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Common sense media reviewers.

Delightful, sad father-son story for teens and up.

A Lot or a Little?

What you will—and won't—find in this movie.

Strong African-American and female characters.

Fantasy peril, death of a character.

Brief nudity.

Mild language.

Parents need to know that this movie has brief nudity, mild language, and fantasy peril. Sensitive kids may be upset by the death of a parent.

Positive Role Models

Violence & scariness.

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Sex, Romance & Nudity

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Drinking, Drugs & Smoking

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Parents Need to Know

Parents need to know that this movie has brief nudity, mild language, and fantasy peril. Sensitive kids may be upset by the death of a parent. To stay in the loop on more movies like this, you can sign up for weekly Family Movie Night emails .

Where to Watch

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Community Reviews

• Parents say (15)
• Kids say (43)

Based on 15 parent reviews

Santa claus unexpextedly spoiled

What's the story.

Will ( Billy Crudup ) believes that his father Edward ( Albert Finney ) has used his embellished tales to hide his true self. After he steals the show at Will's wedding with a story about trying to capture a legendary big fish, Will cuts off communications with his dad, maintaining contact only through his mother (Jessica Lange). Will and his wife move far away, and Will becomes a fact-based journalist. When he learns that his father is dying, he comes home to try one more time to know what is true, to feel that he really knows his father. Once again, Edward tells a story from his past. We see young Edward ( Ewan McGregor ) leaving home in search of adventure. He finds a giant, a witch, a werewolf, a town where no one wears shoes, a highly unusual singing sister act, and the love of his life, Sandra ( Alison Lohman ), who is engaged to someone else.

Is It Any Good?

Big Fish is the enchanting story of a father and son, but it's really the story of stories themselves. It's about all kinds of stories, from the first stories whispered by a father to a sleepy child to the stories a son tells his father to comfort him as he nears death. Facts are fine, but some truths can only be told by fiction, and this movie tells a captivating tale that is a delight for the eye, the heart, and the spirit.

Director Tim Burton , like Edward, believes that it's the fantastic that deserves our attention more than the mundane. The ravishing images are marvels, but it's the heart of the stories that captivate, especially when it all comes together at the end in a moving conclusion filled with connection, understanding, and forgiveness.

Talk to Your Kids About ...

Families can talk about some of their favorite stories -- factual and fictional. Who tells the best tall tales in the family?

Movie Details

• In theaters : December 10, 2003
• On DVD or streaming : April 27, 2004
• Cast : Albert Finney , Ewan McGregor , Jessica Lange
• Director : Tim Burton
• Inclusion Information : Female actors
• Studio : Columbia Tristar
• Genre : Fantasy
• Run time : 125 minutes
• MPAA rating : PG-13
• MPAA explanation : a fight scene, some images of nudity and a suggestive reference
• Last updated : March 9, 2024

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Movie Reviews

Tv/streaming, collections, great movies, chaz's journal, contributors, the power of imagination: on the 20th anniversary of big fish.

“The truth is, I didn’t see anything of myself in my father, and I don’t think he saw anything of himself in me. We were like strangers who knew each other very well.” - Will Bloom, “ Big Fish ”

One afternoon, over ten years ago now, a colleague made a remark that betrayed what was likely a personal regret: we should make the most of our parents while they're still alive. 

Upon revisiting “Big Fish,” Tim Burton 's 2003 fantasy drama now reaching its 20th anniversary, it occurs to me that this sentiment relates in some way to Will Bloom, played by Billy Crudup . The film's plot centers on the difficult relationship between Will and his father, Edward Bloom ( Ewan McGregor and Albert Finney ). The tension between father and son is underpinned by the tall tales Edward tells that mythologize his life. To Will, they're a smokescreen his father's hiding behind, that has stopped him from ever knowing who his father really is. 

The experience of watching “Big Fish” has changed as I have. What struck me on viewings during its theatrical run and a year later was the emphasis on fantastical storytelling over the human story. The plot details were generally lost to time, except for a fragmented series of images. After my third viewing, two decades later, I can now relate to Will in a way I couldn't before. My self-awareness has broadened through life experiences, and I can reflect on the shared history with my father, whose mortality I'm forced to confront. 

For some, but not all, Will is a version of ourselves, only in a dramatized and exaggerated context. Experiencing "Big Fish" when you're fresh out of adolescence to when you're an adult and entering that period where one is prone to encountering a mid-life crisis is different. To a young person whose future reaches out ahead of them, the film speaks to the hopes and dreams of what their life could be. To an adult, it's heavy on nostalgia, and the realization of the difficult relationship sons often have with their fathers, as well as the ups, downs, and twists in any life lived.

The relationships in the film are fully formed, and they belong to their own unique and dreamlike world. Yet, the story’s relatability for some filmgoers will resonate in a way that might feel personal to their own experiences. It's in constant metamorphosis, offering a space for us to emotionally project ourselves upon, becoming a mirror that reflects our image back to us. 

Following Burton's disappointing remake “Planet of the Apes,” whose only saving grace was Tim Roth's performance, “Big Fish” felt like redemption in 2003. Also, in the coming years, he would go on to direct some lackluster films, like “ Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street ,” “ Alice in Wonderland ," and “ Dark Shadows ,” which left him susceptible to increasing criticism. Unlike “Big Fish,” which saw him broaden his aesthetic, visually brighter with the dark fantasy tones not being as oppressive or noticeable, the films that followed felt increasingly commercialized and hindered by underwhelming storytelling. The impression began to form that Burton was a filmmaker who had given us his best, and "Big Fish" was maybe his one last hoorah.  

On the film's 20th anniversary, it struck me that it would have been a fitting swan song for the director. It conveyed much of what we came to love about Tim Burton and his ability to intertwine imagination and humanity. His characters made us laugh and evoked pathos, and “Big Fish” celebrates both. Filled with a naïve and indulgent affection for storytelling, and an expression of human emotion, it still feels like the perfect, or at least a fitting full stop to the filmmaker’s career. Burton layered a fairytale-esque quality into many of his films. Even in the darker or tragic tones of his work, he was still able to convey romanticism and innocence in films like “ Edward Scissorhands ” or “ Ed Wood ,” and those themes reflect in the mirror of “Big Fish.”

It deserves to be remembered, enjoyed, and appreciated by new generations, and yet the film has seemingly fallen between the cracks--lost to time. Aside from Will and Edward's story, the relationship between Edward and his wife, Sandra ( Jessica Lange ), is a strong emotional arc. As we watch Edward's life fade, Burton and screenwriter John August pull on our heartstrings. They craft a touching portrait of love as these two soulmates are forced to finally part in death. Blessed with sensitivity about love, life, family, death, and our love of stories, “Big Fish” is a timeless film that will continue to resonate with future generations. 

In its ability to transcend time, it has had a helping hand from human or societal flaws. Look at how the giant and the witch are introduced as ominous figures, only to reveal that neither Edward nor we should fear them–a scene that challenges our adversarial and xenophobic reality. “Big Fish” appeals to our better angels, advocating tolerance and openness towards those different from us. 

“Big Fish” possesses an almost wide-eyed innocent quality and Edward is almost an echo of all of us. He represents our inner child, that part of us that never fully grows up, even as we enter adulthood and are saddled with hefty responsibilities. The pleasure of rewatching “Big Fish” is to revel in this pure escapist fantasy, where stories and imagination are not suffocated by reality. If François Truffaut said he preferred the reflection of life to life itself, Edward Bloom managed to find a coping mechanism for his monotonous reality, reshaping it in his own vision. 

Two decades later, we still need films like “Big Fish.” The mix of fantasy, imagination, and reality reminds us of the storyteller within us all. It's an antidote to our contemporary dystopia, one that's blighted by toxic misinformation, political lies, and stories that serve narcissistic ambitions at the expense of the underprivileged. Edward’s stories might be a stretch, a reality distortion, but they’re harmless. In this current political and cultural upheaval, perhaps Edward Bloom cannot only find new meaning and continue to endure but offer us hope in a time when we're desperate for some. Unlike narcissistic politicians who rewrite the truth, Edward, Sandra, and their friends don't deny it; they recognize it and choose to escape reality. “Big Fish” is a timely film that encourages discussions about the relationship between fact and fiction, truth and fake news, and how the two share a complicated bond that compromises each respectively.

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Big Fish Broadway Reviews

Reviews of Big Fish on Broadway. See what all the critics had to say and see all the ratings for Big Fish including the New York Times and More...

Critics' Reviews

Review: Hyperkinetic 'Big Fish' Emerges With Heart

While acknowledging that the show is about a self-consciously rambling and absurdist hero, the bloated 90-minute Act 1 threatens to derail as visual gags, projections and busy scenes - plus a book that uneasily mixes whimsy and cancer - bombard the senses....Butz proves he's simply in a league of his own, able to switch from middle-aged to teenager in a snap, offering a complex portrait of a Southern man while avoiding good 'ol boy cliches, and he even spends some of the night lying in a hospital bed, not the most expected way to lead a musical. But then there are lots of other fun surprises at 'Big Fish,' including elephant fannies.

Hooked by storytelling in 'Big Fish' the musical

With the indefatigable, deeply engaged and seemingly irreplaceable Norbert Leo Butz driving its storytelling and willing the show's crucial emotional subtext into being by sheer force of talent and will, 'Big Fish' arrives on Broadway as an earnest, family-friendly, heart-warming and mostly successful new American musical. Modestly and movingly scored by Andrew Lippa, 'Big Fish' is set in the Deep South and honors that region's love of tall tales without exploiting the Southern stereotypes so common to the genre of musical theater.

STAGE REVIEW Big Fish

With his stocky build, short stature, and thinning hair, Butz is an unlikely leading man, but he has the loose-limbed energy and charisma of a young Dick Van Dyke. The radiant Kate Baldwin is underused as his sympathetic wife, though she brings her silken voice to the beautiful second-act ballad, 'I Don't Need a Roof' - one of the highlights of the mostly tuneful score by Andrew Lippa (The Addams Family). Steggert is less compelling as their not-so-likable son, particularly in the problematic second act saddled with several superfluous fantasy numbers and an ending that packs less of an emotional wallop than it should...For the most part, though, Big Fish finds theatrically inventive ways to reel audiences into its central love story. In this case, it isn't boy-meets-girl but father-hooks-son. And Edward Bloom is quite a catch.

Review: Norbert Leo Butz, with "Big Fish" to Fry

Norbert Leo Butz, as Edward, is as charismatic as ever in this father-and-son fable, based on Tim Burton's 2003 film about a traveling salesman who tells far-fetched stories...The two-time Tony winner leaps, swaggers and sweats his way through more than two-and-a-half hours of fair-to-middling show tunes with enough visual spice to keep us engaged, if not quite tapping our fingers along in our armrests....Where 'Big Fish' gets stuck in the shallows is with its score, by Andrew Lippa ('The Addams Family'). A brash musical demands you leave the theater wanting to buy the cast recording, or at least humming a song. 'Big Fish' doesn't, though 'Be the Hero,' which bookends the production, is catchy enough, in spite of its been-there-heard-that message: you should 'be the hero of your own story.

‘Big Fish’ Is a Gorgeous, Charming, Dream Musical: Review

I doubt Broadway has ever seen a prettier, more sensuously kinetic musical than Susan Stroman's adaptation of 'Big Fish' set to music by Andrew Lippa ('The Addams Family.') It's enchanting, especially once it slows down a bit to catch its breath. That doesn't happen until the second act, but it won't matter much, even to fans of the Tim Burton movie (or the Daniel Wallace novel that started it all). When the brooding trees begin their laconic dance before morphing into swamp witches, you know you're watching a Stroman show. By then, we've already fallen under the spell of Edward Bloom, Alabama homeboy, teller of tall tales and creaky jokes, absentee husband and father.

Review - BIG FISH Makes Wholesome The New Hip

Wholesomeness gets a bad rap on Broadway these days, usually regarded as the kind of unbearably sweet and inoffensive entertainment that sophisticated theatergoers must endure while taking their conservative grandmas out for a night on the town...But Big Fish, the new musical that tattoos its heart on its arm, displays no fear in plopping its unabashed wholesomeness right in your lap. Its spirit is steeped in Rodgers and Hammerstein decency that propels an evening that's adventurous, romantic and, yeah, kinda hip. That said, the work of Andrew Lippa (score) and John August (book, based on his own screenplay of Daniel Wallace's novel) is not exactly top shelf musical theatre (although on paper Big Fish easily outclasses any original-run Broadway musical currently on the boards) but director/choreographer Susan Stroman, at the top of her game, whips this warmhearted story into a supremely imaginative and heart-tugging entertainment.

'Big Fish' won't quite reel you in

When Edward proposes to his future wife, Sandra, hundreds of yellow daffodils sparkle against a clear blue sky.Somehow, though, the effect isn't as dazzling, or as moving, as you would hope -- particularly given the talented players involved in this production, which opened Sunday at the Neil Simon Theatre...Butz, Baldwin and Bobby Steggert, as the grownup Will, all bring a sense of genuine humanity to their roles. In the end, though, this Big Fish lacks the imagination or cohesion to reel you in like one of its hero's yarns.

Broadway Review: ‘Big Fish’

Resisting the usual Broadway tendency toward over-production, this show is perfectly scaled to the modest level of Edward's boyish daydreams. Invention, not excess, seems to be the dominant house rule, from the tight choreography, which is quick and clever and never over the top, to the primary-color projections by Benjamin Pearcy that make a comic-book universe of Julian Crouch's sets. William Ivey Long captures the playful vibe with ingenious costumes that move in unexpected ways (like the fishtail of a mermaid's silvery costume) and contribute their own magic to the storytelling (like the witches that materialize from the trees in a forest). The main thing missing from this show - and might have taken the edge off its unlikable hero and unpalatable message - is the mystical sensibility that flavors Southern storytelling. Although supposedly set in Alabama, there's not a hint here, musical or otherwise, of the traditional magic found in regional folktales. The kind of magic that might transform a selfish character like Edward Bloom into the hero of his own dreams.

Big Fish: Theater Review

The musical slaps on the sentiment with a heavy hand, and given that it's ultimately quite moving, that's no crime. But I couldn't get past fundamental problems with the source material...While the lyrics are more literal than imaginative, not to mention doused in Hallmark syrup, Lippa's score is better than his last show, The Adams Family. It freely mixes old-fashioned Tin Pan Alley with pop, using banjos to evocative effect for a show set in Alabama and Mississippi...But many audiences will lap it up, and nobody's begrudging them that. A lot of loving craftsmanship has gone into this musical, and it delivers satisfying entertainment for those who don't mind being emotionally manipulated

A Dad’s Tall Tales and a Down-to-Earth Son

For a show that celebrates tall tales, 'Big Fish' feels curiously stunted. Granted, this movie-inspired musical about a whopper-spinning traveling salesman, which opened on Sunday night at the Neil Simon Theater, is certainly big by most conventional measurements...'Big Fish' fails to forge the crucial connection between its characters and their fantasies. Featuring songs by Andrew Lippa and a book by John August, this musical is about one of those impossible, wonderful, embarrassing fathers whose ghosts have done so much to keep psychiatrists in business...[Susan Stroman] seems to be drawing almost randomly from her bottomless bag of tricks. Yes, her use of dancers to embody an enchanted forest and a campfire is delightful. And it's hard not to chuckle when those two-stepping elephants make a cameo appearance. But if the show is all about the need for personal myths, it has to let its leading mythmaker take charge...Not once did I feel that what I was seeing had been spawned by the teeming mind of Edward Bloom. The show's de facto theme song may advocate 'be the hero' of your own life, but somehow 'Big Fish' turns everyone into a local-color extra.

Hack score undermines Broadway version of ‘Big Fish’

There's a huge gap between what you see and what you hear in 'Big Fish.' Visually speaking, this new Broadway musical is inventive, playful and often downright magical. But then, we expect nothing less from director Susan Stroman, the whiz behind 'The Producers' and 'The Scottsboro Boys.' Unfortunately, Andrew Lippa's score is a hack job stringing one banal non-tune after another. Every time Broadway takes one step forward musically ('Matilda,' 'Once'), it takes two back with safe, witless junk like this. Those who heard Lippa's disposable contribution to 'The Addams Family' can't say they weren't warned.

Big Fish feels like the show that got away. Adapted by John August from his own 2003 screenplay, the musical is built around the tall-or at least well-stretched-tales of an Alabama-born traveling salesman, Edward Bloom (Butz), who has a penchant for embellishing his life...Yet the show is hobbled by a major flaw: Andrew Lippa's thoroughly mediocre score. The music suggests a cross between familiar, inflated Broadway pop and 1970s AM radio; the lyrics vacillate, sometimes line to line, between banal colloquialism and stiltedness... Big Fish has lovely sequences, and earns some sniffles at the end. But it could have been a real catch

‘Big Fish’ Theater Review: It Sings, It Dances, but Wait — Isn’t That ‘The Little Mermaid’?

Very early in the new stage musical 'Big Fish,' director Susan Stroman delivers a splashy ensemble number, 'Be the Hero,' that effectively introduces us to many of the fantastical characters we know from Tim Burton's 2003 film version and the original novel by Daniel Wallace. The difference, however, between seeing them onscreen or reading about these mythic figures is that when they're forced to sing and dance right off the bat with no introduction, there's a distinct feeling of the wrong kind of déjà vu. Is that Ariel from 'The Little Mermaid'? One of the witches from 'Wicked'? The circus ringmaster from 'Pippin'? And the giant from 'Shrek'? Suddenly, they're not archetypes anymore but rather the stars of some 'Best of Broadway' theme-park show...The problem is, neither Stroman's staging nor Andrew Lippa's songs expand upon or deepen our understanding of these stock Broadway figures.

‘Big Fish’: Theater review

Stroman's dances - tap, waltz, hoedowns - are polished but a bit pedestrian. She's famous for wild imagination, but she serves her 'Big Fish' without a showstopper. Lucky for us, she managed to reel in a winner by casting Butz.

'Big Fish' review: Ambitious musical, not exciting

..it's a pleasure to watch [Norbert Leo Butz] engage in the fantastical adventures of both the healthy and the dying Edward Bloom, irrepressible teller of tall stories and bad jokes in 'Big Fish.' In fact, there are many pleasures in this ambitious but disappointing adaptation of Daniel Wallace's Walter Mitty-esque novel and Tim Burton's 2003 movie about a father's inability to make a truthful connection with his serious son...So it's crushing to realize, early on, that this gentle, sincere, beautiful-looking show is deadly dull. Author John August, who also wrote the screenplay, strings sentimentality and hackneyed picaresque escapades together as if they were equivalent balls on a string. Tension never builds, even when Edward's son Will (Bobby Steggert) tries to unravel the father's secret life.

Theater review: Big Fish

The rich, gothic mise-en-scène and seamless transitions of the film are replaced with poor quality songs, a slow pace, excessive sentimentality, one-liners that consistently fail to land, a clumsy structure and an ugly set where video imagery is projected onto what look like barn doors.

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Where to Watch

Rent Big Fish on Fandango at Home, Prime Video, Apple TV, or buy it on Fandango at Home, Prime Video, Apple TV.

What to Know

A charming father-and-son tale filled with typical Tim Burton flourishes, Big Fish is an impressive catch.

Audience Reviews

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Den of Geek

Tim Burton’s Big Fish, Fatherhood, and Storytelling

15 years on, we take another look at Tim Burton's Big Fish, and its father and son relationship...

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This feature contains spoilers for Big Fish .

“Have you ever heard a joke so many times you’ve forgotten why it’s funny? And then you hear it again and suddenly it’s new. You remember why you loved it in the first place.”

In the last two decades of Tim Burton’s filmography, Big Fish feels like something of an outlier. Chronologically, it slots in between his ‘reimaginings’ of Planet Of The Apes and Charlie And The Chocolate Factory , both of which are much more typical of his 21st century output. This film isn’t worlds apart from his usual style, but for once, it’s the substance of the story that connects with his sensibilities as a storyteller.

Based on Daniel Wallace’s book  Big Fish: A Novel Of Mythic Proportions , the film follows the life of Edward Bloom, an extraordinary young man (Ewan McGregor) who grows into an extraordinary old man (Albert Finney), who delights in telling extraordinary stories about his escapades. His son Will (Billy Crudup) is the only one who seems immune to his charm, and as his father reaches the end of his days, he becomes obsessed with finding out the truth behind the stories.

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John August’s hugely quotable script takes the unusual structure of the novel and adapts it into a time-hopping series of vignettes that gradually paints a picture of the relationship between father and son by reconciling their clashing perspectives.

15 years on, it’s still interesting to look back on how the film converts the themes of fatherhood and the importance of storytelling into a visual medium. Burton has no shortage of fans, but the accessible quality of this understated masterpiece shouldn’t be ovelooked next to his more idiosyncratic fare. In Big Fish , the combination of August’s masterful plot structuring and Burton’s directorial sensibilities yields an interesting view of its characters past, present, and future.

Introduction

“Is this a tall tale?”

“Well, it’s not a short one…”

Early on in the film, we’re shown Edward Bloom’s birth, or his version of it anyway. In characteristically preposterous fashion, the new-born baby shoots right out of his mother and slides down a hospital corridor, sending doctors and visitors sprawling in his wake. Although Wallace’s novel was destined for adaptation before it was even published, its delivery was similarly unusual.

August read the manuscript six months before publication, and got Columbia Pictures to option the rights for him. With its adventurous emotional core and unusual structure, the resulting script attracted the attention of none other than Steven Spielberg, who wanted to make the film after he finished Minority Report , with Jack Nicholson playing the role of Edward Bloom.

Dad issues are a big recurring theme through Spielberg’s work, so this probably would have been right in his wheelhouse. However, his notes to August were to give the senior Edward more to do to make it more of a star vehicle for Nicholson. A few script drafts later, Spielberg’s attention was captured by Catch Me If You Can instead, and he reportedly admitted to the producers that he’d been off the mark in changing the script.

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The script came to Burton, and in the main, he’s definitely the better choice. When someone figures out a VPN for parallel universe versions of Netflix, the Spielberg-Nicholson version will probably be worth a watch, but what makes the film itself such a masterpiece is the match of a different director’s sensibilities with a Spielberg-level project.

He nails the Southern Gothic tone and there’s plenty of opportunity to enjoy himself with macabre characters – because of course Danny DeVito turns out to have been a werewolf the whole time. But what’s really unusual about this is that both the director and the screenwriter lost their fathers before coming to this particular project.

August was first attracted to the project because he saw something of himself in Will, having trained as a journalist and not known as much about his father as he’d like, whereas Burton had sadly lost both of his parents in almost as many years. Even if it is based on a pre-existing story, there’s an in-built catharsis to these two creative forces coming together to tell this particular story of a man looking for his dad.

“Kept in a small bowl, the goldfish will remain small. With more space, the fish will double, triple, or quadruple its size.”

All of Big Fish ‘s tall tales are glorious. Much of the film takes place through the senior Edward’s stories about his adventures, and every single new development is funny, surprising, and delightful to watch. McGregor and Finney are both affecting an Alabama accent for this, and somehow, they’re perfectly matched as the same character at different ends of his life.

As Will shakes his head in the present day, we’re as beguiled as everybody else in the story by his tales of witches, giants, secret towns, and all the other escapades he had. It’s not until later that we come to grasp why Will hates these stories, and as pure magical realism, they’re really entertaining to watch.

The film has a lot of fun playing with Edward’s unreliability as a narrator for laughs too. As a boy, he and his classmates look into a witch’s eye and see a vision of how they’re going to die. Then at one point when the older Edward gets lost in an apparently haunted forest, with trees wrapping their branches around him, he simply proclaims “Wait, this isn’t how I die” at the exact moment that the narrator reminds him, and with one bound, he’s free.

The next such moment is memorable for other reasons, as Edward plays on the old cliché that time stops when you first meet the love of your life. Cue an iconic slow-motion scene as Edward crosses a circus ring to try and reach his future wife, Sandra, that’s quickly punctured when he adds “the thing they don’t tell you, is that once time starts again, it moves extra fast to catch up.” Sandra eludes him because the film around him speeds up while he remains at regular speed.

It’s a wonderful visual trick, but what’s interesting about the passage that follows is that the fantasy gets dialled down a bit. It’s still very, very romantic, but there’s not so much fantasy to Edward’s determined wooing of Sandra. By the same token, we’re reminded that it’s still very much one storyteller’s perspective, as Sandra’s current boyfriend Don gets pretty short shrift in the grand scheme of things.

We’re inclined to believe Edward’s stories about the life he has led, but his description of himself as a big fish in a small pond, comparing himself to a legendary uncatchable Beast in the parable he tells from Will’s childhood right up to his wedding day, points to the motivation behind his son’s bitterness. From the very beginning of the film, the trips to the past also count earlier memories of Edward telling Will his stories, and growing ever more exasperated as he grows into adulthood.

The present

“You spend years trying to corrupt and mislead this child, fill his head with nonsense, and still it turns out perfectly fine.”

On his wedding night, Will has a falling-out with Edward over the umpteenth telling of his story about the Beast. The tale of fighting a giant catfish that ate his wedding ring is his head-canon reason for missing his son’s birth. Will sees this as a bit of a wind-up, and they barely talk until three years later, when we find Edward stricken by terminal cancer.

To Will’s annoyance, his wife Joséphine (Marion Cotillard) is utterly charmed by Edward. She’s expecting their first child, and the fact that he’s about to become a father himself clearly motivates his arc. While comparing his dad to an iceberg (which immediately provokes an anecdote about the time he saw a mammoth frozen inside one in Texas), he inadvertently hurts his feelings by accusing him of not being himself.

If Edward’s side of the story is Forrest Gump , Will’s is Citizen Kane . He’s a journalist, and while his father bemoans his son going into a storytelling profession that focuses on facts and leaves out “the interesting parts”, we see those instincts at work as he tries to find out what was really going on with this unknowable figure in his life.

When the flashbacks catch up with Will’s birth, the story flips to his perspective for a while, as he looks into his father’s time as a travelling salesman (another iteration of the fish who’s always on the move), when he built a trust to save the mythical town of Spectre from ruin. He goes out there himself and meets Jenny (Helena Bonham Carter), his father’s fellow trustee.

In Will’s mind, the absence of his father has led to him speculating that he must have cheated on his mother. For a while, that bias seems to colour his search for the truth. Resenting the fact that his dad was on the road has led him to imagine the worst of him, and he hopes to get some answers from Jenny.

The truth turns out to be more banal, but the reveal of Bonham Carter’s dual role in the film as the witch from back when Edward was a boy literally brings the story around full circle. Will says that logically she couldn’t have been the witch, because the timing doesn’t work out, but Jenny counters that there are only two women in Edward’s life – Sandra “and everyone else”. Once again, it’s a canny bit of visual storytelling that marks the cleverness of the adaptation.

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Will returns home to find his father’s condition has worsened, which is when he finally learns the story of the day he was born. As the family doctor (Robert Guillaume) tells him, if it’s a choice between missing the birth because he was on the road, trying to make money for his family back in the days when he wouldn’t have been allowed in the delivery room anyway, or the tall tale, maybe the tall tale is preferable.

“A man tells his stories so many times that he becomes the stories. They live on after him, and in that way he becomes immortal.”

As the film reaches its climax, we learn the only story that Edward never told was the story of his own death; the vision he saw in the witch’s eye. He claims he wouldn’t like to spoil the ending, but the emotional crux of the story comes as he asks Will to tell him the story himself.

Won over at last, Will spins a yarn about the two of them breaking out of hospital, meeting lots of the other characters on their way down to the river. Once in the water, Edward literally becomes “a really big fish” and swims away for good. Smiling, he passes away peacefully in bed. Spielberg couldn’t have done it better.

This final sequence is simultaneously joyous and tear-jerking, and finally comes around to reconciling the duelling perspectives of father and son. It’s matched only by the funeral that follows, where Will meets many of the people his father described in person for the first time.

Once again, we see that some of them aren’t exactly as advertised in the stories, but Will gets the catharsis he was looking for. We’re afforded a glimpse of him telling his own son the same stories in the future, and another circle closes as the film comes to an end.

Burton has rarely matched this fulsome mix of quirkiness and emotion in his work since, and it’s remarkable how understated the use of special effects is in this film next to pretty much everything else he’s made. In the near future, he’ll return to the trend of live-action Disney remakes that was kicked off by his Alice In Wonderland , with next year’s Dumbo , which coincidentally features Danny DeVito as a circus ringmaster once again.

With 2014’s Big Eyes representing another departure, maybe we can figure out how to detect a big palate cleanser every once in a while. Elsewhere, August’s relationship with this story continued when he wrote the book for the musical adaptation of Big Fish , which debuted on Broadway in 2013, and came to the West End in 2017. The strength of his screen adaptation should be enough to get you interested in how he’s translated it once again for the stage.

If Big Fish were only the quotable, entertaining Southern Gothic trifle that Edward tells, it would be one thing, but it’s the way in which it uses cinematic devices to adapt a story about storytelling that makes it an underappreciated modern classic.

Mark Harrison | @MHarrison90

Mark is a writer from Middlesbrough, who once drunkenly tried (and failed) to pitch a film about his hometown to a director from Pixar. Fortunately, he…

September 7, 1952 Hemingway's Tragic Fisherman By ROBERT GORHAM DAVIS THE OLD MAN AND THE SEA By Ernest Hemingway. he "Old Man" is a Cuban, without money to buy proper gear or even food, and past the days of his greatest strength, when he was "El CampÈon" of the docks. He fishes for his living, far out in the Gulf Stream, in a skiff with patched sails. It is September, the month of hurricanes and of the biggest fish. After eighty-four luckless days a marlin strikes his bait a hundred fathoms below the boat. The old man, Santiago, is "fast to the biggest fish that he had ever seen and bigger than he had ever heard of." The ultimate is now demanded of the craft which a half-century of fishing has taught him. It is a tale superbly told and in the telling Ernest Hemingway uses all the craft his hard, disciplined trying over so many years has given him. Both craft--writing and fishing--are clearly in mind when the old man Santiago thinks of the strangeness of his powers as fisherman. "The thousand times that he had proved it meant nothing. Now he was proving it again. Each time was a new time and he never thought about the past when he was doing it." When the boy who took care of him asked if he was strong enough now for a truly big fish, he said, "I think so. And there are many tricks." In "Big Two-Hearted River," one of the best and happiest of his early short stories, Hemingway sent a young man very like himself off alone on a fishing trip in completely deserted country in northern Michigan. They young man, Nick, needed to be alone and to control his thinking with physical tiredness and to get back to something in himself to which memories of fishing seemed to offer a clue. The actual fishing was even better than his memories of it. He "felt all the old feeling." The trip was a success because Nick, grateful for the purity of his pleasure, was able to set himself limits. He did not go into the deep water of the swamp where the biggest fish were, but where it might be impossible to land them. "In the fast deep water, in the half light, the fishing would be tragic. In the swamp fishing was a tragic adventure. Nick did not want it." There was plenty of time for that kind of fishing in the days to come. "The Old Man and the Sea" written more than twenty-five years later, in the maturity of Hemingway's art, is a novella whose action is directly, cleanly and, as he would say, "truly" told. And in it Hemingway has described a fishing adventure which is tragic, or as close to tragedy as fishing may be. In "The Old Man and the Sea," as in the early "Big Two-Hearted River," the art and the truth come from a sense of limits. In the new story, however, a man exceeds the limits, and pays a price for it that is more than his own suffering. The line of dramatic action in "The Old Man and the Sea" curves up and down with a classic purity of design to delight the makers of textbooks. But what Santiago brings back suggests something new about Hemingway himself, defines an attitude never so clearly present in his other work. Hemingway's heroes have nearly always been defeated, or have died, and have lost what they loved, even though the stories seemed at first to celebrate purely physical courage and prowess. The important thing was the code fought by, and keeping the right feeling toward what was fought for, and when something had been won, not to let the sharks have it. Usually the hero has been alone in his defeat, like Lieutenant Henry in "Farewell to Arms," walking back to his hotel in the rain, or Robert Jordan dying at the bridge in "For Whom the Bell Tolls," or Harry Morgan, also a Gulf fisherman, in "To Have and Have Not," gasping out, with a bullet through his stomach, "One man alone ain't got no bloody. . .chance." Often his people have been profoundly bitter in defeat, like Belmonte, the matador, in "The Sun Also Rises," sick with a fistula, jeered at by the crowd, putting his head on the barrera, not seeing or hearing anything, just going through his pain, or the demoted Colonel Cantwell in "Across the River and into the Trees," trying to find abusive enough epithets for Truman and the political generals and a writer whose face he doesn't like. "Seems like when they get started they don't leave a guy nothing," the boy says at the end of "My Old Man." This is the nothingness, the "nada" of the famous parody of the Lord's Prayer in "A Clean Well-Lighted Place." This is the world of the non-religious existentialists like Heidegger and Sartre, a world of self-imposed codes and devotions sustained wholly by the courage and will of the individual, by his capacity for facing his own truths, for leading an "authentic" existence. If he fails, he encounters nothingness, meaninglessness, both in human society and the indifferent realm of nature. In "The Old Man and the Sea," it is all quite different. The old man has learned humility, which he knew "was not disgraceful, and carried no less of true pride." Humility understands the limits of what a man can do alone, and knows how much his being, the worth and humanity of his being, depends on community with other men and with nature, which is here the sea. Santiago has the language to express this, as the American Harry Morgan did not. Santiago speaks in those formalized idioms from the Romance languages which in so many of Hemingway's stories have served to express ideas of dignity, propriety and love. Santiago lives in a good town where he had been happy with his wife, and where there is now the boy. He had taught the boy fishing, and the boy loves him. "QuÈ va," the boy says devotedly. "There are many good fishermen and some great ones. But there is only you." Hemingway we know was himself a champion, a great winner of boxing matches and game fishing contests at Key West and in the Bahamas in the Thirties. But in the later stories, in an uncomfortably personal way, it seemed not enough for the hero to know he was a champion. He needed adulation from those around him, from waiters, people of old families and especially sexually satisfied women who had so little being apart from him that they created none of the moral demands, the difficult ups and downs of any normal human relationship. It is a little like this with Santiago and the boy, but the old man, to repeat, has humility, and the shared craft of fishing is a reality between them. What he brings back to the boy at the end of the story implies a human continuity and development that far transcends this individual relationship. When Santiago says "Man is not made for defeat," he is not thinking primarily of the individual. Even without the boy Santiago is not alone on a sea, which, with its creatures, he knows well and loves with discrimination. The sea is feminine for him, as it is not for the motorboat men. The Gulf Stream takes him out where he wants to go, and the trade winds bring him back, with lights of Havana to guide him. When the huge marlin strikes, he is bound in shared suffering with a fellow creature for whom he finds adjectives like "calm" and "beautiful" and "noble." Santiago does not like to kill, and he does like to think, except about sin, which he is not sure he believes in. Santiago's simplicity together with the articulateness of his soliloquies sometimes makes him seem a personified attitude of his complex creator rather than a concrete personality in his own right. The action is wonderfully particularized, but not the man to whom it happens and who gives it meaning. The talk of baseball, of the "great DiMaggio" and the "Tigres" of Detroit does not help in this. And the references to sin inevitably recall that other American story of the pursuit of a big fish in which Melville went rather more deeply down among "the strong, troubled, murderous thinkings of the masculine sea," that dark invisible sphere formed "in fright" as well as love. But these are simply the bounds rather than the faults of a short tale magnificently told. Like "Across the River and into the Trees," "The Old Man and the Sea" (a September Book-of-the-Month dual choice) is an interruption in the long major work which has engaged Hemingway since the war. But it is not a disturbing interruption, as "Across the River" sometimes was in its moments of tastelessness and spleen. In his imagination of the fishing in "The Old Man and the Sea," Hemingway has, like the young man in "Big Two-Hearted River," got back to something good and true in himself, that has always been there. And with it are new indications of humility and maturity and a deeper sense of being at home in life which promise well for the novel in the making. Hemingway is still a great writer, with the strength and craft and courage to go far out, and perhaps even far down, for the truly big ones. Mr. Davis, Professor of English at Smith College, writes frequently of the techniques of creative writing. Return to the Books Home Page

Big Fish 2003

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Terry Lawson, Detroit Free Press : Burton has not given his imagination such free rein since Edward Scissorhands, and this stands with that and the equally generous Ed Wood as one of his best movies. Read more

Moira MacDonald, Seattle Times : Burton's fabled imagination runs wild with this material, and Big Fish often achieves a whimsical, poetic beauty. Read more

Michael Wilmington, Chicago Tribune : Big Fish is so strange and so literary that audiences seeking conventional fare may get impatient with it. But it always takes effort to catch the big ones. This one is worth it. Read more

Richard Roeper, Ebert & Roeper : ... an amazing looking film. Read more

Eleanor Ringel Gillespie, Atlanta Journal-Constitution : Mostly confined to bed throughout the film, Finney pulls us to him with a flawless combination of theatrical skill and movie-star radiance. Read more

Wesley Morris, Boston Globe : The picture's images linger. Read more

Manohla Dargis, Los Angeles Times : Big fish often swim in small ponds, but in Tim Burton's wistful new film about a son, a father and the lies that come between them there are no small ponds -- just big, bright movie sets shimmering and bubbling with the director's imagination. Read more

Jonathan Rosenbaum, Chicago Reader : Burton shows the rivalry between father and son but not the rancor, which seems to fit with the film's calm lyricism. But the father-son conflict is meant as the dramatic crux, and a forceful actor would have given it some much-needed bite. Read more

Eric Harrison, Houston Chronicle : An enchanting tale from Tim Burton that weaves together reality and myth so touchingly it hardly matters which is which. Read more

Paul Clinton (CNN.com), CNN.com : A compelling look at the relationships between fathers and sons, and the child coming to terms with the parent's mortality. Read more

Lisa Kennedy, Denver Post : A bountiful pleasure. Read more

Owen Gleiberman, Entertainment Weekly : A gently overstuffed cinematic pinata, crammed with tall tales -- with giants and circuses and fairy-tale woods, plus a huge squirmy catfish, all served up with a literal matter-of-fact fancy that is very pleasing. Read more

Philip Wuntch, Dallas Morning News : Offers its audience a long and winding road, with refreshing pauses. And it proves that mega-budgets have not spoiled Tim Burton's vision. Read more

Ella Taylor, L.A. Weekly : The whole seems disjointed, incoherent and lacking in the startling originality of the other two Edwards (Scissorhands and Wood) who, half a career back, poured from Burton's distended outsider imagination. Read more

John Anderson, Newsday : Big Fish flounders largely because Burton leaves out the meaning of the story, which was about the seductive power of fiction. In offering no meaning besides pictures, Big Fish has no power at all. Read more

Peter Rainer, New York Magazine/Vulture : Overall, the film feels like it issues from a place Burton doesn't inhabit. Read more

Stephen Whitty, Newark Star-Ledger : Burton's best film since Edward Scissorhands. Read more

Jack Mathews, New York Daily News : The movie has a great deal of charm and several good performances, but it is the son's judgmental doggedness that sets the story in motion and leads to its mawkish conclusion. It's a hurdle I couldn't get over. Read more

Andrew Sarris, New York Observer : Not only is Mr. Burton at the top of his form in endowing his tallest stories and wildest magical conceits with emotional conviction, but he is aided by a superb acting ensemble that never loses its footing in the treacherous swamps of make-believe. Read more

Rex Reed, New York Observer : A load of tripe that no attempt on my part could make sound half as pretentious and conceited as it really is. Read more

A.O. Scott, New York Times : The most curious thing about this magical-realist fable ... is how thin and soft it is, how unpersuasive and ultimately forgettable even its most strenuous inventions turn out to be. Read more

Roger Moore, Orlando Sentinel : Herniated whimsy -- straining, as labored as those poor Brits who stuff their mouths with grits and try to talk like Southerners. Read more

James Berardinelli, ReelViews : Big Fish is a clever, smart fantasy that targets the child inside every adult, without insulting the intelligence of either. Read more

Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times : There is no denying that Will has a point: The old man is a blowhard. There is a point at which his stories stop working as entertainment and segue into sadism. Read more

Stephanie Zacharek, Salon.com : You'd think that Burton, whose movies can be so invigoratingly nasty or so hypnotically moody, would be able to pull off a gentle, mainstream crowd-pleaser without making it dull or preachy. But Big Fish is both. Read more

Mick LaSalle, San Francisco Chronicle : A long-winded indulgence in tear-and-a-smile whimsy. Read more

Colin Covert, Minneapolis Star Tribune : Burton, who has clung to the trappings of precocious genius well into his 40s, demonstrates a new emotional maturity. Read more

Peter Howell, Toronto Star : A change-up delivery from a director seeking relief from his artful image, the movie wants to catch our ears rather than our eyes, and it does so without completely reeling us in. Read more

Richard Corliss, TIME Magazine : Big Fish makes a big push for transcendence, but the strain shows. It's like trying to push a daydream uphill. Read more

Geoff Andrew, Time Out : The film doesn't so much reject history as selectively rewrite it to its own reactionary, even offensive ends. This might perhaps be just about tolerable were the film funny, illuminating, insightful or moving. It is not. Read more

Mike Clark, USA Today : Big Fish takes a while to get its bearings, but it gets better and better. Read more

Todd McCarthy, Variety : The imaginatively illustrated but precariously precious film offers up a string of minor pleasures but never becomes more than moderately amusing or involving. Read more

J. Hoberman, Village Voice : The ideas keep percolating, but in the absence of any particular tension, the movie has its longueurs. Read more

Stephen Hunter, Washington Post : Somewhat like Forrest Gump on a high colonic. Read more

Desson Thomson, Washington Post : A disappointingly dull thud of a fantasy. Read more

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‘Big Fish’ on Broadway: What did the critics think?

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“Big Fish,” the new musical based on the 2003 Tim Burton movie -- as well as the original novel by Daniel Wallace -- made its big splash on Broadway over the weekend, opening at the Neil Simon Theatre.

With an A-list Broadway team, including actor Norbert Leo Butz and director-choreographer Susan Stroman, the production is aiming high as the first big musical of the Broadway season.

Among the show’s lead producers are Dan Jinks and Bruce Cohen -- the movie-producing duo behind the Burton film. Also returning is screenwriter John August , who adapted the Wallace novel for the screen and who has penned the book for the musical.

CRITICS’ PICKS: What to watch, where to go, what to eat

Butz takes on the character of Edward Bloom, originated in the movie by Ewan McGregor (and by Albert Finney in Bloom’s later years). The character’s son, played by Billy Crudup in the film, is played on stage by Bobby Steggert.

“Big Fish” had a tryout run in Chicago, where it opened in April. At the time, Chicago Tribune critic Chris Jones called it a “worthy, seriously ambitious new tuner” but said it needed some creative fine-tuning before transferring to New York.

The story follows the elder Bloom as he spins fantastical stories of dubious veracity, taking viewers on a ride through the backwoods of the American South.

CHEAT SHEET: Fall arts preview

Ben Brantley of the New York Times wrote that Butz is forced to “coast on his charm, while scenery happens around him, bringing to mind an affable Disney World guide who has discovered he is not the main attraction.”

Bloomberg’s Jeremy Gerard described the production as “enchanting,” though mostly in the second act. Butz, Gerard writes, hasn’t had “such a meaty role since ‘Dirty Rotten Scoundrels,’ ” and possesses that “indefinable charismatic spark that defines a star.”

Linda Winer of Newsday called the show “ambitious but disappointing.” Butz, she writes, has “an exuberance that never feels even slightly dishonest and an intelligence that refuses to condescend to his most outrageous characters.”

The Hollywood Reporter’s David Rooney wrote that “a lot of loving craftsmanship has gone into this musical, and it delivers satisfying entertainment for those who don’t mind being emotionally manipulated.”

Screenwriter struggled to transform ‘Big Fish’ into Broadway musical

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David Ng is a former Company Town reporter for the Los Angeles Times.

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Theater | Review: ‘Big Fish’ at Marriott Theatre promises…

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Theater | review: ‘big fish’ at marriott theatre promises eternal life but needs to more believe in itself.

Marriott Theatre

Alexander Gemignani, Heidi Kettenring, Ayana Strutz and Lucy Godinez in "Big Fish," presented through March 19 at Marriott Theatre in Lincolnshire.

The cast of "Big Fish" at Marriott Theatre in Lincolnshire.

Commercially successful theater usually promises audiences immortality. The message likely will be hidden by metaphor, but the idea of passing on yourself, and what you stand for, to future generations, of death merely being a change in form, is inextricable from the genre. It doesn’t matter if the show is set on the Serengeti, in revolution-strewn Paris or in Anatevka. That’s why people go to musicals; they just think it’s for the tunes.

“Big Fish,” the Andrew Lippa-scored musical that had a pre-Broadway tryout in Chicago back in 2013 , is a show that understands that truth. I’ve had great affection for this piece, which was based both on the 1998 Daniel Wallace novel and the 2003 Tim Burton movie, not least because this fragile show found itself quickly (and unfairly) beached on Broadway , despite a warm-centered Alabama story, a beautiful score and luminous performances from Kate Baldwin and Norbert Leo Butz. So I am glad the Marriott Theatre is reviving a piece that surely will speak to many in this suburban theater’s loyal audience. I only wish Henry Godinez’s production, which has a stellar cast, plumbed more of the emotional depths of the work.

That’s not to say “Big Fish” does not have flaws in its book. It’s centered on a father and son, both longing to connect more fully than ever has been the case. An iconoclastic traveling salesman named Edward Bloom (Alexander Gemignani) has been a loving dad to his son Will (Michael Kurowski), but as the kid reaches adulthood, he becomes frustrated by how he was weaned on tall tales mostly featuring his father as the hero. The first scene of the musical involves Will, about to marry, declaring how his now-aging dad is like an iceberg because only a small percentage of him ever is visible.

And thus we join Will on this quest for knowledge even as we watch his father’s richly encapsulated stories unspool on the stage in flashbacks as he tells them to his boy. The show wants to keep you guessing about what is true here and what’s fiction, along with the corollary matter of whether, at the end of the day, the distinction actually matters. The stories have an edge to them: Edward has declared a lifelong love of wife Sandra (Heidi Kettenring), but he also speaks obliquely of an old girlfriend, Jenny (Allison Sill).

The show is hard to stage (Burton movies are not easy to adapt) and it presents both an overly passive female lead in Sandra and, in Will, a role that requires being mad at a fun dad for most of the show. That’s hard to pull off. Adding to the difficulties is Marriott’s cheap and confounding choice to produce the reduced 12-actor version of the show (half the cast of the original staging), meaning roles that used to be principals are now ensemble parts, which confuses the audience and spoils the show’s original structure. As a leading musical house, Marriott should be hiring more actors and giving its audiences the full monty.

Speaking generally, though, “Big Fish” only works if it accepts everything told by Edward Bloom as truth, at least in the storyteller’s eyes and that’s where this choppy, strident and overly stereotypical production struggles. Often it complicates everything needlessly: as one example, Kettenring sings the show’s most beautiful ballad, “I Don’t Need a Roof” as if the couple is in crisis and she needs to persuade her husband of her love; in reality, the couple already knows all of that and the song works best as a gentle, beautiful reminder of the surety of marriage.

That sweetness, that belief in the mythologies of life, that gentle sense of older and wiser people coming to terms with life’s disappointments and mysteries is what this production struggles to find, notwithstanding truly an A-list cast, including the luminous Kettenring and Gemignani (“Hamilton”), a recent Chicago-area arrival who will be a huge asset to our musical theater community. In the final few minutes, these gifted actors begin to find that quality, but it’s a long wait.

Still, the audience around me was clearly moved; I was struck by how many people clearly had forgotten the film now (time moves on) and, of course, “Big Fish” is a show about familial love and its capacity to make our exits less painful. That will always have power in the theater, even if I’m still waiting for “Big Fish” to get the production it long has deserved.

Chris Jones is a Tribune critic.

[email protected]

Review: “Big Fish” (2.5 stars)

When: Through March 19

Where: 10 Marriott Drive, Lincolnshire

Running time: 2 hours, 30 minutes

Tickets: $59-$64 at 847-634-0200 and marriottheatre.com

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A Novel of Mythic Proportions

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By Daniel Wallace

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• Trade Paperback $17.99 $23.99 CAD
• ebook $10.99 $13.99 CAD

This item is a preorder. Your payment method will be charged immediately, and the product is expected to ship on or around May 15, 2012. This date is subject to change due to shipping delays beyond our control.

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Description

The classic novel that inspired the beloved Tim Burton film and the Broadway musical. In his prime, Edward Bloom was an extraordinary man. He could outrun anybody. He never missed a day of school. He saved lives and tamed giants. Animals loved him, people loved him, women loved him. He knew more jokes than any man alive. At least that’s what he told his son, William. But now Edward Bloom is dying, and William wants desperately to know the truth about his elusive father—this indefatigable teller of tall tales—before it’s too late. So, using the few facts he knows, William re-creates Edward’s life in a series of legends and myths, through which he begins to understand his father’s great feats, and his great failings. The result is hilarious and wrenching, tender and outrageous.

• “A charming whopper of a tale.” — The San Diego Union-Tribune “Both comic and poignant.” — The New York Times “Refreshing, original . . . Wallace mixes the mundane and the mythical. His chapters have the transformative quality of fable and fairy tale.” — Publishers Weekly , starred review“A comic novel about death, about the mysteries of parents and the redemptive power of storytelling.” — USA Today “An audacious, highly original debut novel . . . An imaginative, and moving, record of a son’s love for a charming, unknowable father.” — Kirkus Reviews

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Daniel Wallace

About the author.

Daniel Wallace is the author of six novels, including  Big Fish,  which was adapted and released as a movie and a Broadway musical. His novels have been translated into over three-dozen languages. His essays and interviews have been published in  The Bitter Southerner, Garden & Gun, Poets & Writers  and  Our State  magazine, where he was, for a short time, the barbecue critic. His short stories have appeared in over fifty magazines and periodicals. He was awarded the Harper Lee Award, given to a nationally recognized Alabama writer who has made a significant lifelong contribution to Alabama letters. He was inducted into the Alabama Literary Hall of Fame in 2022. He is the J. Ross MacDonald Distinguished Professor of English at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

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by Daniel Wallace ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 2, 1998

An audacious, highly original debut novel, in which a son attempts to resolve the mysteries surrounding his father by re-creating the man’s life as a series of exuberant tall tales. Edward Bloom has grown wealthy running his own import/export business. Restlessly wandering the world, he has returned home to see his wife and son only at rare, unpredictable intervals. Now, however, he’s come home to die, and William is desperate to understand something of his father’s life and character before he vanishes. But his father, an incorrigible jokester, deflects all of his son’s queries with one-liners. A baffled William, waiting for the end, begins to create a series of tall tales in which his enigmatic parent is remade as a paradigmatic American folk hero. Growing up in Alabama as a “strong quiet boy, with a mind of his own,” this mythic version of Edward has an affinity with wild animals and the uncanny. He reads every book in town, tames a lonely giant who has taken to eating the locals— crops and dogs, and hitches a ride on a giant catfish. As a young man he saves a child from an unearthly dog, rescues a lovely water spirit, and returns an enchanted eye to its rightful owner. As a wealthy older man he preserves a small southern town from the rancorous present by becoming its feudal lord. William narrates these stories in a language that nicely mixes the simplicity and tang of the folk tale with a droll, knowing sense of humor. All the episodes seem infused with a defiant, despairing love; in the end, the dying Edward outwits death by transforming himself into (literally) a “big fish,” which his son returns to its ancestral waters. More a series of ingenious sketches than a cohesive novel, but, still, a vigorous updating of the purely American genre of the tall tale—as well as an imaginative, and moving, record of a son’s love for a charming, unknowable father. (Author tour)

Pub Date: Oct. 2, 1998

ISBN: 1-56512-217-8

Page Count: 196

Publisher: Algonquin

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1998

LITERARY FICTION

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More by Daniel Wallace

BOOK REVIEW

by Daniel Wallace ; illustrated by William Nealy

by Daniel Wallace

THE MOST FUN WE EVER HAD

by Claire Lombardo ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 25, 2019

Characters flip between bottomless self-regard and pitiless self-loathing while, as late as the second-to-last chapter, yet...

Four Chicago sisters anchor a sharp, sly family story of feminine guile and guilt.

Newcomer Lombardo brews all seven deadly sins into a fun and brimming tale of an unapologetically bougie couple and their unruly daughters. In the opening scene, Liza Sorenson, daughter No. 3, flirts with a groomsman at her sister’s wedding. “There’s four of you?” he asked. “What’s that like?” Her retort: “It’s a vast hormonal hellscape. A marathon of instability and hair products.” Thus begins a story bristling with a particular kind of female intel. When Wendy, the oldest, sets her sights on a mate, she “made sure she left her mark throughout his house—soy milk in the fridge, box of tampons under the sink, surreptitious spritzes of her Bulgari musk on the sheets.” Turbulent Wendy is the novel’s best character, exuding a delectable bratty-ness. The parents—Marilyn, all pluck and busy optimism, and David, a genial family doctor—strike their offspring as impossibly happy. Lombardo levels this vision by interspersing chapters of the Sorenson parents’ early lean times with chapters about their daughters’ wobbly forays into adulthood. The central story unfurls over a single event-choked year, begun by Wendy, who unlatches a closed adoption and springs on her family the boy her stuffy married sister, Violet, gave away 15 years earlier. (The sisters improbably kept David and Marilyn clueless with a phony study-abroad scheme.) Into this churn, Lombardo adds cancer, infidelity, a heart attack, another unplanned pregnancy, a stillbirth, and an office crush for David. Meanwhile, youngest daughter Grace perpetrates a whopper, and “every day the lie was growing like mold, furring her judgment.” The writing here is silky, if occasionally overwrought. Still, the deft touches—a neighborhood fundraiser for a Little Free Library, a Twilight character as erotic touchstone—delight. The class calibrations are divine even as the utter apolitical whiteness of the Sorenson world becomes hard to fathom.

Pub Date: June 25, 2019

ISBN: 978-0-385-54425-2

Page Count: 544

Publisher: Doubleday

Review Posted Online: March 3, 2019

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2019

LITERARY FICTION | FAMILY LIFE & FRIENDSHIP

More About This Book

SEEN & HEARD

HOUSE OF LEAVES

by Mark Z. Danielewski ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 6, 2000

The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and...

An amazingly intricate and ambitious first novel - ten years in the making - that puts an engrossing new spin on the traditional haunted-house tale.

Texts within texts, preceded by intriguing introductory material and followed by 150 pages of appendices and related "documents" and photographs, tell the story of a mysterious old house in a Virginia suburb inhabited by esteemed photographer-filmmaker Will Navidson, his companion Karen Green (an ex-fashion model), and their young children Daisy and Chad.  The record of their experiences therein is preserved in Will's film The Davidson Record - which is the subject of an unpublished manuscript left behind by a (possibly insane) old man, Frank Zampano - which falls into the possession of Johnny Truant, a drifter who has survived an abusive childhood and the perverse possessiveness of his mad mother (who is institutionalized).  As Johnny reads Zampano's manuscript, he adds his own (autobiographical) annotations to the scholarly ones that already adorn and clutter the text (a trick perhaps influenced by David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest ) - and begins experiencing panic attacks and episodes of disorientation that echo with ominous precision the content of Davidson's film (their house's interior proves, "impossibly," to be larger than its exterior; previously unnoticed doors and corridors extend inward inexplicably, and swallow up or traumatize all who dare to "explore" their recesses).  Danielewski skillfully manipulates the reader's expectations and fears, employing ingeniously skewed typography, and throwing out hints that the house's apparent malevolence may be related to the history of the Jamestown colony, or to Davidson's Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph of a dying Vietnamese child stalked by a waiting vulture.  Or, as "some critics [have suggested,] the house's mutations reflect the psychology of anyone who enters it."

Pub Date: March 6, 2000

ISBN: 0-375-70376-4

Page Count: 704

Publisher: Pantheon

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2000

More by Mark Z. Danielewski

by Mark Z. Danielewski

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