Movie Reviews

Big Fish is Tim Burton's brightest and lightest film, in its overall tone, but it still manages to be highly original and imaginative. Loosely put, the story involves a young man named Will Bloom (Billy Crudup) and his attempts to unravel the 'truth' behind his father's life. Will's father has always had a knack for telling exaggerated stories about himself and his life, and this has left Will feeling as though his father has never been particularly truthful or honest to Will about who he really his.

Big Fish has an interesting structure in the way it portrays the kinds of stories that Will's father Ed (played by Albert Finney) has told over and over. They're not so much flashbacks as they are imaginative 'visualizations' of these stories (with Ewan McGregor playing the young version of Ed). Most of these little dramatized stories are very entertaining, and Burton does a great job of exaggerating them without turning them into absurdities.

My main problem with the film, however, is that most of the stories don't really tie together very well. They're almost like a series of individual stories and moments combined into a mishmash story that is the "big fish tale" of Ed Bloom's supposed life. The ending, however, is nicely moving and sweet. It's really good; definitely the strongest point of the film, despite not being so much about tying all of Ed Bloom's fantastical stories together as it is about simply drawing upon certain aspects of all of them for the film's conclusion.

It's one of the happier films I've seen in a while, so I'll give it a strong recommendation.