This film, which is directed by Tim Burton and whose main characters are played by Albert Finney, Ewan McGregor, Billy Crudup, Jessica Lange and Marion Cotillard. It is about a man who comes back to his parents’ house because his father has fallen ill. As usual, he had to listen to his father’s stories about his childhood and youth, in which fantasy and reality are always mixed, but this time, he tries to find out things which could help him in order to know his father better, a task which can be a bit difficult because he had to separate elements of both worlds.
I think this film is a wonderful reflex of the real life where we live in, where I think there are as real elements as fantastic ones (for example, there are people who believe in ghosts, in the horoscope, in palmistry, in fate and also in all kinds of legends, which, in the past, were precisely created in order to explain the surrounding phenomena which people couldn’t explain by reasoning).
Just like another famous films directed by the same director, such as Charlie and the Chocolate Factory or Alice and Wonderland, in which there is a colorful atmosphere, and also fantastic, unreal and a big variety of characters and stories which are entwined, features which made us think that there is a big similarity among all that stories. However, I think Big Fish has something special, because it isn’t only related to the childhood, but also with nostalgia of the old age, with the well-known literary topic tempus fugit (time goes by too fast and we sometimes don’t realize how fast it passes), the relation parent-child, the fighter spirit, the fact of being a real dreamer and never give up pour dreams and aims in life, the altruism and the fact of being sociable (the main character of this story helps a lot of people), to fall in love at first sight and not to give up oneself in order to get the love wanted, the freedom (which is directly related to the importance of the water, to fishes and to the fishing), because, the main character of this story is, once for all, a big fish (he is a free person living in a world which makes him being overwhelmed and makes him increase his desire for freedom), he has also a very powerful imagination (he exaggerates the reality in which he lives and that makes his son to be confused and hesitant and that’s the reason why he want to find out the real facts of his father’s life). Another important point is the one related to loving ourselves, our relatives and our friends just like we are, all that without caring about what people could say or think. Because, after all, life is what we dream, like Edward Bloom says: “The biggest fish in the river gets that way by never being caught” .
