tamaranth | Film review: Big Fish

Saw this last night. Mixed feelings
NB: I started writing a more objective review, but the PC ate it. This is the subjective version.

I liked the film until the last half-hour. Then I stopped liking it and started finding it ... difficult. A mixture of 'too effective' and 'too sentimental and airbrushed'.

Most of the film is delightful, visually at least, and vaguely reminded me of Gaiman's American Gods (I'm now tempted to read the novel on which the film was based, though I have things I really should be reading ... The contrast between the father's 'tall tales' and the son's definition of them as 'lies' was hammered home a bit too much, and everyone seemed to have infinite time to sit and listen to those stories, which were told with more energy than one would expect from a dying man. (Not sure if we were ever told what he was dying of).

The last half-hour really bothered me. My father's had strokes of varying severity for the last ten years. Last winter he ended up in hospital. The film version of this was peaceful, quiet, clean and wholesome. My memories overlaid it with the noise of the respirator, my own father fighting to get the bloody thing off him because it hurt, the way that half his face was bruised from falling ... In the film, there was no apparent physical aftermath: but the right side of my father's body was paralysed (and this is not fun: I've experienced it). He couldn't have spoken at all clearly. But oh yes, he was, and is, in storyland ...

That's just me. That's a personal reaction, not something that is in the film. (I don't even know if my father's symptoms are typical of stroke victims). While I had some intellectual appreciation of the resolution of the film (inasumuch as something with such a vague plot -- son comes to terms with father -- can be said to 'resolve') I was taking it all too personally by then.

This isn't really a review, I suppose, but I did want to write it down because it ... disturbed me, I suppose. As though all the interesting aspects of the film -- Helena Bonham-Carter as multiple characters, 'every other woman'; the mermaids; the recurrent images of water, drowning; the idea that if a man knows how he'll die, he has nothing left to fear; the story elements and their mundane counterparts ... -- as though all those were somehow lessened by the way that the film awoke / evoked memories of my own parallel experience. It left me feeling bitter and angry: and I can do that on my own.

It's not just this film that brings my father and his ongoing decline to mind: I've been in tears each time I've watched Return of the King, because of the Theoden/Eowyn scene ... But that felt right, and this just didn't.

After writing that, it'd be interesting to write the objective version again. But I have much to do, and suddenly very little time.