Product Description

A magical journey that delves deep into a fabled relationship between a dying father & his son. The son recreates his fathers elusive life in a series of legends & myths inspired by the few facts he knows discovering both his fathers great feats & his great failures. Studio: Sony Pictures Home Ent Release Date: 03/27/2007 Starring: Ewan Mcgregor Jessica Lange Run time: 125 minutes Rating: Pg13 Director: Tim Burton

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #2241 in DVD
• Brand: Sony
• Released on: 2004-04-27
• Rating: PG-13 (Parental Guidance Suggested)
• Aspect ratio: 1.85:1
• Formats: Anamorphic, Closed-captioned, Color, Dolby, DTS Surround Sound, Dubbed, DVD-Video, Subtitled, Widescreen, NTSC
• Original language: English, French
• Subtitled in: English, French
• Dubbed in: French
• Number of discs: 1
• Dimensions: .25 pounds
• Running time: 125 minutes

Amazon.com
After a string of mediocre movies, director Tim Burton regains his footing as he shifts from macabre fairy tales to Southern tall tales. Big Fish twines in and out of the oversized stories of Edward Bloom, played as a young man by Ewan McGregor (Moulin Rouge, Down with Love) and as a dying father by Albert Finney (Tom Jones). Edward's son Will (Billy Crudup, Almost Famous) sits by his father's bedside but has little patience with the old man's fables, because he feels these stories have kept him from knowing who his father really is. Burton dives into Bloom's imagination with zest, sending the determined young man into haunted woods, an idealized Southern town, a traveling circus, and much more. The result is sweet but--thanks to the director's dark and clever sensibility--never saccharine. Also featuring Jessica Lange, Alison Lohman, Helena Bonham Carter, Danny DeVito, and Steve Buscemi. --Bret Fetzer

DVD features
Somebody smart produced the director's commentary track for Big Fish; they brought in an interviewer to keep Tim Burton on track, thus avoiding those moments when a director gapes silently at his movie, grasping for some fresh thought. This sense of control, however, fosters a somewhat corporate atmosphere, which also infests the typically fatuous featurettes about "The Character's Journey" and "The Filmmakers' Path." Which is not to say they're a waste: Ewan McGregor is simply the most charming man in the world; the various beasties in the movie are technically interesting; and there's an interesting bit about the author of the book and the screenwriter, usually two of the most ignored figures in cinema. There's also a mildly diverting trivia quiz about Tim Burton's earlier movies. --Bret Fetzer

From The New Yorker
The title is apt enough; this movie is long, wet, and wriggling, and, after a while, you may want to hold your nose. It tells the story of Edward Bloom, played in his youth by Ewan McGregor and in the final act of his life by Albert Finney. That life is a picaresque, crammed with exaggeration and casual magic-a witch with a glass eye that shows forthcoming deaths, say, or a pair of spangled night-club singers who are also Siamese twins. This is easy stuff for somebody of Tim Burton's gifts, and you seldom feel that the new picture tests him or turns him on in the way that "Beetlejuice" or "Edward Scissorhands" did. The result is his most emotionally reactionary work to date. With Billy Crudup as Bloom's poor stooge of a son, Danny DeVito as a circus ringmaster, Matthew McGrory as a moping giant, and Jessica Lange and Alison Lohman, both badly underused, as the older and younger versions of the hero's only love. -Anthony Lane
Copyright © 2006 The New Yorker

Customer Reviews

Life is nothing but invisible marvellous wonders
It turns all around the father and his son and their difficult relation. It was perfect as long as the son believed in the stories the father was telling him all the time, that is to say as long as Father Christmas really was a childhood hero. But older age came and those stories sounded all silly, even sillier and sillier and they led to a complete break between the two, the father and the son, till the father came to the point of departing from this life. The son and his wife came back and he was confronted to the stories again. But one day when he was sorting out some old documents of his father's for his mother he came across a strange deed that showed the existence of an estate under the name of his father. And he went there and discovered that this estate had some tremendous reality and that the witch of the old stories was the young girl from some other old story who had become a piano teacher and had benefited from this estate. She sure was in love with the father but the father was faithful to his wife. The son then discovers that all the stories were just embellished true stories. The Siamese Chinese twin women were in fact true Chinese twins though not Siamese. And an epiphany takes place. When the son was keeping watch over his father at the hospital one night, the father called him and the son understood the father was asking him to tell him a bedside story to put him to sleep, the big sleep. And the son is inspired to tell him his own version of his father's embellished stories and that story enables the father to go to his long sleep with all the characters of his own stories. And when the funeral arrives, the son, his wife and his mother can only see with their own eyes that all the characters of these stories are true people. But in the meantime some miracle had happened. The son on the command from his dying father had taken him away from the hospital to the river where he had put him back into the water, as if the father was only a captured big fish living among the humans and waiting for this last minute to recapture his true nature and swim away down the river where he had come from. That's when the film could have turned grotesque or just funny strange. But Tim Burton is a genius of the paranormal and how to make it look so natural that we are obliged to believe in it and to go back to our infancy, when we believed wonderful stories full of unbelievable wonders that we could only believe in deep in our hearts because they were so beautiful. Tim Burton is a magician that mesmerizes us with surrealistic images.

Dr Jacques COULARDEAU, University Paris Dauphine, University Paris 1 Pantheon Sorbonne & University Versailles Saint Quentin en Yvelines

Soooooo slllloooooowwww
I give it 2 stars for cinematography and acting. Other then that I can't recommend this film, especially if you aren't fond of slow, long, drawn out movies that really have no point and whose characters are blah. It does remind me of Forrest Gump a little but Ewan McGregor is no Tom Hanks! And his adventures are no where near as interesting or believable as in Forrest Gump.

My husband loves it and wanted me to see it, so I said yes. Most of the time I was sitting there thinking "can we fast forward, because I don't get the point of this scene and it's really boring" And after it was over I was thinking "was that only two hours, because it felt like four" I should have know better. My husband was never a good judge of movies.

I guess I kept expecting something to happen, but it never did. Every scene led up to what I thought would be a big wow factor, but never was. They built up tension in every scene that fizzled out moments later.
Never trust a film packed full of big time well known actors. It is most likely that they are hoping the actors will carry the film, and they did, but not nearly far enough.

Big Fish
Great movie. Reminds you not to take yourself so serious and enjoy life and older peoples stories.