cbsreview: BIG FISH

The movie marked a double-first for my moviewatching: it was the first time I went out to see a movie right on Christmas Day, and the first time I went to see a movie without the vaguest idea of what it was all about. That it was directed by Tim Burton was a quiet motivator, (though served with a pinch of reluctance after the awful memories of Sleepy Hollow; for a moment it cast a shadow of doubt as to Mr. Burton's ability to rekindle the flame of a great Beetlejuice experience.) But being a movie adventurer, I rolled my moviewatcher's dice. And with Burton's penchance for surprises and unique sense of aesthetics, I knew Big Fish to be worthy of optimism.

Turned out, the odds were on my side. A quarter through the movie, I had my epiphany, glaring brightly (even though all the reviews I read thereafter never mentioned what I perceived): Big Fish has strong and effective parallelisms to James Joyce's Ulysses and (of course), to the myths of The Oddysey, that after the movie I felt as if I hit a jackpot.

Big Fish, like the twin pillars of literature, carries the theme of centrality of family, with emphasis on the relationship between father and son. The haunt of Homer's epic is wonderfully carried by Telemachus' valiant search for his father Odysseus which, many, many years later, was transplanted in Joyce's Ulysses, via the encounter by and between Stephen Dedalus and his surrogate father Leopold Bloom.

In Big Fish, the father's name became the first hint: Edward Bloom. But unlike the way the episodes of Ulysses are in rhythmic pattern with the Odyssey, the analogies presented in the movie are not in the same episodic fashion. In fact, sometimes the contrasts are the very analogies themselves.

The movie opens up with a mythical scene, a big fish plying the waters of a big river. That is a sign of things to come - the myth that Edward Bloom created for his son, that he, Edward Bloom, in his youth was a big fish. As the movie progresses with flashbacks to narrate the myths, so do the myths themselves, so does the son William himself, growing up from childhood to adolescence looking at his father from a mythological perspective (while we moviewathers shared the kids wide eyes watching scene after scene, episode after episode, of fabulous tales told by a fabulist father).

There are four episodes in the father's life which he tells his son (and shown to us), that serve to highlight his mythology. The first is when he and three other friends go to the house of the old witch with a glass eye, and he confronts the witch in order to look directly at her glass eye just so he could, as folktales have it, find out how he is going to die. (When the young William asks the father what he saw, he answers, "but that will be the end of the story"); Second is his encounter with the gentle giant Karl, a humongous monster as tall as a building but with the purity of a baby. Third is his entry at Specter, a quaint beauty of a town with an unforgettable "welcome arch" of hanging shoes and turfed streets, and equally unforgettable inhabitants. And fourth is his pursuit of his future wife (portrayed by a most ravishing Alison Lohman), and his funny escapades to win her over. (When she asks how he could propose to marry her when he doesn't even know her, he responds "but I have a whole lifetime to find out". Cute.)

In Odyssey, the meeting between Odysseus and Telemachus are time and time again averted by the former's great adventures and struggles with the heavies: the Cyclopes, Calypso, Circe. In Ulysses, Leopold Bloom and Stephen Dedalus are shown to be missing their initial encounter by a nick of time, a few moments: at the newspaper office and at the National Library, until they meet later and foretold in an episode known as The Pandemonium, where they experience the "truth" before their eyes. But in Big Fish, there are no missed encounters between father and son in the physical sense but ostensibly on a much deeper scale, in the "perceptive" or even "intellectual" sense. What happens is that when William Bloom grows up and develops a mind outside of his father's myths, he comes to realize he does not know his father after all; the mythical tales dislodge Edward Bloom's reality and William's need of a real vision of him, thus resulting to their estrangement.

But like all love stories, there has got to be a comeback, a moment of reconciliation. The father, now old and dying (portrayed by Albert Finney, an Oscar must-nominee), summons his son to his deathbed and which the son agrees to, not to say 'get well pops' but, on a more significant reason, to know him finally, hopefully. A dying man tells no (tall) tales, they say, and the son dreams so. Alas towards the end of the movie when the fabulist and the realist meet, with a haunting episode reminiscent of the tenderest moments of, say, Alice In Wonderland, or like a curtain call in a great stage show, with all memorable characters giving a final bow, collectively telling us, in silence or body language, in a simple greeting or a great narrative, that like Ulysses, the episodes of Big Fish are not, repeat NOT, an attempt to show slice of life but, on a grander scale, interpretations of life. Which delivers the concluding episode as nothing nobler than a proclamation of truth, the moment we all wait for when William Bloom gets to know his father and find the truth behind his tales.

By way of celluloid, the magical Big Fish should teach this blog what it cries shamelessly: casting the spell of life and literature. Danny de Vito, playing a circus impressario, speaks these words when introducing a circus act - and which could have referred to the movie in its entirety: You will never see anything like this. For like great minds in great literature, Big Fish shows to all and sundry: The Myth Is real, Go Fish!