Visually magnificent as we expect with a Tim Burton movie.

Rating: Null/10 (22 June 2004)

I thoroughly enjoyed 'Big Fish' but find it a difficult movie to rate. Ewan McGregor as the younger Edward Bloom, and Albert Finney as Edward in his twilight years, are both marvelous. The visuals are superb, and many times I found myself thinking of 'Moulin Rouge' in style, where McGregor played an idealistic songwriter. The core of this story is Bloom's life of seemingly tall tales, and his son's (Billy Crudup) inability to feel close to his father because he could never get past those tall tales to discover his 'real' father that he was looking for. However, when the movie ends, much like 'Secondhand Lions', we wonder how tall the tales really were!
SPOILERS follow -- please quit reading now. The father/son difficulties arise from their opposite personalities. Edward was always the upbeat kid, the one who wasn't afraid of anything, who was the natural athlete, running the winning touchdown, hitting the winning basketball goal at the buzzer, going to the witch's house to see her glass eye, escorting the giant out of town. His son grew up conservative, had a secure job in Paris, married to a pretty French lady, hadn't spoken to his father for over three years, until he gets the call, travels home to see his dying father. Visiting his father, most of his focus was to get his dad to tell him who he really was, to quit telling all the tall tales. But his father insisted, "This is who I really am." At the funeral, all sorts of strange characters show up, the giant, the twins, the circus performers. While his tales may have been exaggerated a bit, they all were real. And his son finally realizes who his father really was. The title comes from one of the tales, where Bloom used his gold wedding band to catch this big fish in the lake. In the end, son told his dad a fable of how dad would die, son would carry him to the water, and as he sank, turned into the big fish then swam away, immortal. As were his stories.