UrbanWire

Big Fish, believe it or not, isn’t about the accuracy behind Edward Bloom‘s (Albert Finney) stories, no matter how tall and implausible they seem. Edward is now old and a dying man, yet he continues talking about his stories like an excited child, stories which are incidentally harder to swallow than Forrest Gump’s supposed multiple triumphs. His only son, Will Bloom (played by Billy Crudup), almost unrecognisable next to his last major role as a rock n’ roll star in Almost Famous, now a hard nosed pursuer of fact, as a reporter, is one of those who doubted him.
On Will’s wedding day, Edward steals his son’s thunder as he narrates his yarn to everyone’s amazement except Will’s. Those tales from Edward’s younger days, when he looked suspiciously like Ewan McGregor, comprise of the unbelievable from a future-reading witch, a menacing giant to a pair of conjoined Chinese sisters.

Instead of keeping his son amused, the grander Edward’s tales were, the further the distance is between father and son as Will believes that his father is a totally unknown entity to him since he can’t recall him ever telling him the truth.
Hence, this film is also about Will’s chance to understand and know his father as a real person before cancer claims the latter’s life, and to reconcile the differences between them. There are 2 landscapes in Big Fish, one happening in modern day with senior Ed severely ill and the other in good ol’ Alabama, where Ed was living, disgruntled with small-town life and in search for greater adventures.

The flashback scenes are tell tale signs of Tim Burton’s touch – bright colours, whimsical and full of grandeur. The current timeframe pales in comparison with the flashbacks. In fact, the incidents happening in Ed’s younger days were much more exciting than the events in the present day, which were reeking of normalcy.
The difference between Big Fish and Burton’s previous works is half of Big Fish is set in reality unlike his other fantasy works A Nightmare Before Christmas. We see Edward Bloom as old as he gets, and hardly the dashing young man in his Technicolor past. The rest of the present-day characters, from Will’s wife Josephine Marion Cotillard, to Sandra Bloom (Jessica Lange) are bland and lack the magic sparkle unlike the other characters in the other half of the movie, some of them subhuman even.

The soundtrack of the film is a rather interesting mix, perhaps because of the nature of the story. As the story moves through the decades, songs from the respective eras are used. There’s the original music score by Danny Elfman (who else in a Tim Burton film?), rock n’ roll hits in the 60s from the likes of Elvis Presley, Buddy Holly and The Allman Brothers, as well as a Pearl Jam song as the end credits roll.
Those characters in the younger Edward’s days are a steal to watch, from Helena Bonham Carter (Planet of the Apes) doubling as a witch and an secret admirer of Ed, and Steve Buscemi (Armageddon) playing a struggling poet with great deprecation and style.

Big Fish traces the life story of an ordinary man who sought extraordinary adventures, being too big, like the giant he befriended, for the normal life. Whether his recollections are factual recounts or facts told with flavour is just one tiny aspect of the film, because Big Fish is much more than that. It is a story on faith, love, redemption and more importantly, the art of storytelling.