Dir. Tim Burton, 2003, USA, 110mins
Cast:
Ewan McGregor, Albert Finney, Billy Crudup, Jessica Lange, Helena Bonham Carter, Steve Buscemi, Danny DeVito
Big Fish is, above all, a story. It's a story about storytelling, and how one man born to be a storyteller creates the legend of his own life.
Will Bloom (Crudup), a modern-day storyteller working as a journalist, receives a call from his mother (a beautifully understated performance from Jessica Lange) to inform him that doctors have decided to stop the cancer treatment for his father, who he hasn't spoken to in three years. Flying to his childhood home, he and his wife try to reach an understanding of the gregarious, larger-than-life Ed Bloom (Albert Finney). Will does so through trying to analyse his father's stories, searching for snippets of 'truth,' or chinks that reveal the man's darker side.
This is central to the film. Will's idea of truth is the kind of fact he encounters daily in the news - cold hard facts, and not necessarily interesting: Ed's idea of truth is of a lyrical kind. His experience of the Korean War is condensed into a classic tale of love, where he ropes two bickering, loveless Siamese twins into an adventure to get back to his wife. How much really happened? Will asks. 'How much does that matter?' the film seems to reply.
Key to this is the visual style; as we would expect from a Tim Burton film (and complimented perfectly by Danny Elfman's score) it has a beautifully slanted and quirky quality and, as always, hints at something darker, especially in the flashbacks to Ed's youth - it's not fluffy bunnies and flowers. The town of Spectre - so happy and perfect and without the curiosity that keeps us humans searching and growing - is too much even for the eternally cheerful Ed (a charming performance from the very lovable Ewan McGregor as the young Ed) and he escapes back to the fairytale forest said to hold ghosts. The world of these flashbacks, and Ed's stories, is just as real as the dim greys of the modern one - just more interesting. In a wonderfully vibrant world of open roads, lush summer meadows and even a travelling circus, he meets witches, werewolves and giants, and because of his easy manner (as he often says, he is a 'social person') he befriends them all. He is even involved in an armed robbery while on his adventures, though in a humorous and innocent way of course, but most importantly, he has a life that's kept secret from his family.
It's this fact that drives Will: the abandonment that he felt as a child leads him to seek the lies in his father's past, and he approaches the stories by which it's constructed like a detective. The bone of contention - and the reason for the three-year silence - is the story of Will's birth: Ed has always held that he was fishing at the time, and caught the legendary big fish using his wedding ring as bait. Will sees it another way: that his father was away working at the time and not there for him. In a touching scene at Ed's hospital bedside, Dr. Bennett recalls both versions of the event and asks Will which one he would rather hear - the harsh reality of a birth in the days when fathers weren't allowed to witness them, or a mythical portrait of how his love for his wife overcame all temptation. Although Will resists, we can see how his reasoning starts to shift.
In the final reckoning and faced with the last big adventure of death, Will relents and embraces Ed's world of magic and possibility. Once he accepts it, spinning his father a final story of a reunion by the lake of all the characters from his past, it actually happens - though Will-style of course, rather than Ed-style. After all, he's the storyteller now.
Our culture is built on stories and they're everywhere in the modern world - from the When Harry Met Sally style of stories that couples love regaling unsuspecting listeners with, to the 'real' ones that people like Will, as a journalist, pedals on a daily basis. The ideas in this film are slightly at odds with today's ultra-real, ultra-intellectual world, and I can see why some would not enjoy it, but once we accept the enduring power of the story and enjoy it for its colour and vibrance, it's quite easy to love Big Fish.
Kerry McLeod
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