Pond Life
Having just returned from seeing Big Fish, I’ll agree with Outside Counsel’s assessment of the film. There are two aspects I’d like to address of what made the movie work for me, which I guess amounts to criticism, although it doesn’t feel that way, putting me in line with the television pundits more than I’d like, I suppose. The first thing that struck me was in the father-son relationship, which had its surface “factuality” in the son’s dispute with his father’s fabulism: who is his father, if his stories are unreliable. I don’t buy this entirely, but I’m bringing a bit of baggage with me. My father’s stories were undervalued by me as a child, and he didn’t tell a lot of them, to my recollection, until lately, and now I’m a bit further off in the world than makes hearing the story of his life particularly feasible. M. had the inspiration from her brief talks with Dad to offer him a leather-bound diary one year for his birthday, but I left the movie feeling rather sad, not to mention fairly desperate, at the thought that this might be my best hope of getting his version of events. I’m not sure what else I can do, but I know I need to hear a lot more. Everything so far has been gold: sometimes ore, sometimes refined, sometimes tarnished, but always worth its weight.

After I’d thought about this for a while, it also struck me that this is a particularly American movie, not the way some movies are – horror films are the most peculiarly American; gangsters and westerns quintessential forms, along with musicals – but in that it was expressive of something that in the last hundred years, certainly in the years since the invention of cinema, something that is characteristic, idiosyncratic of America itself: it is a country founded and grown up on the absolute belief in the infinite possibilities of life. America recognizes no boundary to what can be achieved or what might yet happen, and I cannot recall a movie I’ve seen that is so thoroughly in itself expressive of this, Gone with the Wind’s “After all, tomorrow is another day” philosophy notwithstanding. I say this even knowing that I am now living in one of the few places on earth where this sensibility may be equally applied, and once I’m over being homesick right now, I’ll have to give the comparison some time.