"Dad, I have no idea who you are because you’ve never told me a single fact," says Will, the journalist son of a story telling salesman.

"I’ve told a thousand facts, Will. It’s what I do, I tell stories!"

"You tell lies, Dad. You tell amusing lies. . . I believed you. I believed your stories so much longer than I should have." He looks away in shame as he reveals his regret at having trusted his father.

"You think I’m fake?" his father responds.

"Only on the surface, Dad. But it’s all I’ve ever seen." The problem for Will is that he’s about to have a son and, "it would kill me if he went through his whole life never understanding me."

The pain this accusation evokes in the father, played poignantly, heart-breakingly by Albert Finney, lingers on the man’s face as he repeats his son’s statement. "It will kill you, huh? What do you want, Will? Who do you want me to be?"

"Yourself . . . just show me who you are for once."

With clarity and great dignity, Mr. Bloom declares, "I’ve been nothin’ but myself since the day I was born. And if you can’t see that, it’s your failin’, not mine."

As this verbalizes the central conflict of the film, we of course begin to see some pretty unusual (bordering on the mythical) experiences in Will’s helping his folks that confirm "facts" about his father.

By this point, too, our suspicions have been satisfied that there are many meanings to the title:

Big Fish in a little pond

Big Fish that got away

Big Fish is a tall tale

Big Fish is a woman you’ll never catch

Big Fish is the father whose stories about himself make him larger than life...

In a word, the "big fish" is elusive and will get away.

The son needs facts to know his father. Knowing the stories served to disillusion him. It’s obvious to us that the son is blind deaf and dumb—his father is a consummate story teller. THAT’s who he is. If we don’t catch that, then it’s revealed to us as it is revealed to the son in the climax of the film in the dialogue above. Anyone who knows anything about life knows that the story teller is the most important person in the world. Anyone who knows anything about himself knows that a father is the most important person in his life. The most elusive. The most critical to formation. The most difficult to know intimately. The most difficult to individuate from while growing up.

The Irish are the first to implore you not to let the facts get in the way of a good story. But a child in search of himself must first go in search of his father, apparently. Are you searching for the true identity of your father? Answers to all the reasons for the quirks, odd comments, embarrassments in public, strange persisting habits, unexplained gaps in his life’s story? As is also true of a good story, this one, originally told in the novel by Daniel Wallace, and now here by John August and directed by the transcendent, enigmatic Tim Burton, this story may be just what you need on your own journey of self-discovery and the kind of forgiveness that embraces our parents. C. S. Lewis once said that we read to know we’re not alone. Another powerful gift in a good story.

The thin subcutaneous line between what is imaginary and what is imagined...what the truth is and the way the truth is told...is magical in this film. Even the characters seem to not get the difference. "If I had to choose between the true version and an elaborate one involving a fish and a wedding ring, I might choose the fantasy version," says old Dr. Bennet (Robert Guillame) to the waiting son in the hospital at his father’s bedside. Fantasy version? Is that part of the point? We interpret story as fantasy? We can’t bear very much reality, T.S.Eliot says to us and so this reality must be transformed by the way we imagine our lives; is the essence of our embrace of that life, of events, of relationships, of desires, of successes, of failures, of the way things are.

After the son hears the fact of his birth, his father awakens distraught about needing to get to the river. And Will presents to him the story of waking to find his father awaking and ready to escape....

Was it the truth that set him free to participate in his father’s story? His father needs water. His father needs to go to the river. The son colludes by telling his father the story of their conspiratorial escape to the river. Of course, the greatest universal symbol for both life as well as death is the river.

We all know from the very beginning of the story that the fish who got away is the metaphor for the father, and a metaphor encompassing the son’s lifelong pursuit of knowing his father, yet there is far more beauty and satisfaction in the film than the pieces revealed here. The greatest gift the son gives to his father is companionship at the end of his life in the context of the gift the father had given his son since birth: story telling—the gift of dying as he’d lived, in the context of an elaborate story...only to find out that the gift of all his stories was not the lie he had presumed. All the characters embodied in his father’s stories show up at the funeral.

"You become what you always were . . ." The story will save you. It will inform who you are. It will carry on beyond you and a piece of you will become the breath of its life. This is the metaphor of immortality. The thread that connects us all. And it is why we continue to tell the story.