The most real substance I have seen in a movie. 10/10

Rating: 10/10 (27 February 2004)

(My glowingness might seem suspicious, so: I swear I don't work for anyone involved with this movie or anything like that.)
Excellent.
Okay, let me start off by pointing out the fact that, from the summary given by IMDB as well as others, this movie might sound like a weepy chick-flick (no offense to "chicks") type thing that's all sunshine and kittens and airheadedness. It's not. This movie should appeal to just about everyone who likes movies, and I do not say this lightly. I saw this movie in a theater with people of all ages (as well as a bunch of younger soldiers, normally die-hard action/comedy types), and from the chatter in the lobby after the movie, it was one of the most well-received of any movie I have ever seen in that theater.
Even if you generally dislike Tim Burton (my opinion of him *was* pretty neutral, slightly on the negative side), you'll probably find this an improvement on a lot of his previous stuff, which was all either kinda thin, or way too dense, plot-wise and in almost every other aspect, in my opinion. He should keep doing this sort of thing. He fits here.
It seemed to me that it was near impossible to find a good summary of the plot of Big Fish, and it struck me while I was watching it that this is because it's such a hard movie to summarize. You can't write a "form-letter" kind of summary for it because it's got a formula all its own.
Here's a summary of the movie as I see it.
All his life, Ed Bloom has liked to tell tall tales about amazing things he's supposedly seen and done. His son, William Bloom, was edified by this when he was young, but now he's about 30 and after all these years his father's habit of constantly trying to be the center of attention and telling these same stories to anyone who'll listen over and over again wears on his nerves. He feels that he doesn't really know his father because he knows next to nothing about his father's life. All he's ever heard about his father's experiences up until he was born are the tall tales his father is so fond of telling (Most of the movie consists of vignettes of these stories, featuring Ewan McGregor as a younger Ed Bloom). And now his father is dying, and he's afraid he'll never know the truth. He pleads with his father to tell him of what "really happened", but his father refuses to water down his life and spoon-feed it to William, as he basically puts it. As his father grows more and more sickly and weak, William goes digging around trying to piece together an account of his father's real life, he begins to realize that maybe, just maybe, the stories he'd been told since childhood weren't simply larger-than-life myths. Perhaps, he realizes, his father truly is a larger-than-life man. (This idea is subtly given to us in of the flashback vignettes wherein 10-year-old Ed begins to grow very tall. I won't spoil the rest of it, see it yourself, you'll enjoy it.).
There's no way that my summary does it justice, but I hope it's enough to get you to want to see this. This movie deserved a lot more praise (and revenue) than it got while in theaters. We want to encourage more movies like this. It's truly incredible, but you really shouldn't take my word for it; it defies description. Go see or get it on DVD as soon as possible. My new favorite movie. I only wish it was longer. It was worth my $1.75, and had any of the creative department been present I imagine I might have tipped them.