Big Fish

Sony Pictures - Sony Pictures

Release date: 2004-04-27
DVD
Director:Tim Burton
Actors: Ewan McGregor, Albert Finney, Billy Crudup, Jessica Lange, Helena Bonham Carter

Adult Language, Adult Situations, Adventure, Bittersweet, Brief Nudity, Circuses & Carnivals, Color, Comedy, Comedy Drama, Death of a Parent, Drama, English, Estrangement, Family Drama, Fanciful, Fantasy, Fantasy Comedy, Fathers and Sons, Feature, Feature Film-drama

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Big Fish

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It turns all around the father and his son and their difficult relation. It was perfect as long as the son believed in the stories the father was telling him all the time, that is to say as long as Father Christmas really was a childhood hero. But older age came and those stories sounded all silly, even sillier and sillier and they led to a complete break between the two, the father and the son, till the father came to the point of departing from this life. The son and his wife came back and he was confronted to the stories again. But one day when he was sorting out some old documents of his father's for his mother he came across a strange deed that showed the existence of an estate under the name of his father. And he went there and discovered that this estate had some tremendous reality and that the witch of the old stories was the young girl from some other old story who had become a piano teacher and had benefited from this estate. She sure was in love with the father but the father was faithful to his wife. The son then discovers that all the stories were just embellished true stories. The Siamese Chinese twin women were in fact true Chinese twins though not Siamese. And an epiphany takes place. When the son was keeping watch over his father at the hospital one night, the father called him and the son understood the father was asking him to tell him a bedside story to put him to sleep, the big sleep. And the son is inspired to tell him his own version of his father's embellished stories and that story enables the father to go to his long sleep with all the characters of his own stories. And when the funeral arrives, the son, his wife and his mother can only see with their own eyes that all the characters of these stories are true people. But in the meantime some miracle had happened. The son on the command from his dying father had taken him away from the hospital to the river where he had put him back into the water, as if the father was only a captured big fish living among the humans and waiting for this last minute to recapture his true nature and swim away down the river where he had come from. That's when the film could have turned grotesque or just funny strange. But Tim Burton is a genius of the paranormal and how to make it look so natural that we are obliged to believe in it and to go back to our infancy, when we believed wonderful stories full of unbelievable wonders that we could only believe in deep in our hearts because they were so beautiful. Tim Burton is a magician that mesmerizes us with surrealistic images.

Dr Jacques COULARDEAU, University Paris Dauphine, University Paris 1 Pantheon Sorbonne & University Versailles Saint Quentin en Yvelines

Guest

Big Fish

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I give it 2 stars for cinematography and acting. Other then that I can't recommend this film, especially if you aren't fond of slow, long, drawn out movies that really have no point and whose characters are blah. It does remind me of Forrest Gump a little but Ewan McGregor is no Tom Hanks! And his adventures are no where near as interesting or believable as in Forrest Gump.

My husband loves it and wanted me to see it, so I said yes. Most of the time I was sitting there thinking "can we fast forward, because I don't get the point of this scene and it's really boring" And after it was over I was thinking "was that only two hours, because it felt like four" I should have know better. My husband was never a good judge of movies.

I guess I kept expecting something to happen, but it never did. Every scene led up to what I thought would be a big wow factor, but never was. They built up tension in every scene that fizzled out moments later.
Never trust a film packed full of big time well known actors. It is most likely that they are hoping the actors will carry the film, and they did, but not nearly far enough.

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