A certain wise man once said that art exists because life is not enough. The old tradition of storytelling, especially when covered by the sophistication of literature and cinema, can also bring this motif in its essence. Big Fish (USA, 2003), attests to this perception. Based on Big Fish: a novel of mythical proportions, a book by Daniel Wallace, director Tim Burton's film fulfills with care the task of transposing his fantastic narrative into equivalent or analogous images.
   The character Edward Bloom (embodied with impetus on his deathbed by Albert Finney), an inveterate storyteller, recounts the fabulous adventures he swears he lived in his youth (played with immense tenderness by Ewan McGregor), whose decisive circumstance lies in one of those first adventures, the childhood night when he learned the day and cause of his death. The certainty he relies on to go in search of love without fearing failure or death - since he trusts in advance that his fatal date is far away - , and the radiant filming of these unusual adventures would be enough to produce his enchantment, but this motto perhaps configures only its most visible aspects. A certain tension permeates the plot with a subtle dose of drama, which prevents it from being reduced to the mythological reminiscences of the dying man and makes it transcend the puerile genre and the gothic fantasy tone typical of the soap opera culture of the south of the USA (by the way, the film was shot in Alabama).








   The son of the now bedridden Edward Bloom, the urban and bored young man on the eve of his wedding (Billy Crudup), which consolidates his entry into adult life, that is to say: the “age of reason”, disbelieves or is already too saturated with, according to him, fanciful or exaggerated stories about his father, as if they were nothing more than an attempt to escape reality. The old man, irreducible, is indignant that his offspring is not able to see the world through the same lenses that he does. This is the point of contact, rather, friction and friction, between the two contiguous worlds. And this side effect is what will bring us back to our own perspective, that of the spectator, in which the perception that we have been deceived by the beautiful cinematographic devices that stage Bloom's dreamlike memories can be disappointing._d04a07d8-9cd1-3239-9149- 20813d6c673b_









   But this principle of frustration, if it succeeds in imposing itself on the charm that the entire film conveys, is supplanted by the theme which, deep down, is perhaps its primordial motto : that of reconciliation. This was perhaps the biggest inspiration that moved Tim Burton to direct it, since in the two years before the start of production he had lost his parents. Thus, by sketching an argumentative way of contesting his father's hyperbolic narratives, Bloom's bored young son begins to understand him. 
   Since sequential images are the very language of cinema, a traditional limitation restricts its exposure, which is justified by the credulity that images must convey: the premise of that everything displayed constitutes a reality within the story. If someone tells a lie, for example, it is counterproductive to simulate it with retroactive images (a resource, also limited, against this restriction are the characters' dreams and blunders). In Big fish this premise is irrelevant, or rather, it is its very synthesis, as if to say: “whoever wants to discredit, let him discredit”. But his delight is in believing, as in the simulation of art, as in one of Blaise Pascal's sentences in favor of faith: “if we believe and it is not true, we have lost nothing”. Telling and listening, or, more precisely in this case, watching the epic, tragic or lyrical stories, so well combined in Big fish, offers us the chance to realize that, even if only for as long as the exuberant ecstasy of fiction lasts, life really isn't enough, and that's why we need to adorn it with wonderful things.