Big Fish is a story about a man and his son who tries to found out more about his father in the last days of his life. It is about the art of telling tall tales, the realtionship between father and son and the inner child in everyone of us.
It tells the story of Edward Bloom (played by Albert Finney as an adult and by Ewan McGregor as an young adult) and his son William Bloom (Billy Crudup). In the beginning of the movie William describes their relationship like between „two strangers who know each other very well“. He doesn't see anything of his father in himself. We see young Edward telling the child Will a fantastic story about a giant fish who stole Edward's wedding ring and which he managed to catch after years, on the day of Will's birth. The story continues, but the years pass by and we see Edward telling the story again and again while Will seems to be more and more bored by it. After a fight on William's wedding (about these tales) they don't speak to each other for three years. Then, Will gets a call from his mother, telling him he should come home because his father is suffering from cancer and is going to die soon.
Will is reminded of his father's stories by different things through the whole movie. While on the plane home, he sees a little boy doing shadowplays. This reminds him of a story in which his father goes to a forest at night and sees the way he is going to die in a glass eye of a witch living in this forest. Edward says that it is quite helpfull to see your own death because you know you will survive anything else. Will arrives at the house of his parents with his pregnant wife and is greeted by his mother. His father is upstairs, confined to bed due to his disease. After three years of not talking, Edward doesn't seem to be sorry for his behaviour on Will's wedding day and acts kind of rough. He keeps saying that nobody has to be worried about him as he had seen his destiny in the glass eye and this is not the way he is going to die. Will wants to know the true version of how all the things happened as it is impossible for him to seperate fact from fiction in his father's tall tales. Now that he is going to die, Will sees the last chance for him of eventually getting to know his father but he keeps evading the questions of his son.
By seeing his old room Will is being remembered of another story in which Edward told him, that one time he had had to stay in bed for three years because his bones were growing too fast. In this scene we can see the typical Tim Burton style in the bizarre machine Edward is connected to. After this „disease“ he manages to become the pride and joy of his hometown Ashton. But one day a giant comes into the town, destroying fields and eating the cattle of the citizens. Edward volunteers to talk to the giant and convinces him to leave the town with him.
„Did you ever think of maybe you are not too big,
but maybe this town is just too small?“
Their ways seperate for a short time because Edward wants to explore an allegedly haunted route through the forest. Doing so, he gets to the hidden town Spectre which seems to be a perfect place to live in. Edward meets the famous poet Norther Winslow from Ashton who now lives in this secret town. Further he meets the little girl Jenny who seems to have a crush on the young man. He spents an afternoon there and then decides to leave, to the surprise of everybody. He says he is not ready to settle down (although the place might be perfect for that) but he promises Jenny to come back when the right time has come. He meets the giant Carl again and they continue their way.
Will keeps provoking his father into finally telling the truth and stop with the tales, he has apparently a lot of (and one to every topic). One night, Will's wife Josephine (Marion Cotillard) starts a conversation with Edward and he tolds her the story of how he met his wife Sandra.
„Is this a tall tale? - Well it is not a short one.“
After leaving Spectre, Edward and Carl visit a circus in which Edward sees his future wife but looses her in the tumultous crowd without knowing anything about her. The circus ringmaster Amos Calloway (played by Danny Devito) is very impressed by Carl and gives him a job at the circus. Amos seems to know the girl Edward felt in love with and Edward offers him to work without wanting any payment but the name and address of the girl. Amos consents to tell him one thing about the girl every month. After 3 years of working Edward knows quite a lot about her but neither where she lives nore her name. He wants to talk to the ringmaster about this, but when he arrives at Amos' caravan the man has turned into a werewolf. Edward manages to overpower the wolf and that way he earns the respect of Amos who now tells him where to find the girl whose name is Sandra Templeton (played by Alison Lohman as the young Sandra and by and by Jessica Lange as Edwards wife). Edward finally finds her and tells her that he loves her. Unfortunately it turns out, that she is engaged to a boy Edward knows from his hometown. But he stays insistent and finally plants a whole field of daffodils (Sandra's favourite flowers). As Sandra's fiancé sees that, he beats up Edward and not even Sandra can stop him. She leaves him, telling him that she prefers an almost stranger to a brute like him. But short time after that Edward is sent to the Korean War. He volunteers to every dangerous mission to get his time in the army down. So one day he has to steal some important documents from a camp which is having a show to entertain the troops at this moment. He manages to do so and escapes with the help of two twin sisters (which have two torsos but just one pair of legs) promising them a better career in the USA. However, without any possibility to keep the contact with the outside world during the four months his journey home takes him, the army declares him dead.
Will and Josephine talk about his father and Will explains that the problem with his father is, that he has never told him one true thing. He just doesn't have the feeling to know anything about his father and who he really is. As a child, he always thought that Edward has a second life, a second family for which he would leave Will and his mother one day. As this isn't the case, he concluded that Edward invents all these stories because he finds his life as a father so incredibly boring. Josephine tells Will to talk to his father about this. He tries so the next day but Edward insists on having always told the truth and not just tales. Will doesn't see a way to stop his father's childish behaviour and gives up, leaving the room. He starts tidying out the tool shed and finds some documents and objects that Edward mentioned in his stories (like the letter his mother received from the army when Edward was declared dead). He rememberes another story of his father becoming a salesman after the war...
On his journeys through the country Edward meets the poet Norther Winslow in a bank in Texas. He left Spectre to apparently rob banks. Edward helps him to rob the bank, though he does this more unwittingly than deliberately. Later it turns out that the bank was bankrupt and Edward suggests Norther to get a job at the Wall Street. To thank him for this help, Norther sends Edward a „fee“ as his career adviser. From this money he buys the dreamhouse he and his wife are now living in.
Will finds an interesting document with a womens' name on it and decides to find her. His way leads him to the towm of Spectre and the house of the now grown up Jennifer Hill (Helena Bonham Carter), the little girl Edward met the first time he was in Spectre. While Will suspects his father of having had an affair with the women, Jenny tells him the truth about what had happened. Edward had been on a business trip and came to Spectre by accident. But the town looked nothing like in his memory. A new road had led the outside world to Spectre and with it depts and insolvency. Most of the people were bankrupt and the town was put up for auction. Edward decided to buy the town with the financial help of the people he had made rich in the past (Norther Winslow, the twin sisters...). He started to buy all the houses but let the people stay there without wanting them to pay rent. That way he met Jenny again (who was still in love with him) and helped her repairing her dilapidated house until it looked like a whole new house. He was spending very much time with her and so she thought he would have feelings for her. But when she tried to kiss him, he turned her down and left her broken-hearted. He never came back to the town he saved. Jenny tells Will that she has been living in a tale while Edwards family, him and his mother, were real.
When Will comes back home his father has had a heart attack and lies in hospital. Will decides to stay with him while his mother and Josephine go home. Dr. Benett, a good friend of the family, tells Will the not so spectacular story of his birth and says if he could choose between the true version and the elaborate version of the fish and the ring, he would choose the fancy one. He leaves them alone and when Edward wakes up, he wants Will to tell him the story of what he had seen in the glass eye of the witch and how his life ends. So Will starts to tell a fantastic story, just like his father, about an escape from the hospital to a river, where all the characters of his father's tales are waiting for him to farewell him. Will puts his father where he becomes a big fish.
„You become what you always were: A very big fish.“
Meanwhile in the „real world“ Edward died at the hospital. At his real funeral it turns out, that at least a few of the tale characters really exist: the twin sisters (who aren't really knitted together), the circus ringmaster, the giant Carl (who is not really a giant but still very big), the poet Norther Winslow, Jenny and other people from Spectre. It is left open to the audience how much of the tales are true. The movie ends with a scene with Will and his new family passing the stories of his father to his son.
There are two things that are not very clear in this movie and which I thought about for a while. The first thing is that Edward really seems to be some kind of fish. When he was born he was so slippery that he slided down the hallway of the hospital and nobody was able to catch him. In one scene he says that he always has been very thirsty but he doesn't know why. In another he lays in the full bath tub with his clothes on and says he had the feeling to dry out (which he has quite often according to the reaction of his wife). That fits the statement Will makes of the end of the film in which he says his father was always a big fish.
The other thing is that Jenny tells Will that after his father left her she became a witch and the story ended where it has begun. Will says that it is impossible that she is the witch Edward met as a little child and that this wouldn't make any sense. Jenny answers that it only makes sense when you think the way Edward thinks. I think that all the stories have something very dream-like. They make sense in the first moment but when you think about them later you realize that something seems wrong. In dreams the characters and places merge into each other without the dreamer really noticing it. And so (provided that Edward is the dreamer) it makes sense to him. However this is my oppinion, in the movie Jenny adds that there are only two women in Edwards world: Sandra and all the others. So maybe Edward just doesn't really distinguish between Jenny and the witch.
Big Fish is like a picture book for adults. It is a master piece in every respect: the scenery, the acting, the music (which is of course by Danny Elfman, who does the music in almost every movie Tim Burton makes). All this works together and creates an atmosphere only this director is able to create. It has a lot of typical Burton-elements, like the machine Edward is connected to, the house of Jenny which is all crooked and really dark, the black and white striped wagon in the circus, the dresses of the women and the very intense colors in almost every scene. I really enjoy the movies by Tim Burton, they always have something very special and touching yet very bizarre. Each of the characters has something very characteristic and individual about itself. Although it belongs to the category of Drama movies, it has quite a lot funny scenes (one of my favourites is the scene Edward is dancing with the absurdly happy citizens of Spectre) and very amusing dialogues (for example the dialogue between Carl and Edward when they meet for the first time).
The story itself basically consists of Edward's tall tales which are all very imaginative and creative. They are the kind of stories you want your dad to tell you when you are a child, so you'll see him as the hero you want him to be. However, the movie's true message is more about the realtionships parents have to their kids. We never find out which parts of Edward's stories really happened and which not, neither does Will. I can't imagine growing up with a father who never has grown up himself and keeps telling tales. Will sees him as a stranger which departed from him more and more with the years as was getting older. Even when he begs him to stop, Edward isn't willing to lead a serious conversation with his son. But this kind of seriousness wouldn't go with the concept of the movie. So Will discovers the passion and meaning of these stories step by step throughout the movie and finally finds what he is looking for by telling his father such a story himself. He decides to tell his son the same stories but I wonder what he is going to tell him when he is older and wants to know the truth. I think Will found a happy medium for himself and his son to tell these stories. The point is that in the end he understood his father and why he acted that way more than before and he had the feeling to know his father more.
