appetites, enormous passions and tall tales. In his later years, portrayed by five-time Best Actor Oscar(r) nominee Albert Finney (Best Actor in a Supporting Role, Erin Brockovich, 2000), he remains a huge mystery to his son, William (Billy Crudup). Now, to get to know the real man, Will begins piecing together a true picture of his father from flashbacks of his amazing adventures in this marvel of a movie.After a string of mediocre movies, director Tim Burton regains his footing as he shifts from macabre fairy tales to Southern tall tales. Big Fish twines in and out of the oversized stories of Edward Bloom, played as a young man by Ewan McGregor (Moulin Rouge, Down with Love) and as a dying father by Albert Finney (Tom Jones). Edward's son Will (Billy Crudup, Almost Famous) sits by his father's bedside but has little patience with the old man's fables, because he feels these stories have kept him from knowing who his father really is. Burton dives into Bloom's imagination with zest, sending the determined young man into haunted woods, an idealized Southern town, a traveling circus, and much more. The result is sweet but--thanks to the director's dark and clever sensibility--never saccharine. Also featuring Jessica Lange, Alison Lohman, Helena Bonham Carter, Danny DeVito, and Steve Buscemi. --Bret Fetzer
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