Schmaltz sells

Rating: 5/10 (15 June 2004)

Schmaltz - it's a Yiddish word for gushy sentiment, for the use of cloying and manipulative emotionalism. I thought that this movie was a perfect representation of Hollywood Schmaltz.
A lot of people love this movie. There's an understandable yearning for stories, for fantasy. But I thought that these stories, these fantasies, were trite and predictable. (Especially the ending.) It was also a little disturbing to me the way that the film whitewashes (literally) the history of Alabama, making it seem like some paradise of ideal race relations. Notice how the "fantasy" scenes set in the protagonist's past are completely free of any tinge of racism, and that aside from a single Black boy, there are no African-Americans to be seen at all. And "Big Fish" was filmed in and around Montgomery Alabama, where ML King preached and Rosa Parks boycotted. It's so much easier to construct false images of the past than to remember what it is was really like.
When the past is too uncomfortable to remember, it is often distorted and made to be the subject of fantasy. But just because amnesia is popular doesn't mean that is healthy.