Odd characters in extraordinary situations

Rating: 8/10 (3 July 2016)

Legitimate daughter of her director, Big Fish is a film about odd characters in extraordinary situations, a summary of the magic of many fairy tales told throughout our childhood. Tim Burton, the father of unforgettable fantasies (Bettlejuice, Edward Scissorhands, Batman, Sleepy Hollow) tells us the story of a common man who usually tells his son the most scarcely possible facts about specific situations of his life.
As time goes by, the child becomes a fully disappointed grown up who gets obsessed with finding the blurry line where the truth and lies meet. The camera on the other hand, is determined to show us pieces of a human being's fabulous life in the sunset of his days.
The magic and the setting which both appear with relative success throughout the entire story, would've perfectly had our blessing to pop up in each and every frame of the film.
Nonetheless, the love story, the unforgettable characters, and it's thrilling ending (an unstoppable stream, a mix of both real and fictitious waters) are the elements that make us gasp and breath hard before the credits. Finding out that the man that we have been mistrusting for more than two hours is more clearheaded than we thought, and that he's given a desperately tender meaning to his life (he's not a liar nor a trickster, he just tends to exaggerate), fact that reduces any resistance, ennobles the tale.