“Big Fish” is a film that you may need to see twice to get past its silliness. The first time through, the film is an unconvincing joke, with odd fairy tale scenes that can’t be taken seriously. But the ending gives a deeper meaning to the fantasies and makes you want to start the movie over, pretend you’re in a dream and feel like a kid again.
Edward Bloom (Albert Finney) raised his son Will (Billy Crudup), telling him the exaggerated truth about his past. At first, Will enjoys and believes his father’s tall tales of befriending a 15-foot giant and joining a circus with a part-werewolf ringmaster, among other blatant myths. But his father, with a Peter Pan attitude, continues these tales into Will’s adulthood. Will, resentful for a lifetime of lies, cuts off contact with his father. As Edward lies on his deathbed, his realist son joins him to make up and get the true story of his past.
Edward’s past, as Will knows it, is shown in the form of a flashback. Magical, whimsical filmmaking unveils the stories of Edward’s past — seeing his future death in the glass eye of an old witch, traveling through a grotesque forest to a rosy town full of overtly-welcoming strangers and winning over his future wife with a field of daffodils and love letters etched in the sky. The visual glitz and glamour are a treat for the eyes, but the stories are so far-fetched that they only bring smirks instead of laughs or surprises. After seeing Edward sky-dive from an airplane and land on top of a theater performance featuring a pair of Asian Siamese twins, it’s really no shocker when he is saved by a nude female swimmer after his car is submerged underwater during a rainstorm. One outrageous scene after another gets old after awhile. Edward’s courtship with his wife also fails to provoke emotion, because it heavily lacks substance — he sees her once, then three years later meets her and they start a relationship based on nothing.
It isn’t until the film’s finale that the pieces of the fantasy are put together into a picture of who Edward actually is. He is a romantic who puts on rose-colored glasses to gain admiration from others and make life more interesting to numb the pain from the bad hands dealt to him. He wishes for his fact-demanding son to daydream a little and discover the happiness an imagination can bring. When Will finally does see life through his father’s eyes, the film declares its purpose as a portrait of a reconciled father-son relationship.
The somewhat-dragging, fairy-tale content is worth sitting through for the film’s beautiful and heartfelt result. “Big Fish” is a rarity: a fantasy movie that intermingles child-friendly images with complex feelings that adults can identify with. It makes the assertion that an adult who imagines and tells fables of pure nonsense is not just sane, but can use their imagination as a vehicle of love.
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