“Big Fish” is open to a myriad of interpretations about the usefulness of fiction. Even if Bloom’s stories aren’t true, they tell us things about him, and they gain him a kind of temporal immortality through their repetition. It’s tempting to try reading the movie in the light of Tim Burton’s body of work, which are mostly movies about ambitious, misunderstood outsiders, like Batman, Ed Wood, Edward Scissorhands, Jack Skellington, and Frankenweenie. But Bloom is the quintessential insider, who is always popular, always successful, always fitting in. If anyone is an outsider, it is his son, who doesn’t fit in among Dad’s admirers from previous generations.
The movie also stands as a defense of the absent provider father, who for all his faults is still a good guy. Bloom, who is distant, uncommunicative, and only pontificates on the cracked reality he forces onto his household, is an interesting interpretation of the traditional father. (Not my dad, though, who would never force anything on anybody.) The Blooms never suffer financial woes and, while the other woman may try to woo him, his devotion to his wife is indestructible. Bloom’s wife (played in flashbacks by Alison Lohman of “Matchstick Men” and “White Oleander” and in the present by good-looking older woman Jessica “Dude Your Mom is Hot” Lange) is strangely ambiguous, or resigned, about his babblings.
Or the movie can be seen not as Bloom’s arc, but his son’s, who learns to love his father, faults and all, even if his father is embarrassing, a loud mouth, tells the same jokes too many times, and is inaccessible. There are always walls when grown children try to humanize their parents, even if the walls are not out-and-out lies. By giving Bloom multiple historical eras to claim as “when he grew up,” and by making his account of things so preposterous, the movie has made him every generation’s remote elder. Sometimes we can’t understand our parents and their decisions on our own terms, only theirs.
Finished January 17th, 2004
Copyright © 2004 Friday & Saturday Night
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