Big Fish

        It is commonly recognized that somewhere between early childhood and young adulthood, many people’s active imagination atrophies. While children’s play shows an active engagement with fantasy, adults in general settle for the much less colorful world of fact.
        Only a few fortunate individuals – poets, artists, Lord of the Rings fanatics – escape to carry their fantasy life into adulthood. Ed Bloom (Ewan MacGregor/Albert Finney) is one of these lucky few, a man who never had a real experience that couldn’t be improved with a bit of fantastic embellishment. As he tells it, his life has been full of heroic achievements, mysterious encounters, and close friendships with giants, werewolves, and witches.
        His son, Will (Billy Crudup), has grown up with Ed’s stories, one of the most commonly retold being the account of Will’s own birth: on the day his son was born, Ed almost caught an elusive, legendary giant catfish by using his wedding ring as bait. The fish, you see, was not a male as all the other anglers had assumed; it was a woman, and as Ed concludes, “Sometimes the only way to catch an uncatchable woman is with a wedding ring.”
        But Will is not like his father – like most people, he moves on from fantasy as he grows, and so his father’s stories have become increasingly tiresome to him, to the point that father and son do not speak to one another following a blow-up at Will’s wedding.
        Thus the scene is set for Tim Burton’s Big Fish, which has been marketed as a “modern-day Wizard of Oz” but is really much, much more surreal than Dorothy’s classic journey. After all, she had to go to a fairyland for her adventures; Ed Bloom’s emerge unexpectedly from a somewhat Gothic southern landscape.
        Take, for instance, the witch whose prediction of his death enables Ed to face other dangers unfazed. Their initial encounter takes place in Ed’s childhood, but the witch is also the grown-up Jenny (Helena Bonham Carter), whom Ed meets when she is an eight-year-old girl and he is 18, and who grows up to have an undying but unrequited love for him. How can they be the same person? And yet they are, and with no Wizard of Oz dream structure to account for it.
        Will’s alienation from his father sets up the frame of the story, as the young expectant father returns to his Alabama hometown to, perhaps, reconcile with a dying Ed. We know, because we have seen this story before (see “Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood,” etc.), that they will, in fact, reconcile. En route, however, Will must come to terms with the questions of reality and fantasy that his father’s life poses.
        Are Ed’s story’s lies? Will certainly thinks so, but as his mother (Jessica Lange) tells him, “Not every one of your father’s stories is a fabrication.” And then there’s the old family doctor (Robert Guillaume), who tells Will the true story of his birth but suggests to him that his father’s embellishment may be preferable to the literal truth.
    Through Ed’s stories and Will’s investigation of his father’s life, we are led on a journey through some bizarre landscapes:

But even the most unbelievable locales and people seem to have some basis in reality, as characters from Ed’s mythic past cross Will’s path in the present, until finally he and we have to acknowledge there are some things that are just unexplainable.
There are many candidates for the “Big Fish” of the title: the giant catfish of the river, the “uncatchable woman” who becomes Ed’s wife and his lifelong love, Ed himself – a “big fish” in a small town. Ultimately, though, the elusive “big fish” comes to be seen as the nature of truth itself. Every event in Ed’s life, from birth to death, has two versions – the mythic and the real.