Always Trust Your Imagination

Rating: Null/10 (8 November 2004)

Will Bloom (Billy Crudup) always wished for his father Edward Bloom (in younger days Ewan McGregor and in older Albert Finney) to tell the truth. While Will grew up, he was always embarrassed of his father's imaginative stories he would use to entertain Will's friends, even though his father would claim they were true. That was why Will decided not to speak to his father for many years. The movie goes through Edward Bloom's life in flashbacks from the view of his death through a witch's glass eye when he was ten to his last days on Earth. As Will is about to have a child of his own, his father is put on his death bed. Will pleads with his father to tell one tiny truth, but it only makes Will angrier when his father argues with him. On the day of his father's funeral, he looks around and starts to notice all of the characters in his father's story.
Tim Burton's movie Big Fish is the best example of using your imagination. It is actually a book by Daniel Wallace, also entitled with the same name as the movie. As I watched the film, it seemed as though Edward was just trying to make his life more interesting than what it really was. His stories were in fact true, except he had exaggerated the small details to make a bigger and better story. Tim Burton did a great job on casting Ewan McGregor, Albert Finney, Jessica Lange (as Will's mom and Edward's wife) and everyone else that even appeared in the movie for a short time. I couldn't imagine anyone else to play the character roles as good as they did. They were perfect for each part. Big Fish never had a slow part in it. It just played out connecting every piece of Edward's life together. The storyline is far-fetched with a fifteen foot tall giant who ate sheep and cows, a town no one knew about, and with singing Vietnamese Siamese twins. Just off-the-wall settings and characters like those make the movie. I was infatuated with Big Fish and appalled when it ended.