media consumption

Big Fish

This is a heartwarming and fanciful film in which Will Bloom (Billy Crudup) comes home after a long absence to make peace with his estranged father, Ed (Albert Finnney), who is dying from some unspecified cancer. Will hadn't spoken to his father in years and still harbors resentment towards the man who was seldom home and who is only able to communicate with his son by telling stories or "tall tales."

Will tries to come to terms with these feelings first by appealing to his father at his bedside then by digging into his father's past. Most of the fun of the movie takes place in flashbacks and the depiction of Ed's stories in which young Ed (Ewan MacGregor) joins the circus, falls in love, saves a town, infiltrates the Red Army and catches the big fish of the title. By reliving his father's stories, Will eventually finds the truth that had lain beneath the surface of his father's stories all along.

Tim Burton infuses many of these stories with his trademark surrealism, but the out-and-out creepiness of most of his films are not evident (at least to my eye). The acting was in general very good, with Albert Finney and Jessica Lange (in the role of Ed's wife, Sandra) standing out from the rest.

In short, Big Fish is a story about reconciliation: a son's reconciliation of his relationship with his father; the reconciliation of a story's factual truth with its inner meaning; and the reconciliation of a man's life with the stories that surround it.

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