Big Fish

The most amazing thing about this film is how it's written. Most of the sentences uttered by the characters are designed to illuminate the difference between big and small, right and wrong, facts and faith. The sentences tend to balance each other out, or provide balance for ideas within a single sentence. I think Tim Burton chose well -- his style of moviemaking fits with a script about understanding wholly different lifestyles. A son returns to his father's deathbed to try and understand who his father really is. He never believed his father's tall tales (i.e., Big Fish stories), although everyone else seems to have, or at least have been enamored by them. Burton enjoys making films that fly in the face of normalcy -- Edward Scissorhands, Ed Wood, Mars Attacks! -- but that are still about basic human emotions, such as fear and love. He gets to conjure up circus show freaks and ridiculous scenery (e.g., a car stranded in a tree) but integrates this with "normal life." While at times the film seems to be running too long (a few too many Big Fish stories told), the ending is surprisingly moving. We should all have a chance to die as we lived, with those whom we cared about coming together to talk about the life we lived. (And that's an example of the kind of sentence structure I was mentioning earlier.)

year: 2003
length: 125 min.
rating: 3.5
IMDB link: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0319061/combined