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Overall Rating
  Awesome: 49.69%
Worth A Look: 39.26%
Average: 7.36%
Pretty Bad: 1.84%
Total Crap: 1.84%
11 reviews, 97 user ratings
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| Big Fish |
by Brian McKay
"I usually don't care for Tim Burton films - but I cared about this one"
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At one point during the film, I begin to wonder what Ed Bloom's real motivation for grandiose storytelling was. Was it just a certain joi de vivre on his part, a tendency to enhance and embellish simply because he's a natural storyteller? or does it stem from feelings of inadequacy, a way to compensate for all the things he felt he should have done, but never did?In much the same way, his son Will Bloom (Billy Crudup) faces the dilemma of deciphering his dying father's facts from myths. As the older Ed Bloom (Albert Finney) tells story after story, each more elaborate than the last, the stories are brought to life in surreal flashbacks of the younger Ed Bloom (Ewan McGregor).
Born in a small Alabama town, Edward Bloom posesses the unshakeable certainty that he was born for bigger things. After befriending a gentle but hungry giant named Karl (Matthew McGrory) who has been preying on the town livestock, he convinces Karl to hit the road with him and seek their fame and fortune in the big city. However, big city life is not in the cards, as Ed's adventures (much like his stories) take him on one surreal tangent after another. On his many adventures, he befriends other strange but colorful characters, such as a renown local poet (Steve Buscemi) who seems incapable of composing poems longer than three lines, a lycanthropic Circus ringleader (Danny Devito), and a pair of really hot Chinese singing and dancing siamese twins (Ada and Arlene Tai) - and that's a "two for the price of one" package that's a steal in any language! (Amusingly enough, he learns to speak to them fluently in Chinese by consulting an "English to Asian" dictionary).
Amid all of these adventures, Ed spots the girl of his dreams in a crowd, and is instantly convinced that she is the one he is destined to marry. He doggedly pursues Sandra (alternately played by Alison Lohman and Jessica Lange) with a fervor that would result in a restraining order in the present day, but is of course recieved by Sandra in the proper spirit of hopeless romanticism.
Meanwhile, back in the present, Will grows increasingly frustrated with his terminally ill father's inability (or unwillingness) to tell "the Truth". But when he begins digging through stacks of old papers in his father's disused study, he begins to piece together the jigsaw of Ed's life, finding that even the biggest lies can often contain a kernel of fact.
Big Fish is probably the most enjoyable effort from Tim Burton to date (possibly with the exception of Nightmare Before Christmas). And although at times the film's pacing is bogged down by a number of tangental scenes, the characters and the emotions they convey are very real at their core. This marks a more mature, subdued Burton who seems more focused and less incined to overdo things in his typically surrealistic style, generally keeping the focus on the characters more than on the gimmicky but visually pleasing retelling of Edward Bloom's tall tales.In the end, BIG FISH is about a man's quest for immortality - not through religion or progeny, but through the sheer power of his words. It drives home the fact that we humans sometimes need a varnished reality with a more pleasing veneer, rather than the humdrum plainess of "truth" with all of its splinters.
link directly to this review at http://efilmcritic.com/review.php?movie=8377&reviewer=258
originally posted: 02/24/04 05:38:59
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OFFICIAL SELECTION: 2004 Palm Springs Film Festival. For more in the 2004 Palm Springs Film Festival series, click here.
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USA
10-Dec-2003 (PG-13)
DVD: 08-Nov-2005
UK
N/A
Australia
05-Feb-2004
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