Big Fish Father Son Relationship

Big Fish is a movie about a father with a seemingly vast imagination and a son who is very hesitant to believe a word his father says. Throughout the film, the viewers are exposed to how the two protagonists’ personalities clash. The movie is based on the father, Edward Bloom, and his “tale tales” that everyone except for his son, William, seem to believe. With the gradual realization that he only knows his father based on the stories he tells, Will becomes infuriated when his father makes his stories the subject of their lives. The fallout and eventual mending of a relationship between a father and son in the film Big Fish evaluates the line between fact and fiction with the correlation of time.

The film opens with Edward telling Will one

of his stories about a big catfish and her inability to be caught. Edward claims that he finally caught the fish the day Will was born with his gold wedding ring. Fast-forwarding to the reception of Williams wedding, I realize the Edwards story communicates a very appropriate and valuable message. The fish represents his wife and the wedding ring that he was able to catch her with was a symbol of fidelity for his wife. Edward declares, “The only way to catch an uncatchable women is to offer her a wedding ring.” From the beginning it’s not difficult to determine the factual and fictional aspects of Edwards’s stories. William then confronted his father to tell him that he no longer enjoys his stories as he feels like the context of them, he then very harshly calls upon his idea that the world doesn’t not revolve around his father. This ultimately leads to a detrimental relationship between the two and 3 years of no communication.
After three years of not talking Will receives a phone call from his mother telling him that his father was ill. This scene means the most to me because of Will’s effort to make things better between him and his father. In order to ameliorate their relationship, Will must find out the truth about his father’s life. The film then strays away from reality to explore the fiction behind his father’s stories. Before Will arrives at his parents’ house, a story about the witch of the town of Ashton is told. The significance of this story is that the witch possess a glass eye that will show you the way you die when you look into it. Except, we see how Edwards friends will eventually die, but we never see how Edward will die. He seemed content with the way he passes, but as a viewer, this scene will soon make better sense to me towards the end. When William finally sees his father and tries to get him to drink something, Edward tells him that people shouldn’t worry about him so much because that is not how he dies. This scene in particular was what made it harder for me to differentiate between fact and fiction in Edwards stories.
The relationship between Edward and his wife is the subject of many of his stories.

She’s always tolerated her husband’s stories, possibly because she was able to find the truth in them. Some of Edwards’s stories involving his wife are clearly factual, but at the same time, it’s difficult to separate the fictional aspects. Edward tells Will stories that he’s heard many times before but is willing to listen to not hurt his father. Throughout the rest of the film, Edward narrates and tells his stories which, to me, seem completely make believe. Sadly Edwards’s body only gets weaker and he is checked into a hospital. At the hospital, Will is the only person in the room with his father. After waking up appearing to be in slight shock, Edward tells his son to tell him the story about how he passes. At this moment I realized the purpose of why Edward seemed content with the image of his death in the witch’s eye. For the first time in a long time, Will would find some amount of comfort in the stories his father once told considering that now it’s his job to make his father happy before his inevitable death. Part of Williams’s story is a summarization of the characters from his father’s tales. At the end of Will’s story, he takes his father to the river where everyone from his father’s stories is there and happy to send him off. Will carries his father into the water where his mother is waiting. He tosses her his gold wedding ring and is then carried further into the river by his

son. Finally, Will gently places his father into the water where he becomes the catfish in the story he once told.
The film Big Fish evoked a very strong personal response from me as a viewer. While watching the film, I realized that everyone perceives it differently due to the elaborate details and how they will end up fitting together to create a better picture. Towards the end of this film I realized that Edwards’s stories were completely factual but were exaggerated in way that made them seem almost entirely fictional. Edwards’s main purpose behind sharing his stories with his son was that he hoped that Will would share them with his son to keep the image of him alive. The big fish was Edward all along, representing dreams and imagination that will live on forever just as he hoped his stories would.