Though small town Americana presents a very romantic image for some, for a lot of people – especially teenagers and young adults – it has become a meaningless dead end. Big Fish in Middlesex chronicles the story of a number of young people from Middlesex, Virginia and how they relate to the small town life.
T.K. is a cocky, crack-selling gangster wannabe, who takes advantage of the small population to set himself up as a big wheel. Turtle is one of the only African-Americans in the small town, and must constantly deal with racism and discrimination. With a young wife and a small child, Bo is struggling to get by and build a life for himself and his family, but at every turn he keeps getting shot down. And William is torn between his contentment with small town life and his sick mother and his love for his girlfriend Paige who is desperate to move on and go to college.
Content
In a small town like Middlesex, there is very little for young people to do except drink, get high, swear, and have sex. Given this fact, there are many scenes in Big Fish in Middlesex that include all of these elements. Due to the fact that they occur in various levels of severity and visibility, I’m honestly not sure whether this film would receive an R or NC-17 rating. Because the sexual elements of this film are no worse than Sharon Stone’s Basic Instinct or Sliver, both of which received the R Rating, I’m going to assume an R-rating. Still, with the rapidly changing climate in movie ratings, if the director is going to try to market this film, it might be a good idea to cut out some of these elements, specifically some of the onscreen sex and nudity, in order to avoid the NC-17 rating.
In watching this movie, it’s easy to tell that the filmmakers have a definite understanding of the pace of life in a small town, and that their personal lives have been invested into this movie.
I really liked the ending of the film; it did a good job at showing how so many things fall apart because of the self-destructive actions of these characters, and yet how, in the end, nothing ever really changes in Middlesex.
Unfortunately, this film’s biggest issue was the fact that there is no cohesive storyline. It’s difficult to tell what the plot is until you’re about halfway through the movie, and since none of the characters are really introduced – and sometimes called by nicknames instead of real names – an audience has to divide their time between figuring out who the characters are and what their supposed to be doing rather than being able to sit back and enjoy the movie.
With that said, let’s get into the specifics of how to improve this film might be improved and how to improve future films with a similar layout.
First of all, it is important to introduce all of the characters – especially since there are several different characters, each of whom has their own things going on. It also might be a good idea to do so before the opening credits. There are a couple of easy ways to introduce multiple characters. First, there’s narration, which could easily be added after the fact to repair issues in the current film. It can be a little hokey if overdone, but, with careful management, it can be very effective in helping viewers distinguish between the many different characters and storylines in the film. Either you can pick a main character and have them do the narration (which might fit in with the final scene where William does a brief voice-over), or have someone completely different act as a God-type character, such as in It’s a Wonderful Life or “Desperate Housewives.” Otherwise, there’s always the option to use captions. It can be done simply, such as how Kevin Smith introduced all the characters in Dogma, or it can be a really flashy introduction such as in Guy Ritchie’s Snatch. In the latter, not only did it end up looking exceptionally cool, but it made all the interwoven storylines much easier to follow.
The next thing that needs to be done is to tighten the story, which can be done after the fact by tightening and reorganizing the edit of the film. Introducing the characters will make the plot easier to follow, but it still ought to be better organized. As it is now, there are a lot of extraneous scenes that don’t contribute to the story, and it’s hard to figure out which ones are important. For example, at one point the boys go to a party where a fight breaks out, and the owner of the house gets stabbed. The next day a cop shows up at T.K.’s house, harassing him for being involved in the assault, and saying that eventually he will lock him up. At the end of the movie, T.K. does go to jail, but it’s not for the aforementioned attempted murder. Instead, he’s arrested by a completely different officer for a completely different crime. It’s already been established that T.K. is a badass who gets in trouble with the law, as has the fact that the only thing to do in Middlesex is party, so having him get. As a result, this scene is pretty much meaningless.
