Readers, I hope you all had a good Monday. I myself managed to have a day full of being fairly useless. But I am caught up on reading and some of my TV shows so it's not the worst Monday I've spent in a while. Last week CT wrote about Skyfall. Today I want to leave the gritty world of espionage behind and instead go somewhere a little more fantastical. So I'm following Albert Finney to Big Fish.
The story is about a man named Will who's estranged from his father because of the older man's fondness for telling huge stories. When Will's father gets sick, Will has to go home and confront the legacy and legend of his father's life. It's a Tim Burton movie, from back when that didn't automatically mean that it would be a two hours of Johnny Depp feasting on the scenery. Instead this movie is a beautiful exploration of the nature of story and the necessity of faith in a relationship.
The cinematography in this movie is just stunning. As the locations change from the normal suburban reality to the fantastical world of the stories, the sets and the costumes never feel out of place or over the top. Colleen Atwood did the costume design, and not to sound like the biggest nerd in the room but I will literally watch a movie I don't have much interest in just to see her costumes. The woman is a national treasure.
My favorite thing about this movie is how it explores the concept of an unreliable narrator. We know from Will and his mothers clarifications that Ed Bloom likes to embellish the facts. But because he is the one telling the story, his larger than life version is the only one we see. We hear little hints that his tales have some truth to them, when Will finds the letter that was sent when Ed went MIA during the war, but we never see the actual horror or misery of the reality because Ed refuses to allow it into his stories. It's a beautiful way of looking at the hard spots in the world, and watching this movie makes me feel like I can embrace that a little bit.
Happy Watching,
Little C
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