Brilliant

Rating: 10/10 (19 September 2006)

Big Fish is a tragedy. It's about how Edward Bloom is stupid enough to marry the nice, respectable bourgeois girl (Alison Lohmann) instead of the smart, zesty and wild witch-girl (Helena Bonham-Carter) that he was really destined to be with. Bloom's life then becomes a search of what might have been, and a self-search about where he went wrong. Where we might go wrong. As with all tragedies, it is a warning to us, about choosing correctly. Choosing life and vitality and genuineness and CHANGE, over the old-fashioned, respectable image of static, conservative, unchanging "perfection", as the boring, nauseatingly normal surrounding society sees it.
What is art? Art is something that overwhelms you, catches you off-balance, or, indeed, throws you off-balance. Tells you things you didn't know and are surprised to discover. Big Fish does that. The point is to demonstrate that all those wild and outrageous stories were not just fiction. On a symbol level, they were all true, but it's a truth we are not prepared for, or capable of accepting. Hence the need to present them as symbolical.
Remember, it's all true.