Another Kind of Fairy Tale

Rating: 9/10 (26 May 2005)

Fairy Tales come in all shapes and sizes; we had films from Disney about relationships (Beauty and the Beast, The Little Mermaid, Sleeping Beauty, Snow White, and Cinderella); Steven Spielberg and his Sci-Fi movies about average people seeing the impossible (Jurassic Park, E.T., and CEO3K); now in Tim Burton's film "Big Fish," the imagination has gone beyond our wildest dreams, where one person stories has made a difference to others.
"Big Fish" is a story about a father (Albert Finney) and his son (Billy Crudup) in which the son doesn't want to have a relation with his father after many of the bologna stories he has heard from time to time about the big fish, a giant, and meeting the love of his life (Jessica Lange).
The character Ed Bloom (Finney) is dying of cancer and his wife has called her only son with his wife to fly from Paris to visit his dying father. As it turns out, the son's wife is going to have a baby, and during the visit, they all want to hear the stories that Bloom has said before.
In the pastime, Ewan McGregor plays the young Ed Bloom for which he was the town's hero; he was a jock, a nerd, an inventor or a renaissance man as you might recall him. Until one day, a giant has stock upon the small town that Ed had lived and it is up to him to defeat the giant where he finds out that the creature himself is harmless. In the story, the older Ed tells stories about a young predicator; a group of townspeople that never changed, how he met his sweetheart by working in a circus, entering the Korean War and getting into business to support his wife and child.
Like Harvey Pekar from "American Splendor," I can also relate to Ed Bloom from "Big Fish" where the character Ed was a dreamer and a storyteller who wasn't afraid to share it with the rest of the people around him. I was a storyteller in high school where I would tell stories to all the students about what happened during the early days at the school I attended to the people and the events that changed our lives; I was also a dreamer, but unfortunately, my dreams of getting the girl, getting a standing ovation at graduation or having people thanking me for all I did, didn't come true. I just pray that my final story involves my older brother carrying me, like Ed's son did for Ed, and everybody I knew would just be waving and cheering me on as I go on to turn into a fish myself.
This is by far the most personal and best Tim Burton movie I've ever seen.