a love story in which the love story is shoved to the background

Rating: 5/10 (11 December 2003)

Poor Billy Crudup. This graciously natural actor is stuck in a miserable role in Big Fish, playing William Bloom, the stick-in-the-mud son of a very ordinary man named Edward Bloom, who has enchantedly imagined his entire life as a gloriously giddy myth. But William, who grew up to be a newspaper reporter (he specializes in facts!), can't accept his dad for who he is. And so while Edward spins wonderful gold out of the straw of his life, William the wimp rejects him totally until Edward begins to die, when William comes home to America from Europe, with his French wife. What for? To grill Edward for the "truth". What a jerk!
Nobody who goes to see Big Fish is going to like William. So it's unfortunate the whole movie is set up with William as the hero - he's the one who's going to grow and change, he's the one we are going to wait for the whole film until he catches up with what we already know from scene one: he's got a wonderful dad. No matter how talented of an actor Billy Crudup is, every time he's on screen in Big Fish you just want him to shut up and get lost. William is a loser.
His father Edward is a champion yarn spinner. But the character we actually love most in Big Fish is Edward's wife Sandy, because Sandy loves Edward for who he is and can follow with her heart what her eye cannot see. Now that's extraordinary vision! Unfortunately for Big Fish, Sandy doesn't get as much screen or story time as putzy William, and the movie suffers, because the two best scenes - involving the young Sandy (Alison Lohman) crumpled on the front lawn of her home when she thinks Edward's been killed in the Korean War, and the older Sandy (Jessica Lange) climbing fully clothed into a bathtub with Edward - are all we have to hang our hearts on in this movie.
There's several surface treats, fueled by Tim Burton's fanciful eye and Phillipe Rousselot's quirky and handsome photography, but they don't have a strong rallying point - which should have been the love bond between Edward and Sandy. But Big Fish ultimately misses the boat as well as the golden ring it symbolically tries to swallow in the first scene.