When you look at Ed Bloom, what do you see? Do you see a man who has lived a heroic and adventurous life, or a man who hides behind his stories to make his life seem more appealing. In fact, Ed Bloom has altered his life into such a series of weird and wonderful stories that his grown son, Will questions whether he really knows his own father. Finding out his father is terminally ill, Will tries to beat the ticking clock and find out who the man is behind all of the crazy stories and tall tales. But his crazy stories and tall tales cloaked what precisely?
We are the sum of our experiences, our memories and our genetic make-up. As of today, you can’t change your genes, probably not your past experiences. But memories? You can enlarge them, reduce them, modify them – something all of us are guilty of. These memories become our stories. These are the stories we love to tell. Sometimes we tell our stories to the ones we love and trust and sometimes we will tell stories to anyone who will listen. In doing so, we give a part of ourselves to these people that will stay with them forever.
This is how Ed Bloom lived his life. We are not supposed to look at Ed as a liar. Instead, as his funeral reveals, he is just an incredible storyteller split between fact and colorful fiction. Just as Ed said himself, Will tells stories with “all the facts, none of the flavor,” and that’s just not how he does it.
When I saw this movie, it hit pretty close to home. Knowing a person who had lived similarly to Ed Bloom in the wild storytelling and colorful exaggerations, you become surprised when its the crazy stories that stay with you longer than the true ones. If there is even one of those stories that can inspire you to take that extra step toward your crazy dream, then that person is in fact your hero.
“A man tells his stories so many times that he becomes the stories. They live on after him, and in that way he becomes immortal.”
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