Summary
That night in bed, Josephine tells Will that she talked to his father the previous night. When she confronts him for never telling her how his parents met, he insists that the whimsical details his father included aren't real, to which Josephine says, "but it's romantic." Josephine asks him if he loves his father, and he tells her that he was never around when he was a kid, saying, "He likes his second life better, and the reason he tells these stories is because he can't stand this boring place." Josephine disagrees, and tells Will that he should talk to his father.
The next morning, the family sits around Edward's bed as he eats his breakfast. When Edward goes to tell a story about "the maple tree and the Buick," Will stops him and tells him they've all heard the story before. Even Josephine knows it and tells it to Edward herself. When Sandra and Josephine go to do the dishes, Will and Edward talk.
Will uses the metaphor of an iceberg—the fact that one can only see 10% of it, while the other 90% is below the surface of the water—to describe their relationship and the fact that he doesn't really feel like they know each other. "You tell lies, Dad," says Will, confronting his father about his tall tales, and asking his father to show himself to him. "I've been nothing but myself since the day I was born, and if you can't see that, it's your failing, not mine!" says Edward.
Will leaves and goes outside to clean the pool. While cleaning, he suddenly sees a large fish swimming in the pool and jumps back, startled. Later, Sandra shows Will and Josephine the garage where Edward's office was. They decide to go through all the things to decide what's important and what ought to be thrown away. As they go through it, Sandra finds the old letter from the army saying Edward was dead, and gasps. "That really happened?" Will asks, taking the letter.
When Sandra goes to check on Edward, and Josephine goes to lie down, Will looks at a metallic hand that holds letters and smiles, and we are once again transported back into Edward's biography.
"With my prospects few, I took a job as a traveling salesman. It suited me. If there was one thing you could say about Edward Bloom, it's that I am a social person," Edward narrates. Edward goes on the road selling the metallic hands, while Sandra waits behind in the trailer they share.
A few years later, we see Edward driving a car as "Ramblin' Man" plays, and he narrates that his territory for sales stretched from the eastern coast to western Texas. We see Edward in line at a bank in Texas, where he runs into Norther Winslow, from Spectre, who immediately recognizes him. Norther tells Edward that Edward's departure from Spectre inspired him to leave Spectre and travel, and that he's come to the bank to rob it. In the blink of an eye, Norther shoots the ceiling and holds up the bank, enlisting Edward to help him do so.
When the teller brings Edward to the vault, she cries and tells him that they have no money, they've gone bankrupt. In the car, Norther asks to see what Edward got from the vault and is disappointed to find so little cash. Edward tells Norther "about the vagaries of Texas oil money and its effect on real estate prices, and how tax enforcement of fiduciary process had made Savings and Loans particularly vulnerable." After hearing this, Norther decides to go to New York and become a Wall Street trader, sending Edward a check for $10,000 after making his first million. With the money, Edward buys his first house.
The scene shifts and we see old Edward in the bath with his clothes on, holding his breath underwater. "I was drying out," he says, explaining to his wife, who stands nearby. When Sandra gets in, the couple embraces and Sandra begins to cry.
The next day, Will drives to Spectre, where he finds an old dilapidated house near the river. An older woman answers the door; it is Jenny Hill, the young girl from Edward's past. She knows he's Will Bloom, and tells her piano student to skip his lesson this week. Inside, Will asks Jenny how she knows Edward, and when she says he came through on his sales journeys, he asks if they were having an affair. "Why didn't you just ask Eddie?" she asks, and Will tells her that his father is dying.
Jenny begins her own story, telling Will that neither of the times Edward arrived in Spectre were intentional. We see young Edward driving his car through an overwhelming thunderstorm that completely submerges the car underwater. A beautiful naked woman swims by the car, and presses her hand against his window.
The next day, Edward's car gets stuck in a tree and Edward finds a key to the city. He wanders back into downtown Spectre, which is now no longer a beautiful oasis, but a depressed and abandoned ghost town. Jenny narrates, "A new road had brought the outside world to Spectre, and with it banks, liens, and debt. Almost everywhere you looked, people were bankrupt."
Edward buys the town of Spectre, for $50,000, taking loans from Norther, Amos, the conjoined twins, and others to do so. We saw Edward wandering up to Jenny's house and knocking on the door. He finds Jenny playing piano, and asks to buy her land in order to complete his purchase of the town. When she doesn't agree to his proposition, he's confused, but soon realizes that she is Jenny, the little girl he met on his first visit to Spectre. She's disappointed he didn't come back sooner, and tells him she doesn't plan to sell him her house. He tries to open the door and accidentally pulls it off its hinges.
Determined to buy the land, Edward begins refurbishing Jenny's home, enlisting Karl to help him straighten the frame of the house on the foundation, and fixing it up like it's new.
Analysis
In Will's pre-bed conversation with Josephine, we learn the true core of his resentment towards his father. As he tells her, Edward was never around when he was a kid, and the performances and whimsical stories that Edward weaves are—to Will's mind—all evidence of the fact that Edward isn't satisfied with his regular life. While other people take Edward's stories to represent his magical spirit, Will can only see it as representing his father's neglect and shortage of loving feelings towards his family.
However, Edward is not the only one to blame for the distance between him and his son, and as we learn in their conversation the next day, Edward genuinely does not believe that he has held any of himself back from his children. When Will asks Edward to show him who he is, Edward insists that he's been honest about who he is, and that the stories and fantasies that he spins are an inextricable part of his identity. Will's feelings of betrayal prevent him from seeing his father's admirable qualities, and from finding the magic in the everyday.
The film maintains a wry sense of humor woven into the narrative. When Edward goes on the road to sell obscure inventions, he runs into Norther Winslow, who has become a bank robber, but is unpleasantly surprised to find that Texas oil has ruined the Savings and Loans business. After Edward explains the local economy, Norther resolves to move to New York, where he will become a bank robber in a more official way, as a trader on Wall Street. The film comments on corporate greed and unethical profit-making, but in a cheeky, indirect way.
In this section of the film, Will seeks to see just how much of his father's stories are made up. He goes through papers in the garage, then goes to visit Spectre to investigate the town that his father always had such a fantastical memory of. There he meets a grown-up Jenny Hill, who is far from fantastical, living in a house that is in disrepair and teaching piano to local kids. Soon enough, however, her story takes on the mythical qualities of Edward's, and Will realizes that the fantasies of his father's youth extend beyond his father.
For all of the film's humor, at the center of Big Fish is the tension between magic and realism, and the sobering realities of the modern world, specifically economic depression. Nowhere can this be seen more starkly than in the changes that take place in Spectre between Edward's first and second visit. In the first visit, Spectre had been an idyllic, if somewhat creepily uniform, town, but in the second, it has been connected to the outside world, which harms its economy. The modern world might offer opportunity, the film suggests, but it also saps people of their resources, and harms utopian isolation and peacefulness.
