Tim Burton's "Big Fish"
Movie review by Dennis D. McDonald
My wife and I watched this last night. She wanted something lighter and more friendly than my usual picks.
I remembered seeing it decades ago. She enjoyed it, but I found myself a bit bored at times by Burton’s stylistic excesses. Still, I appreciate the theme: some people cling to personal lies and myths, and many others are comfortable with that—as long as the stories aren’t hurtful. The father-son relationship (a dying father repeating tall tales, and a son exasperated by them) illustrates this dynamic through a series of fantastical and entertaining flashbacks.
That perspective is at the heart of the movie, though it occasionally gets buried under Burton’s excess. Even so, many sequences—such as the deathbed storytelling, the bank robbery, and the flower field—remain genuinely entertaining.
Review copyright (c) 2025 by Dennis D. McDonald
