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Big FishRating:
Release Date: 27 April, 2004 Retail Price: $19.94 OUR Price: $9.87 You SAVE: $10.07! Cast: Complete Cast (13 total) |
Big Fish Reviews
A Father's Love
This film is one of my favorites. I am a self-proclaimed Tim Burton fanatic but this one is really up there for me.
Ewan McGregor does a fantastic job as the main character but the crux of this film is the relationship between he and his son. Through his father's stories, one thread remained true, family was always family. As the witch in the town Edward Bloom tried to save said, "It was always your mother". Every woman always came back to Jessica Lange's character for Edward Bloom.
Like most of us, Ewan McGregor was a mix of fact and fiction. His life was made better because he made it that way. His son found this at his death, before most of us really meet our father. Most of us really get to know our dad's after they are gone when it is too late. OK, I'm siging "Mike and the Mechanics", "In the Living Years" right now. We usually cannot accept them as they are when they are here.
Jessica Lange was an awesome addition to the cast as Ewan McGregor's wife. As we find in the end of the film, many of the "characters" from the "tall tales" were real people that knew and loved Billy Crudup's father.
A life well lived can be quiet and uneventful but a life well lived can also be told in technicolor. We are called to dream the dreams and make our imaginations color our worlds. How many really do that in their mundane lives?
This film reminded me of James Blunt's CD "Back to Bedlam". It makes you believe in true love standing the test of time again. It is not syrupy and it is not fake. Time really does stand still when you first see your true love, that may be the enduring legacy of this film, that life is what you make it, even if you make it up as you go along!
Burton explores the role of the story-teller in a tall tale of his own.
This film is essentially about story-telling. If you keep this in mind as you watch the film, it offers an interesting contrast between the story-telling of an elderly Alabama businessman, Ed Bloom, and the storytelling of the film's director, Tim Burton.
Ed Bloom, played by Ewan McGregor in his youth and by Albert Finney in his old age, is a natural story-teller. He takes the raw material of everyday life and enhances it, embellishes it, and pulls it together in an entertaining whole. Because his life had several odd twists and turns, he has more raw material for his stories than the average fellow. His courtship of his wife Sandra, played by Alison Lohman in her youth and by Jessica Lange in her maturity, comprises the most romantic and the longest tale in the story.
Ed and Sandra have a son, Will, played by Billy Crudup, who has heard one tall tale too many and has become estranged from his father for the last 3 years while Will and his young wife live in Paris. The story moves from the vastly romantic courtship of Ed and Sandra to Will's stuggle with the relationship with his father. Basically Will assumes that if the stories are embellishments of truth that he does not really know his father. As his father is dying of cancer, Will tries to break through and find the real father underlying the tall tales. His father is insulted and hurt by this approach, and through his sick-bed story telling Ed captivates Will's beautiful young French wife.
At the end of the film, the son Will, is left alone with his father as his father is dying and tells his father a tall tale of his father's death, surrounded by all those who have know and loved him, as he becomes a giant black catfish who swims away. At the end we see the son Will finally recognize that the tall tale, the embellished story, contains an essential truth that must be protected and clothed and escorted with the trapings of fantasy so as to be recognized, appreciated, and absorbed.
This is the truth that Burton wishes for us to comprehend about the role of the storyteller and he relays this message in his own tall tale.
As a final note, since I am from Alabama, I personnally enjoyed seeing the scenes that were filmed in old downtown Montgomery and on the Huntingdon College Campus.
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