Film : Big fish

Big Fish

How are truth, lies and exaggeration portrayed?

This week in class we watched a film, the film we watched was Tim Burton's Big fish, first released in 2003.

The basic story line is Will Bloom and his wife  pregnant with their first child, leave Paris to return to  Alabama on the news that his father, Edward will die soon and has been taken of chemotherapy. Wills whole life his father has told tall tales, not only to Will but the whole world. As a child Will believed those stories, but now realizes that he does not know his father. Will realises he will never get to know unless Edward comes clean with the truth before he dies. On the brink of his own family life beginning, Will does not want to be the kind of father Edward has been to him.

We were set several questions to give our responses to, I chose to discuss how truth, lies and exaggeration are portrayed in the film.

Truth, lies and exaggeration are three of the key themes of this entire film since Edward Bloom tells fantasised stories to his son from a young age, he tells his son stories of a witch whose eye revealed how you would die. The town of spectre, where everything was simply perfect and out of reach and the circus owner who was secretly a werewolf. After a child hood of these stories William decides that none of these stories can be true and he doesn't actually know his father. He states to his father whom he does love...

"You're like Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny combined - just as charming, and just as fake."

He just gets frustrated because his father will never tell him the truth no matter how many times he asks for it.

In the beginning of the film we are led to believe all these stories are true yet as we go on through the film they become more and more fragmented and unbelievable, Williams own distrust in his father causes us to distrust him too. It becomes clear that William doesn't even know the true story of his birth as his father had over exaggerated that also, making us pieces to make the story more interesting.

However at the end of the film the story of wills birth is set straight by a doctor looking after his father in the hospital, the doctor says 'if I had to choose between the true story and some elaborate version including a wedding ring and a fish, I would choose the fancy version', this suggests that perhaps all of the stories his father told him as a child weren't all that bad, that maybe knowing the truth isn't always the best thing.

As the film draws to a close William understands that his father told him all these stories to make his life more exciting and to encourage his son to live life to the fullest, William tells his father a story as he dies, to make everything seem better than the situation he is in, lying on his death bed in pain. At his funeral he see's some of the people his father talked about in his story, we see that not everything was a straight up lie, some of it was just exaggeration, for example Karl the giant was just a very tall man, the conjoint twins were just regular twins.

At the end of the film he learns a lot about his father, smiling because he has finally come to terms with who his father was, a very big fish in a very small pond.

Megan :)